When looking at more than a few lists of best sitcoms, I kept seeing TMS listed on there. I know TMS is a variety show, but could it be considered a sitcom. A sitcom is defined as a situation comedy. So what are your thoughts, could the situations make TMS qualify as a sitcom or not?
According to Wikipedia, a sketch comedy comprises a series of short comedy scenes or vignettes, called "sketches", commonly between one and ten minutes long. Such sketches are performed by a group of comic actors or comedians, either on stage or through an audio and/or visual medium such as radio and television. Often sketches are first improvised by the actors and written down based on the outcome of these improv sessions; however, such improvisation is not necessarily involved in sketch comedy.
An individual comedy sketch is a brief scene or vignette of the type formerly used in vaudeville, and now used widely in comedy and variety shows, talk shows and some children's television series (such as
Sesame Street).
Sketch comedians routinely differentiate their product from a "skit", maintaining that a skit is a (single) dramatized joke (or "bit") while a sketch is a comedic exploration of a concept, character or situation.
Programs such as
The Carol Burnett Show, Saturday Night Live, SCTV, In Living Color, etc., fall into this classification, and while
Seinfeld is often called "a show about nothing", it follows its own structure: a story thread is presented at the beginning of every episode, which involves the characters starting in their own situations. Rapid scene-shifts between plot lines bring the stories together. Despite the separate plot strands, the narratives reveal the creators' "consistent efforts to maintain the intimacy" among the small cast of characters.
It seems like each episode of TMS has quite a bit of secondary story lines as Kermit tries to keep his cool while juggling the duties of backstage managing and hosting.
Muppet Wiki gives the following synopsis of TMS:
The Muppet Show is a half-hour variety show in which Kermit the Frog and the Muppets put on a weekly musical/comedy revue at the Muppet Theater. Unfortunately for them, things never quite go according to plan, for the Muppets or their weekly guest stars.
....
The action in each episode was balanced between the on-stage acts and the frantic activity backstage (one of the very few exceptions is ep. 110, in which almost all sketches and skits are depicted on-stage). The concept is reminiscent of old-time radio shows like
The Jack Benny Program, where the star struggled to put on a weekly show amidst personal problems and an often uncooperative cast.