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this article was written in front of a live studio audience (my colleagues)
Sitcoms have long been a television staple, with each generation having at least one defining show that remains a comfortable favourite. Gen Z, however, has no central programme to call its own. What gives?
Creating a hit sitcom is no easy feat.
Pulling together an array of likeable, funny characters and handing them interesting stories that (by and large) wrap up in neat 21-minute episodes is a constant challenge for television studios. When a show does strike gold, it can become endlessly lucrative, as viewers rewatch it continuously, forever. The cast of Friends still reportedly make $20 million USD per year in syndication cheques, for example.
Each decade and generation has at least one era-defining sitcom. Cheers, Seinfeld, Friends, Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother, The Office and New Girl are all beloved, mainstream programmes that depict twenty-somethings navigating young adulthood in quirky, relatable ways that still resonate with audiences today. Some of the original casts of these shows now run podcasts based on their respective series, and reboots are never too far away. Scrubs is currently airing brand new episodes on Disney+, The Office has its own bizarre spin-off, and the less said about How I Met Your Father, the better.
Yet, as publishers like the BBC have recently pointed out, Gen Z doesn’t seem to have its own, universally-loved sitcom in quite the same way. Sure, there are some programmes that have proved popular: Euphoria, Sex Education, Stranger Things, but these aren’t generational sitcoms that will remain in the zeitgeist forever, and not any single one has stood out as the show to resonate with Gen Z.
To their credit, networks are attempting to create their own modern version, such as Adults and The Sex Lives of College Girls, but most are cancelled after a few seasons and tend to fade out of the limelight quickly, if they ever get there in the first place. None of these efforts have truly captured a widespread audience, and nothing has come close to permeating our lexicon like Chandler’s sarcastic quips or The Inbetweeners’ Jay yelling ‘bus wankers’ out of a car window — if you’re from the UK.
What gives? Why is it seemingly so difficult to get the format right in 2026, given its established, proven track record for success?
The clearest, most obvious reason is simply that Gen Z are consuming media from different places at their own pace. In a similar way to the music industry, which we wrote about a few weeks ago, there is no singular, mainstream canon for television in the same way as there was in the noughties and even the 2010s. A scattered audience across multiple streaming platforms and social media apps is very hard to pull together in unison, especially for sitcoms that are usually low-stakes and intended for casual viewing.
In 2022, Ofcom found that 16-24-year-olds watched seven times less broadcast television than those aged over 65, with one in five homes signed up to the three biggest streamers, which include Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+. In May 2025, analytics company Nielsen reported that streaming overtook broadcast and cable for the first time, accounting for 44.8% of all viewing in the US. All this doesn’t consider social media, either, which is stealing Gen Z’s attention: Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends report stated that 58% of young people watch videos via TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat more than streaming services.
Given this landscape, it makes sense that new sitcoms struggle to garner the same cultural weight as shows from decades past. Attention spans are shorter, and many Gen Z viewers crave authentic, independent content over glossy, studio-lit comedy sketches. Relatability often comes from actual people and content creators, rather than fictional characters carefully written up by studios and executives.
“A scattered audience across multiple streaming platforms and social media apps is very hard to pull together in unison, especially for sitcoms.”
In fact, the BBC points out that many current Gen Z shows are written by millennials and Gen Xers. The humour often feels contrived and immediately dated, with newer sitcoms struggling to authentically represent uniquely generational struggles such as AI, dating apps, precarious renting situations, loneliness, and the overall mistrust toward political systems. Culture moves far quicker today than twenty years ago, which makes effective satire of these weighty topics far more difficult, especially if the writers are not actually twenty-somethings struggling to get by.
This partly explains why sitcoms have declined as a dominant entertainment format.
According to the Boston Globe, only 1.7% of new TV shows in the 2020s have been sitcoms, compared to 12.1% in the 1990s. Instead, streaming platforms have moved toward more cinematic, expensive shows that prioritise spectacle over humour, such as The Last of Us, The Mandalorian, and Fallout, all of which serve as flagships for different streaming platforms. This trend has also been paralleled in cinema, with fewer romcoms and comedies making it to the big screen; the market has largely squeezed out humour as a serious moneymaker.
So, where does that leave Gen Z? For those who are watching sitcoms, most are pivoting (pardon the pun) toward older shows like Friends, which remains one of the most popular programmes with younger people despite being over thirty years old. It offers a fantastical, optimistic slice of nostalgia, depicting a life of economic aspiration that is out of reach for many Gen Zers today. It probably helps that most grew up with reruns on television, making it an easy, familiar show to dive back into. In some ways, these older sitcoms are still taking up airtime where newer shows would traditionally sit, leaving less room for innovation or fresh content.
That’s not to say there isn’t any space for new comedy. New Girl, while not a Gen Z show, finished in 2018, finding renewed success during the pandemic once it became available on streaming platforms. It aired at the very tail end of cable television’s dominance, and is proof that there is a modern audience for new shows if a niche is hit correctly. We certainly wouldn’t rule out a possible, massively popular Gen Z sitcom in the future, and perhaps it’s too early to really tell what will stick.
It just seems that the hill to reach icon status has become far steeper, longer, and harsher than any era before — writers certainly have their work cut out for them in the coming years.
See also:
- Have phone screens ruined Gen Z romance?
- The rise of ‘grandmaslop’ puts Gen Z’s privacy at risk
- Why are the music charts full of old songs?
