America's watching a lot of (old) sitcoms

So it looks like the sitcom isn't dead, after all. It's just really, really old.

According to this AP article, a new study states TV viewers are watching more hours of sitcoms than ever before, to the tune of 4.84 hours per week, as opposed to 3.78 hours/week in 1993-94. Unfortunately, most of the sitcoms being watched are reruns, from syndicated reruns like Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond to pretty much every comedy on Nick at Nite, TV Land, and TBS.  The study showed that viewers watch prime-time network sitcoms only 13 percent of the time, opposed to 56 percent in '93-'94. Now, the numbers might be skewed a bit because the total number of hours of sitcoms on TV has tripled over the last twelve seasons, but it still looks like people are flocking to new sitcoms in smaller proportions than in past years. Jeez... no wonder why Arrested Development failed...