There are clear downsides to being the main character—or a member of an ensemble cast—in a sitcom. You go through hardships and struggles on a regular basis that people seem to find deeply entertaining, dramatic events happen in your life at least once a week, and there is always the sense that somewhere people are laughing at you.
The downsides are not the only part of being a sitcom protagonist. Whether it is due to the conventions of fiction, the conventions of sitcoms, or the reality of television production, there are clear upsides to the life of a sitcom character, small perks that many or most of them enjoy.
9 You Have Incredible Professional Flexibility
The main casts of sitcoms tend to have impressive or at least interesting jobs. At most, one will work as an office drone, unless the sitcom is about work drones, such as Peep Show or The Office. Instead, most of the cast, especially in sitcoms that are not about work, have jobs as writers, cooks, architects, or professors.
Alongside the interesting jobs, they apparently have very flexible contracts with their workplace. Whatever you work as in a sitcom, even if it is a high-stress, competitive job like accountant or lawyer, you will always be available to drop everything for the latest plot point, or have an ambling discussion with friends in the late morning on a weekday.
8 You're Never Dateless For Long
Dates of all kind make ripe fodder for sitcom plots. Whether it's between two characters who have been building up chemistry and tension for several seasons, somebody who has never been mentioned before the episode, or the classic "blind date arranged by friends," it seems that sitcoms are never short of dates, any night of the week.
As a result, even if you're single in a sitcom, you don't need to worry about being lonely. However bad your dating skills, relationship history, or general situation, there will always be a friend of a friend or a chance encounter with a compatible singleton you can date at a few minutes' notice.
7 Celebrities Just Drop Into Your Life
Celebrity cameos have a long and happy tradition in sitcoms. Sometimes they're playing a character who merely happens to resemble them and has a large number of their mannerisms, but often celebrities just drop into a sitcom for a scene or two as themselves, with the characters suitably happy to meet them.
If you live in a sitcom, you will always be delighted if your friend sets you up with Jean-Claude van Damme, or if you run into Elon Musk in a soup kitchen, or if you try and flirt with Heidi Klum at a party, without ever considering that you seem to meet these people far more often than the average person.
6 Everything That Happens To You Turns Out Funny
As indicated in the name, sitcoms run on comedy. While plenty of them are not averse to dipping into drama from time to time, humor is the presiding tone of events, and the situations shown within tend towards the funny, whether it is through wit, absurdity, or slapstick.
No matter what happens to you if you're the protagonist of a sitcom, you will probably be able to laugh about it eventually. If you fail a job interview, it's typically because something unbelievable happened. If your relationship ends, you get injured, or your prisoner of war escape ring is in danger of being rumbled by Stalag guards, there will nonetheless be something there to giggle about.
5 Your Enemies Always Fail Or Come Around
Enemies in sitcoms are typically of the more gentle kind than seen in other types of fiction. The format has been experimented with, but typically the lower stakes of a sitcom don't allow for an antagonist who seeks to destroy the world, or kill the heroes, or even commit serious crimes.
Part of this gentleness is that, should you clash with another person as a sitcom protagonist, their machinations will usually be at worst inconvenient, and even if they go for something more serious—sabotaging your relationship or job—often there will be incompetence or redeeming features. Either they'll fail, or they will return in a future episode and express regret.
4 You Always Have Stories To Tell
Despite their appeals to mundanity and a certain level of realism, sitcoms by definition take place in an elevated level of existence where things happen in service of the story and comedy. Characters won't go on a quest to the Far World, but they will have seemingly unbelievable things happen to them on a regular basis.
So, if you are a main character in a sitcom, you will never be bereft of a story to tell. Whether you need to spice up an awkward conversation or find something in your own life applicable to somebody else, there will be a strange and dazzling story from your years of strange and dazzling events to share.
3 Your Home Will Be Lovely
There are certain realities to filming for television, whether a sitcom is filmed with a single camera or multiple cameras. Fitting the cast, the scenery, the props, the cameras, the microphones, the crew, and everything else needed to film in a space requires that space to be large.
As a result, in a sitcom, whether you are unemployed, working a low-paying job, or at a high-paying job you spend very few hours at, even the worst apartment you buy will be large, even if it has been dirtied a bit. Sometimes you may just simply not acknowledge it, at other times you might make jokes about rent control to explain.
2 You're Always With Your Friends
Ultimately, most sitcoms revolve around friendship. Whether it is simply a group of friends who enjoy one another's company, colleagues who have to get along and end up forming deeper bonds, or an unlikely quartet of lost souls in the afterlife who come to love each other despite their differences, friendships make for more comfortable comedy.
So if you are a sitcom protagonist, you can count on being with your friends a huge amount of the time. Regardless of the stresses of modern life, housework, jobs, children, other commitments, you will always have time—perhaps every day—to spend time with your friends, trade jokes, comfort one another, and engage in comedic hijinks.
1 Everything Will Be Alright
The very earliest use of 'comedy' referred to stories with a happy ending. While the term has diversified to include largely any piece of work that revolves around humor, comedies nonetheless still tend towards this. With the generally lighter tone, it is easier to make jokes when everything ends up okay, without those jokes feeling cruel. Shows that avoid this—like Peep Show—tend to stand out.
Regardless of what happens to you as a sitcom protagonist, you can be almost always assured that the situation isn't as bad as it seems, or at least solvable within half an hour with a couple of ad breaks. For truly desperate, season finale dire straits, it might take an hour.