[rhizome]

This explains Chuck Lorre's career. Touch just enough segments of society and keep them just entertained enough (there have probably been focus groups on optimal laughs per minute), and you will have the widest number of advertisers wanting to buy time. This is a fact of all mainstream media, it's just that in TV you have to keep coming up with new combinations of people for the audientce to relate to, which is hard. "Everybody Loves Raymond" is essentially "I Love Lucy," but also different.