Michelle Buteau’s Netflix Comedy ‘Survival of the Thickest’ Is Too Little of a Good Thing: TV Review
variety.comAlison Herman TV Critic It’s a great irony of the streaming age that many platforms built their audience on the backs of sitcoms with vast, bingeable catalogs — only to produce abbreviated, compressed sitcoms of their own.
Classics like “Friends,” “The Office” and “Seinfeld” have served as a bridge between a previous era of television and the current one, offering lessons in what can make a show an enduring favorite.
One of those lessons is the value of a 22-episode season, which allows room to establish an ensemble while preserving the efficiency of standalone installments.
But streamers generally prefer to invest in a wider variety of shows; even when they do make traditional sitcoms that could, in another world, air on NBC, full seasons are compressed into just a handful of chapters. “Survival of the Thickest” is the latest case study in how this approach does a disservice to an otherwise promising series.
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