For sitcoms today, quality trumps quantity

Post-millennial declarations of the sitcom’s demise are greatly exaggerated. TV is still delivering wildly good comedies, if not high ratings for them, and I’m thinking that some of these comedies will be durable enough to keep their dignity through years of syndication overkill.

And yes, I do believe that the likes of ‘‘The Office’’ and ‘‘Scrubs’’ are strong enough to pass The Deathbed Test: What’s worth watching when you’re so incapacitated that you finally mine all those DVD box sets you’ve collected through your lifetime?

Clear signs that the sitcom is rebounding from its early-2000s slump are beginning to surface. Before this year, as onetime hits such as ‘‘Frasier,’’ ‘‘Friends,’’ and ‘‘Everybody Loves Raymond’’ were saying their too-long goodbyes, the sitcom genre was viewed as a tired format with a musty TV Land vibe. The unevolved likes of newcomers such as ‘‘Joey’’ and ‘‘Freddie,’’ with their loud x laugh tracks, didn’t help matters. And inexpensive reality TV had already taken up increasing amounts of prime-time space — at least two hours a week on each network, hours that formerly belonged to comedy.

In the late 1990s, NBC had 16 half-hour comedies in its lineup; this year, the network has but four.

Once like wallpaper on TV entertainment lineups, the sitcom became a less automatic programming tool.

But while there are fewer sitcoms on TV now, each of them seems to be working harder to stay alive. Most importantly, NBC has got its comedy mojo back with all of its sitcoms, having reinstituted a Thursday sitcom block. The night flows from strength to strength, from the white-trash folk wisdom of ‘‘My Name Is Earl’’ and the petty politicking of ‘‘The Office’’ to the pop-up brilliance of ‘‘Scrubs’’ and the corporate meta-irony of ‘‘30 Rock.’’ The revival of ‘‘Must See TV’’ — NBC is calling it ‘‘Comedy Night Done Right’’ — is emblematic of the start of a fresh era of sitcoms, as is Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s breaking of the ‘‘Seinfeld’’ curse with CBS’s ‘‘The New Adventures of Old Christine.’’

Like Louis-Dreyfus, we’re no longer stuck in the shadows of the past. Significantly, none of NBC’s comedies uses an old-fashioned laugh track.

In the past year, ‘‘The Office’’ has blossomed into a signature comedy of the ’00s, as it has reinvented the workplace genre for a more-bust-than-boom era. Among its virtues, ‘‘The Office’’ has perfected the fine art of making what’s unsaid funnier than what is said; it has slyly ridiculed the excesses of both political correctness and political incorrectness; it has celebrated misfits in all their pathos and geekiness; and it has added a dash of Don Quixote poignancy as its paper salesmen face a paper-free world.

And since its premiere last fall, ‘‘30 Rock’’ has begun to look like a breakout comedy. It operates at the opposite end of the explicitness spectrum from ‘‘The Office,’’ with broadly witty swipes at the business of making funny. And it rocks. Tina Fey has become a surprisingly sweet and hapless contemporary heroine, and Alec Baldwin provides a neat corporate twist on Alan Brady from the all-time comedy-writer sitcom to beat, ‘‘The Dick Van Dyke Show.’’

CBS’s ‘‘How I Met Your Mother’’ has also emerged in the past year as a should-be hit, a heartfelt urban romance with a costar — Neil Patrick Harris — who rivals Baldwin in ‘‘30 Rock’’ and Jeremy Piven in ‘‘Entourage’’ for hysterical vainglory. ABC’s new ‘‘The Knights of Prosperity’’ has glimmerings of excellence, too, if it can keep the writing tight. And, while ‘‘Sex and the City’’ left a gap on HBO, cable is still providing superior comedies including HBO’s neurosis opus ‘‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’’ playful ‘‘Entourage’’ (which returns in April ), and celebrity-ego spoof ‘‘Extras,’’ and FX’s winningly immature ‘‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.’’

Fewer of us are watching these comedies; none of them has managed to be both good and resoundingly popular, like ‘‘Seinfeld’’ in the 1990s. As with so much TV in this time of cultural fragmentation, today’s sitcoms are at best cult-size hits that generate miles of magazine and Internet coverage but not an ocean of viewers.

Indeed, right now it’s relatively unusual for any sitcom to hit the Nielsen Top 20, except for CBS’s ‘‘Two and a Half Men,’’ a show that fails not only The Deathbed Test but also The Flu Test. Last week, new episodes of ‘‘My Name Is Earl’’ and ‘‘The Office’’ drew smaller audiences than the ‘‘CSI: Crime Scene Investigation’’ repeat that aired opposite them on CBS. In the late 1990s, NBC dominated the top 10 with its sitcoms; now it’s lucky to break into the top 20 with them.

The greening of the TV drama in the past 10 years has certainly made survival more difficult for the sitcom. Despite the reality TV craze, dramas have improved enough to establish TV as a viable option to the movies. Our tolerance for mediocre comedies lowered when our options began to include extraordinary cable hours such as HBO’s ‘‘The Sopranos’’ and ‘‘Deadwood’’ and network hits like Fox’s ‘‘House’’ and ABC’s ‘‘Lost.’’ Next to these slickly produced and artfully written and acted series, conventional multi-camera sitcoms just look worse than ever.

And the hourlong series have also co-opted comedy to some extent, as shows such as ABC’s ‘‘Desperate Housewives’’ and ‘‘Ugly Betty’’ are as humorous and campy as they are dramatic. They take up space in the comedy nominations categories on awards shows. But they offer proof that, no matter how much reality and drama we are served, our need to laugh is ever-present.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit boston.com/ae/tv/blog/.