The Look Is Gone.

The other night I saw a drawing of a character that reminded me of Christina Applegate.  So I ended up looking at a few clips of Married With Children(or Married...with Children as some sources render it) on YouTube.  One thing that struck me was how it was a multi camera show filmed to video, a format that has disappeared from sitcoms, and the rest of North American scripted TV as well, other than the remaining US soaps.  In the '80s it was incredibly common, but looking at those clips in 2017 it was just one of the things that made them look dated.  Current productions all look like they're filmed now, whatever the actual equipment used to capture them is.   But I'm kind of surprised that I didn't notice the change, even though it happened a good while ago already.

Of course filming to video isn't completely gone.  It's still very common for reality TV, and shows like Saturday Night Live.   It still works for those formats, giving them the appearance of happening as we watch them.  I suppose sooner or later someone will try it with a sitcom again, but it will probably be used deliberately to make it look like a '70s or '80s sitcom.