During the late 80s and early 90s most of the prime time sitcoms I watched seemed like kids shows to me and I often wondered what made them so different from some of the afternoon kids shows on networks like Nick.  For example, when I was between the ages of six and ten my family and I would watch Full House, Roseanne and Home Improvement together.  The plots of these three shows centered so profoundly on the child characters it made me wonder why these shows were on after dark as opposed to after school. Some of the adults in these shows would exchanged mildly sexually charged barbs but dialogue of that kind was superbly outnumbered by children discussing life from a child’s, or teen's perspective ( with parents focusing on issues  that came from raising their children) that I hardly noticed any of the adult oriented lines at all. 
Now as I grew older my sense of humor grew with me and when I was 11 I started watching shows like Frasier, Seinfeld, and Drew Carey at night ( my three favorite Sitcoms of the 90s in that order :)).  I was easily able to understand why these shows were not on after school because of the more mature content matter in their plots and jokes.  Sure, Home Improvement was still on then and when I would watch it I would find myself floored by the degree of difference in the suggestiveness of their plots and jokes as compared to Frasier, Seinfeld or Drew Carey. As the 90s drew to a close and the new millennium began you saw the gradual decline of family oriented or better yet, child raising oriented, situation comedies in prime time like Family Matters, Home Improvement, and Roseanne.  Let us look around the sitcoms of today and most of them do not center on the family or parenting small and adolescent children at all.  My question to you all becomes what do you believe placed shows about parenting off of America’s prime time scene? 

I think it was a combination of a couple things. For one, family sitcoms had been around since the dawn of television. There's really only so many stories you can tell about families. Whether they live in the city or the suburbs, are black or white, are traditional or nontraditional, you're still going to be talking about the same basic issues week after week. Even Family Guy - the wackiest, most surreal family sitcom out there - recycles a few plots that have been staples of family sitcoms since Ozzy and Harriet. They can't help it. There are only so many stories you can tell about a nuclear family. Especially if you insist on making every family virtually identical (well-meaning but bumbling dad, stay-at-home rock-of-the-family mom, crazy rebellious kid, smart well-behaved kid, etc. etc.), which networks will tend to do because they like to take a formula that works and run it into the ground. So I think part of it was that people were just plain sick of family sitcoms because they'd seen it all.

It may also be a cyclical thing. I read somewhere that family sitcoms weren't doing so well in the 80's until The Cosby Show brought them back to prominence. I don't know if that's true, since I wasn't alive during the early 80's, but I know that when I think of sitcoms that originated in the 70's, I'm hard-pressed to think of any about families. There were a lot of shows in the 70's that focused on the workplace. So it might just be something that goes in and out of fashion. The fact that it keeps coming back seems to indicate its widespread appeal, but nonetheless, I think after a decade or so of family-oriented stories, people get tired of all that and look for something different.

There's also the 90's themselves. The 90's as a decade was kind of obsessed with its own edginess. Everything had to be "edgy" and "real." So the family sitcoms, which might have gone out of fashion on their own just from people getting bored with them, might have been pushed out faster because they weren't Generation X enough. Hence, their replacement by shows about wisecracking yuppies living in big cities.

I think when Reality Shows came on air in 2000 to mainstream networks that was the death knell to the family sitcom.

I think when Reality Shows came on air in 2000 to mainstream networks that was the death knell to the family sitcom.


Yeah, Survivor started in 2000 and a new era of television began!

Yep, the birth of reality tv's dominance in 2000 pretty much killed family sitcoms. It's a shame really.

I agree, I noticed that too. Most '90s sitcoms actually remind me of 80s music...in the sense of appealing to kids and adults alike. They also seemed to balance between being silly and throwing in a few serious moments as well, especially like you were saying with Full House and Roseanne. Nowadays that would probably be considered too cheesy. Even Seinfeld, which was basically all kidding around, tended to show the consequences of actions (like you rooted for them sometimes, but also knew they kinda weren't very nice people. Especially George LMAO).

I was just watching a bunch of Blossom episodes on youtube the other day too, and it surprised me how even that was more serious than I initially remembered. Back then I saw more of the later episodes around 1994/95, when it was more centered on the teen/young adult aspects, but the first season in 1991 had Blossom and Six dealing more sith peer pressure and dating issues, or on the dad Nick divorcing her mom and beginning to date again.

Even though I stopped liking Home Improvement (the characters just got on my nerves after awhile), they had some pretty touching episodes later in the series too. Like with Brad always getting in trouble or experinemting with drugs and sex.

In addition shows like Roseanne, Full House, and Home Improvement did confront very serious family issues but when they did it was always billed as “a very special’ episode because not much of TV made it a point to tackle topics like sexuality, drugs and  domestic violence as often as they do today.  For example, in Brothers and Sisters there are three openly gay male characters, a recovering alcoholic and a white collar felon.  These were the kind of issues 1980s and 1990s family sitcoms dealt with one or twice a season at the most and they were not woven into the characters’ personal makeup and regular week to week plots hence the “very special” network pitch label. Back in the 1990s there were dramas where young people faced serious problems every week Party of Five and 90210 come to mind but these were not sitcoms, and more to the point, they were not marketed as shows which the entire family could and should watch.

  This is not to say that the 2000s have been completely void of family oriented sitcoms but the last three to four years has seen them go from the endangered species list to extinction on the four major networks.  Yes, we saw George Lopez and 8 Simple Rules, but those seemed to be the last gasp of life from the dying lungs of family sitcoms as the choke hold from reality TV and “judging shows” grew ever tighter while the decade progressed.  TGIF is a very essential element in my thesis because in the past three or four years when have any of the four networks billed a block of primetime sitcoms as one that the entire family could watch on a weeknight?  I am saying that the four major networks used fake families to make real families laugh together while these days it seems that every member of the family has their own personal show that they watch by themselves because it is not suitable for everyone.