TV comedies tend to be half-hour shows while dramas tend to be hour-long shows? Why? And why don't we have comedies with a continuous story over a whole season on more?
Feature-length comic movies are common enough, so why not hour-long sitcoms on TV?
There's an obvious line of approach to that last question: Feature-length comedies are different from sitcoms. Just what that difference is, of course, needs to be spelled out. Whatever it is, we still have the question of why TV comedy adheres to the sitcom and not to a more expansive format.
Conversely, why don't we have a flock of half-hour TV dramas?