Life & Mortality Quote by Ben Savage

Ben Savage isn’t mourning the sitcom so much as calling out its zombified afterlife. The line lands because it splits the difference between nostalgia and critique: yes, the form still exists, but what’s being sold as “sitcom” often feels like a copy of a copy, engineered to be frictionless. His “to some extent” is doing real work. It’s an actor’s diplomatic hedge, but it also signals the actual diagnosis: the genre isn’t dead; it’s been standardized.

The subtext is about risk, not laughs. When Savage says the shows “are all the same,” he’s pointing at the industrial logic behind contemporary TV comedy: writers’ rooms shaped by data, branding, and the fear of alienating a broad subscriber base. That sameness can look like interchangeable premises, flattened characters, and a tonality that avoids sharp edges. Even when a show is technically funny, it can still feel pre-approved, like it was designed to be bingeable background rather than a weekly argument with the culture.

Savage’s context matters, too. He comes from a generation where multi-cam sitcoms and family comedies were mass events, with distinct rhythms and big identities. Today, comedy is fragmented: some of the funniest work has migrated to dramedy, cringe, or single-cam hybrids that don’t even want the “sitcom” label. His critique doubles as a quiet dare: if the sitcom wants to live, it has to stop auditioning for its own reruns.