If Your Favorite Sitcoms Were Described Like Dramas

What's that? That show makes you laugh? Let's improve it by having it make you cry and shake with suspense instead.

Parks and Recreation

NBC Parks and Rec Tumblr

Leslie Knope is not above bribery or smiling cutely to get her way, while her team has their own salacious motives beyond the parks department. An intense look at the corruption, sex scandals, bureaucracy, and lies within local government.

Community

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A gritty portrait of a community college, where the victims of the world -- faced with drug addiction, adultery, unemployment, injury, and the problematic problems of American mental healthcare -- try to live and thrive in a broken system.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Brooklyn 99 Fox Tumblr / Via brooklyn99fox.tumblr.com

An unflinching look at the American criminal justice system from the eyes of those who enforce it, who are faced with problems like extreme debt, homophobia, racism, sexism, a few more -isms, and bad romantic luck.

New Girl

Fox New Girl Tumblr / Via officialnewgirl.tumblr.com

Jess enters the household of three men, upending their carefully guarded home life, providing a sobering look at one's early thirties as well as changing gender and postracial dynamics in modern America.

Modern Family

ABC Modern Family Tumblr / Via modernfamily-abc.tumblr.com

Through several misunderstandings and hijinks, the Pritchett family hold up a mirror to our own families time and time again, demonstrating all the new ways we disappoint our loved ones and fail to see each other as we really are: kind of jerks.

The Big Bang Theory

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Four incredibly intelligent men fail to understand human communication in this hard-to-watch portrayal of contemporary Pasadena, which plumbs the unknown depths of three nerdy white guys, as well as the foreigner and ladies who love them.

The Middle

ABC The Middle Tumblr / Via middleabc.tumblr.com

A local quarry manager's wife struggles to support her family both financially and emotionally, but the quintessential Midwestern family sticks to their values of hard work and, in the case of their daughter, delusional levels of optimism to stay afloat.