Life in Pieces in Pieces

Life in Pieces, one of the newer sitcoms on CBS, follows the life of one large family consisting of the grandparents, John(James Brolin) and Joan Short(Dianna Weist), their adult kids, and their families, however it is not your typical sitcom.

Rather than trying for the typical laugh-out-loud comedy style, Life in Pieces employs a much more subtle and ionic form of comedy.  Life in Pieces  creates a large amount of its comedy by cleverly inserting the comedy into the plot.  Sure some of its comedy is made by having the characters say funny jokes or do goofy things, like Modern Family or Big Bang Theory, but it is not as overpowering as the previously mentioned shows.  By using the plot as a medium for comedy the need for cheesy one liners is removed thus leading to a much more clever and pleasing story.  In the clip below almost all of the comedy is within the plot, rather than in cheesy one liners, thus transforming the comedy from being a heaping pile of poorly crafted puns into one nice, finely tuned joke.

Perhaps the most striking difference between Life in Pieces and other adult sitcoms is that one 30 minute episode is split into a few smaller stories or shorts(typically 3 or 4 but most recently “The 12 Shorts of Christmas”) thus playing to the name Life in Pieces.  These shorts help to focus the plot of each short rather than having all the plots intermingle and interact with each other.  This type of plot structure is needed to highlight the comedy within the plot.  If you had all the plots intertwined the comedy within each individual plot would become blurred and suffer.  

Even though Life in Pieces is an unconventional  sitcom, in regards to its style of comedy and plot structure, it still has the traditional sitcom themes - family ,though annoying at times, always has your back, things will work out in the end, and life is meant to be spent with those you love.  Overall this is a great show and hopefully it starts a new era for sitcoms where writers aren’t afraid to try something different and the selection of sitcoms become much more diverse than they are today.