Podcasts are the most-watched format on television right now. The industry is calling them podcasts. It should be calling them sitcoms.
Here are some numbers worth sitting with: As of October 2025, 53% of new US weekly podcast listeners prefer watching a podcast. YouTube reports more than 700 million hours of podcast content viewed on television sets every month. Netflix has started licensing podcasts. Cable viewership, meanwhile, has fallen 39 percent since 2021.
The trade press has a ready explanation for all of this: podcasts are cheaper, more flexible, better at capturing attention in a fragmented media landscape. That’s true. But it misses the deeper structural reason these shows are winning — and what it means for us.
The format that is eating television is not a new format. It is the sitcom.
The Anatomy of a Sitcom
Strip the sitcom down to its functional parts and you get: a fixed ensemble cast, a recurring setting, a weekly release cadence, and a reason to return that has nothing to do with plot. Nobody watches Seinfeld to find out what happens next — that’s kinda the point. They watched it to be in the room with Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer. The setting — the diner, the apartment — was just a container for the dynamic.
Consider SmartLess — Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, Will Arnett, rotating mystery guests. The dry one, the bubbly one, the chaotic one. The mystery guest is not the show; the mystery guest is the episode’s B-plot. The show is the ensemble. That is a three-camera comedy without a laugh track.
The most revealing example right now is Friends Keep Secrets — Benny Blanco, Lil Dicky, Kristin Batalucco, eighteen cameras rigged across a house in Venice. Guests — Ed Sheeran, Selena Gomez, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Rudd — do not come in for a formal interview. They come over. They cook. They sit on the couch. Friends was six people across two apartments in Manhattan. It’s Always Sunny is five people in a bar. Friends Keep Secrets is doing the exact same thing, distributed free, viewable Tuesday morning while you eat breakfast.
The Parasocial Engine
The academic literature on podcasting has been building toward this conclusion for years. Researchers studying parasocial relationships have found that podcast listeners grieve host departures the way they process real relationship losses, that hosts become “recurrent presences” in listeners’ lives, and that the strongest bonds form around conversational, ensemble-based shows rather than narrative or true crime formats. The best of which also function on the same parasocial relationships.
Where the Puck Is Going
A sitcom with no writers’ room, no network, no pilot season, and no production budget — distributed free on YouTube, monetized through licensing deals and brand partnerships — is not a disruption of the entertainment industry. It is the entertainment industry, a better product at a lower price. The WGA West board member Adam Conover put it plainly in 2025: “Like it or not, this is the future of television.”
The next phase of this shift will not be driven by audio-first creators figuring out video. It will be driven by people who understand casting.
I’ve seen a lot of the new video podcasts out there, they have innovated by moving their podcast out of their garage, and into sets with wooden walls and 90’s furniture.
If I Were Netflix…
I’d round up the funniest people I could find. Write a few outlines — not scripts, just situations, kinda like how they write Curb. Find a location with a couch that isn’t against the wall, ideally with a table behind it and windows with a nice view, a visible door, and a kitchen island high enough to lean on. Buy three ball head tripods and hire three camera operators and a sound person, and most importantly, allow my “podcasters” to stand up and move around the space. Improvise it, Three or four takes per setup and cut it down to twenty minutes. Do that once a week for twenty-four weeks.
Congratulations! You just made a season of TV. Or as its called nowadays, a podcast. It’s non-union after all!
It’s so simple… I might just do this myself.