The Shortcom Is Not a Short Sitcom: Visual and Aural Pacing in French Television Comedy

Shortcoms are short-form comedic television series built from episodes of only a few minutes in length, a format that has been uniquely popular in France since the late 1990s. Existing scholarship in media and television studies is split between views that shortcoms are simply "short sitcoms" and those that see them as a novel audiovisual form. We address this tension computationally through a corpus of 15 French shortcoms, 12 long-format French comedies, and the long-format variants of 8 of the shortcoms. Seven episode-level metrics of visual and aural pacing, derived from automated shot detection, shot scale estimation, frame embeddings, and speech transcription, feed a linear discriminant model evaluated with leave-one-out cross-validation. The model matches episodes to their source series with a pooled F1 score of 0.53 against a random baseline of 0.037, rising to 0.70 when considering the two closest neighbors. Collapsing those predictions to the two corpora, a distinction the model is never given, places 90% of episodes in the correct format. Plotted in the space of the leading discriminants, the long-format comedies do not form an independent cluster but instead sit at the limit of a wider shortcom range. Shortcoms fit a cohesive story into a short time window by either speeding up the speech or slowing the visual dimension, and the series that expanded into longer episodes move toward the long-format region. Rather than constraining the possibilities, the short format appears to have encouraged experimentation with the pacing of broadcast television. Our results also show that series-level stylistic signatures hold beyond Anglophone collections and within even short-form materials.