If you don’t know what a single-camera sitcom is, you’ve almost definitely watched one at some point. While it’s been around for quite some time (Get Smart, The Andy Griffith Show, Doogie Howser M.D.,) it’s only become prevalent in the last ten years or so. As opposed to the three-camera setup found in most TV studios, single-camera is shot like most films, with traditionally cinematic shots and angles storyboarded like any movie. While this one characteristic is what separates the two classifications of situation comedy, their differences lie far beyond how many cameras are used to film them, allowing a different type of screenwriting to take hold.

For one, the more cinematic style of shooting lends a more, well, cinematic style to the sitcom. Many can resemble low-budget independent films (even the biggest sitcoms’ budgets pale in comparison to feature films). Single-cameras, because of the way they are shot, typically don’t have live studio audiences and most eschew a replacement laugh track. Without a laugh track to tell you where the punchlines are and when to laugh, and coupled with the slower, quieter filmic approach, the humor of single-camera sitcoms presents itself in a completely different way.

As a viewer, you have to actively find what’s funny within a scene. Just as good characters in comedy can be indicated by lines that are only funny because they were spoken by that particular character, the single-camera environment sets a tone and becomes a place where jokes are only funny because they were specifically said within them. This is usually what people mean when they say a location in a script is a character in itself (unless they say New York is its own character, then they’re just bullshitting.) This also allows the humor to be more subtle—the slightest roll of the eyes can be caught in a close-up reaction shot and sell the same kind of laugh that a character hammily mugging to the audience in a three-camera sitcom would make.

Single-cam in action:

Single-cam comedies don’t have to be calmer and quieter, however. Rather than feel like an independent film, single-camera sitcoms can resemble screwball comedies. The 2003 cult favorite Arrested Development is a prime example of this and did what The Simpsons and other animated series (shows allowed to bypass three-camera setups without raising any eyebrows) discovered they could do fifteen years earlier—the rapid-fire delivery of jokes and scenes and locations. A standard episode of a show like Arrested Development or 30 Rock has an incredible amount of scenes when compared to a three-camera sitcom like Friends. These shows in effect become live-action cartoons, embracing and indulging in the lack of boundaries a three-camera set inhibits on scripts.

Why are three-camera setups inhibiting and typically averse to subtle forms of humor? It helps to remember that three-camera shows aren’t defined by the fact that they’re shot with three cameras (and conversely, many single-cams like Arrested Development are always shot with two or three cameras simultaneously). Rather, it’s better to think of them as recorded stage plays, performed on very limited sets for flesh-and-blood live studio audiences. This is a fundamentally different storytelling medium than the much more cinematic single-camera style. YouTube is full of clips of multi-cam shows like The Big Bang Theory with the laugh track edited out and they are fascinating to watch.

You might not have noticed when watching a multi-camera show because as viewers we’ve become so accustomed to its form, but actors pause between jokes and actually hold and wait for the audience’s laughter to subside before resuming their lines. As the YouTube clips amusingly convey, talking like this in real life would make you sound like a crazy person. But three-camera actors must perform this way, and three-camera writers must likewise conform their scripts. Not only can more subtle humor be easily lost on an audience seeing everything at once several dozen feet from the action (as opposed to being merely inches from a close-up viewed on your screen at home), but a joke’s timing—one of its most crucial components—has to be set and predicated by this staccato hold-and-wait type of performance.

Three-cam without laugh track:

The limited locations of a three-camera sitcom also derive from its theater-like stage. Only so many sets can be built and fit into a single studio. That’s one of the reasons the three definitive sitcom genres exist—workplace comedies take place in the workplace, family comedies in the home. Usually there is a bar or a diner in a friends (and often, workplace and family) comedy where everybody hangs out, just to keep things visually interesting. A show could also employ a limited exterior set portraying the outside of their house or bar. Sometimes they might throw in some B-roll second-unit shots of exteriors to make it feel like the show is really taking place outside the studio and in the real world, or at the very least, make it feel like it’s being shot on location. (For instance, Seinfeld’s classic apartment window exterior was neither Seinfeld’s apartment—which was a set—nor actually even in New York.)

In general, though, ninety percent of a given multi-cam episode will take place in the same handful of sets. Single-camera shows can shoot on location, or at the very least use different angles to make the same set feel fresh. So not only are they capable of several more scenes than their three-camera counterparts, they can place these scenes in a multitude of locations. This can expand the sense of the world the show occupies and ground it, or inversely add to its cartoonish energy. A comedy like Arrested Development could take place in a California apartment complex, Iraq, on a boat, in a magic shop, at the beach and in Reno, Nevada, all in the same episode

More scenes also allow for more storylines, and more storylines allow for more characters. While a three-camera sitcom’s primary cast is usually limited to six or less, a single-cam sitcom like The Office can boast an ensemble of fourteen or more. Similarly, a multi-cam script might include a primary A-plot, a secondary B-plot, and perhaps a tertiary C-plot, whereas a single-cam could include A, B, C, D, and E plots and give them all more heft and substance.

Another trend since Friends helped sitcoms usher in the single-cam revolution: the mockumentary series. While fake-documentaries have existed in cinema for quite some time, it wasn’t until the new millennium that television decided to crank them up to eleven. Again, Arrested Development proved itself ahead of the game by employing a cinéma vérité format that had its characters lean against the fourth wall and graffiti it rather than break it. But it was even earlier, in 2000, when the original U.K. version of The Office portrayed the fictional documentary crew as a diegetic presence existing in the world itself, allowing all its characters to communicate directly with the camera like some sort of latter-day Zack Morrises.

The U.S. remake of The Office brought this style across the pond to mainstream American audiences, which then spread to both comedy and drama alike, giving television writers new tools and techniques to employ. The so-called “talking head” shot, where a character delivers their thoughts interview-style straight to the camera allowed for exposition dumps—exposition that would feel too cheap or out-of-place in traditional narratives—which in itself allowed for cramming even more plot into a twenty-minute episode. (Arrested Development’s Narrator, another documentary staple, was a similarly useful device.)

In addition, characters could be developed in their talking heads not by what they said but by what they didn’t say, which coupled with facial and body language allowed for a subtext much harder to come by in multi-camera sitcoms. The mockumentary format also gave a more voyeuristic viewpoint that could make its storytelling more realistic and grounded—with Lisa Kudrow’s The Comeback being an early pioneer of this format. While the characters frequently broke the fourth wall, audiences were drawn forth within it. This poses a delicate balance for sitcom writers—at first the American Office tried hard to faithfully depict the drudgery of working in an office, but quickly abandoned this when producers realized that people didn’t want to come home from the office just to spend their free time watching other people work.

Why have single-camera comedies only exploded now if they provide such an interesting alternative to multi-camera studio sitcoms? The biggest reason, as always, comes down to money. Shooting on tape with a handful of sets was always much cheaper than shooting cinematically. But digital video has come a long way and is now at a point where it is cheap enough and good looking enough to make single-cam as viable (if not more viable) an option as multi-cam. And while the prevalence of single-camera sitcoms highlights the changes television has made since Friends, we are currently amidst an even greater geological shift for situation comedies, a shift proving that money is and always has been the driving force for the evolution of TV production—the advent of multimedia.

Single-cam might be in but it isn’t new, it’s been around since the 50s—just ask The Beaver. And Adult Kevin was narrating to the camera on The Wonder Years long before J.D. was on Scrubs. But the Internet and smartphones and video games and digital cable haven’t been around as long as TV, and they’re introducing change in complicated and unforeseen ways.

More entertainment options means less people watching the same thing at any given moment. While for most of its existence, television has split its real-time audience between three or four main networks, there are now hundreds if not thousands of choices a viewer can make. Any given channel’s ratings are drastically lower than they were fifteen years ago, despite an ever-growing population of more potential viewers. The Big Bang Theory, television’s highest-rated scripted show, boasts numbers that would’ve been considered moderate when Friends was ending its run and would’ve been considered outright weak when Friends was debuting. Seinfeld was almost cancelled by NBC in its early seasons because it only had four million viewers, a number many sitcoms would beg for today.

While this scares the hell out of the networks and their shareholders, having more options is obviously a good thing for television viewers. More venues provide more specific niches. Shows can stray farther from the norm and not be as mainstream and homogenous as they’ve been in the past—their common denominator no longer has to be as low. Types of humor that not everybody appreciates can finally find a voice. Unconventional sitcoms like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Workaholics, and Veep can now find audiences. In most cases, their numbers aren’t as large as the networks’, and pale in comparison to the ratings of yesteryear, but they no longer need to be so large. For the time being, they meet a standard that television executives have to be satisfied with. Television writers are striking while the iron is hot, experimenting in many and varied ways. Even eleven-minute sitcoms like Eagleheart can find themselves renewed year after year. While entertainment diversifies and ratings dwindle, creativity is thriving.

And we haven’t even settled into the new paradigm yet. All signs point to this just being the beginning. Innovation continues to dominate a rapidly growing and changing planet. Even if the tools we use were to somehow peak at their current point, we’re still years away from learning truly how to use them. This new wave of multimedia sitcoms, (some, like Orange is the New Black can’t even technically be called television shows) might end up seeming closer to Friends than they do to whatever comprises the entertainment landscape two decades from now. There may no longer be networks, or even TV, but don’t be surprised if the sitcom still exists in some form, about people in the workplace, or families, or—thanks to the legacy of Friends—good-looking twentysomethings just hanging out and shooting the shit. They might be on the moon or something, but there will always be friends.

Click here for the first part in our Evolution of the Sitcom series, which looks at the lasting influence of Friends on the sitcom landscape.

There are only a handful of producers in Hollywood who utterly dominate their field, whether they are box office champions or MVPs of television ratings. Jerry Bruckheimer is both. He has been directly involved with multiple hits on both large and small screens, and indirectly his sphere of influence has reached almost every corner of the industry.

Jerry Bruckheimer, a life-long film and photography buff, first started working in advertising in Detroit and New York, where commercials he produced picked up several awards. In the 1970s he moved from advertising to feature films, and after his first few productions paired up with director Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of successes like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Their collaboration on Cat People and the Richard Gere-starring American Gigolo brought Bruckheimer his first serious attention.

Bruckheimer then found his perfect partner in Don Simpson. Simpson, known as “Mr. Inside” for his industry schmoozing, was an ideal counterpart to Bruckheimer, who with his eye for marketable filmmaking earned the moniker “Mr. Outside.” Together, the two found they had a knack for blockbuster entertainment, both outside and in.

Their first hit together was 1983’s Flashdance, which cleaned up the box office despite its R-rating. In fact R-ratings, usually a detriment to studio executives looking to make a lot of money, seemed to be no obstacle for the duo. Their next project, Beverly Hills Cop, was a cinematic juggernaut, topping the box office for fourteen straight weeks and becoming the biggest domestic hit of 1984, a year that included movies like The Terminator, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Ghostbusters. Proving that sex and violence were a plus and not a negative for Hollywood blockbusters, Beverly Hills Cop remained the highest-grossing R-rated film ever for the next two decades.

Bruckheimer found a kindred spirit in director Tony Scott and with Simpson they took their ideology one step further by building movies around a macho action atmosphere, downplaying the comedy of Eddie Murphy’s cop movie and focusing on explosions and beautiful women and a general coolness. Tony Scott’s Top Gun and Days of Thunder proved this macho vibe could and would make a lot of money for everyone involved, including their star, Tom Cruise.

After 1990, Bruckheimer stayed under the radar for a little while, before returning to big screens with a vengeance. In 1995, Bruckheimer released Crimson Tide and the adrenaline-fueled school drama Dangerous Minds. That same year Bruckheimer introduced the world to Michael Bay, a director who epitomized Bruckheimer’s loud, testosterone-injected sense of style. Michael Bay’s feature debut Bad Boys was a smash hit followed by the go-for-broke action popcorn-pleasers The Rock and Armageddon, with similarly directed knockouts Con Air and Enemy of the State drawing audiences in droves. Don Simpson passed away before his time, leaving Bruckheimer to produce on his own, though he had more than enough momentum to carry him into the next millennium.

The 2000s started with Bruckheimer experimenting with his macho philosophy, releasing the football drama Remember the Titans and Coyote Ugly, a movie that downplayed the violence and upped the sexy women quotient. In 2001, he channeled his machismo into two very different types of war movies, Michael Bay’s romance-hued Pearl Harbor and Ridley Scott’s gritty Black Hawk Down.

Bruckheimer also launched his bid to become the king of television in the twenty-first century. In 2000, he produced his second scripted TV show to that point, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. The crime drama took a different view of violence, focusing on the creepy gore of forensic science and psychopathic murderers. The format proved incredibly lucrative, spawning countless imitators and descendants still dominating the airwaves today. Many of the most successful of these were also produced by Bruckheimer, including Without a Trace, Cold Case, and two CSI spinoffs. Like many of his movies, these shows relied more on a sense of continuity and cookie-cutter plots rather than push-the-envelope storytelling. Audiences responded overwhelmingly to Bruckheimer’s philosophy, with several of his shows topping the Nielsen ratings for most of the decade.

One of those smash hits included The Amazing Race, one of only two Bruckheimer-produced reality series. Like his forays in other media and genres, Bruckheimer proved incredibly deft at giving the people what they want. Premiering in 2001, adventure-themed The Amazing Race is still one of the most popular reality series on television, with audiences and critics alike. In the twelve years the Primetime Emmy has been awarded for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program, Amazing Race has won an astounding ten times. While it’s been several years since Bruckheimer released a new television megahit, CSI and The Amazing Race are still going strong.

In 2003, Bruckheimer brought moviegoers a biopic, a sequel, and two films aimed at slightly younger audiences: Kangaroo Jack, which flopped, and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which birthed one of Hollywood’s biggest franchises of all time. Pirates reinvigorated Johnny Depp’s career, solidified Orlando Bloom as a pretty boy movie star, and most importantly, made adventure films (and pirates) cool again.

Pirates of the Caribbean also showed that Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer were capable of epic, heart-pounding cinema. Bruckheimer tried to replicate that bombastic magic in several of his next films, some more successful than others: National Treasure, Prince of Persia, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and The Lone Ranger.

In between, Bruckheimer managed hits in other genres, including swords-and-sandals epic King Arthur, basketball drama Glory Road, chick-flick Confessions of a Shopaholic, CGI-guinea-pig-starring kids movie G-Force, and his last of six collaborations with Tony Scott, 2006’s Déjà Vu.

At 73, Jerry Bruckheimer shows no signs of slowing down. No doubt his future projects will show his same flair for pleasing crowds, big or really big. He’s also not afraid to look to his past for material—several of his slated upcoming productions are sequels to previous hits. Top Gun 2, Beverly Hills Cop 4, Bad Boys 3, and a fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie are all in different levels of pre-production. He’s also looking to TV again, this time cable giant HBO. With Michael Bay, Bruckheimer is producing Cocaine Cowboys, based on the documentary of the same name focusing on the early days of the Miami cocaine drug trade. While it’s too early to tell if it will be yet another massive success under his belt, it’s safe to say the final product will be hip, macho, and a hell of a lot of fun to indulge in. Jerry Bruckheimer wouldn’t have it any other way.

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