The 2007-2008 season finished with nary one situation comedy in the top ten shows. Only Two and a Half Men skated by in the top 20. It’s been only four years since sitcom juggernaut Friends ended its nine-year “Must-See-TV” run. The obvious question remains: Who killed the sitcom? And, more importantly, how do we bring it back?

Believe it or not, a lot of the blood lies on the hands of the creative forces behind shows we’ve come to love, like Friends, Seinfeld, and Will & Grace. Wait… that doesn’t make sense. How can that be? That’s because we forget such stillborn efforts like Kirstie Alley’s comeback vehicle, Veronica’s Closet, or how about Christina Applegate’s humor-challenged effort, Jessie, which featured a brother character who didn’t speak. Both shows came from Friends creators.

Worse, the train wrecks were kept on the air for two seasons because the studio held the network hostage, since they were delivering Friends. How about Good Morning, Miami – another abortion from Will & Grace creators (along with The Stones, Twins, and The Four Kings)?

Writers of Seinfeld, arguably one of the best sitcoms of the century, were also responsible for spawning such creations as, Father of the Pride, It’s Like You Know, The Complete Savages, and Alright Already, to name a few.

See a pattern forming yet? Wait, there’s more…

From Friends we got Partners, Getting Personal, Three, If You Lived Here You’d Be Home Now, Welcome to the Captain, Love Inc., The Class, Imagine That, Cursed, Work With Me, The Men’s Room, Sons and Daughters, The Loop, Grounded for Life, Quintuplets and, lest we forget, two seasons of the ever-forgettable, Joey.

Joey proved to be a critical and creative disaster unlike anything television would see before. It made After M*A*S*H look like a classic. Despite the first-year failure, in its infinite wisdom, NBC trusted the writers with a second season re-tooling of the show. After all, they were on Friends since it began… that should mean something, right?

Wrong. It was like giving the architects of the Titanic the keys in designing a jumbo jet liner. What followed was another 22-episode abomination. Joey barely limped its way through a second season, wasting countless millions and ultimately losing NBC its 20-plus-year Thursday night victory…forever. And for its star, Matt Leblanc, seemingly witness relocation.

Aside from the hundreds of millions lost on these aforementioned shows, studios also spent millions of dollars over the years securing overall deals with the writers and creators of these shows in the hopes that lightning would strike again.

When Seinfeld wrapped, Variety announced the network pick-up of The Michael Richards Show, created by the writers of “The Muffin Top” episode of Seinfeld. That was the first time an actual episode was singled out at as a credit. What followed was anything but an episode of Seinfeld. The pilot had to be retooled, and then shortly after the show’s launch, the show was pulled – never to be seen again.

Out of the three “Must-See” classics, guess how many hit shows were subsequently spawned from one of the writers associated with the shows?

One. Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. (It should be noted – the one possible exception: The New Adventures of Old Christine, which barely landed this side of the bubble with a 13-episode back-order by CBS. It’s still a long way from syndication, and if the studio doesn’t hit the magic number, the deficits associated with Christine will be an enormous loss.)

The lesson networks should learn here are simple: One: it takes a lot more to create a hit than previous success. Two: just because a writer has the ability to recreate the voices of a hit show doesn’t mean he/she has the ability or talent to create their own hit. In other words, just because you can imitate Sinatra doesn’t mean you should be cutting any new albums any time soon.

The demise of the situation comedy obviously isn’t simply on the shoulders of the creators of these shows, but the philosophy spills over to the Suddenly Su of the world and similar ilk. The 1980s, saw a hit from Linda Bloodworth Thomason called, Designing Women and subsequently spawned misfires like Hearts Afire, Woman of the House, Emeril and, most recently, 12 Miles of Bad Road on HBO, which was apparently so bad, HBO is refusing to air any of it.

Diane English gave us Murphy Brown and then also gave us Ink, Double Rush, and Love & War. If only she gave us a gift receipt. Personally, I liked Murphy Brown much better back when it was called The Mary Tyler Moore Show. On the other hand, Two and a Half Men is much funnier than My Two Dads, so go figure…

Past success is no guarantee for future success. If anything, it often cripples the chances because vision and passion are watered down by greed.

Clearly, trying to program via résumé is self-evident. What results more often than not is mediocrity. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. Norman Lear was a master at developing shows America would treasure. But if you take a look at each one of his successes, you’ll find at least one common denominator – a passionate vision and strong point of view. That and, oh yeah… they were funny. Really funny.

It’s easy to understand the temptation by network executives to pick off writers from hit shows and marry them to former co-stars of other hit brethren with half-baked concepts in the hopes of striking gold. But history and economics simply prove the opposite. And given the current environment, that philosophy just won’t work anymore.

The truth is, it wouldn’t have worked 50 years ago either. After I Love Lucy, CBS didn’t try to make a run with I Kinda Like Viv. Not to put it past them – nobody came up with the idea (and Vivian Vance, it seemed, had no problem playing second fiddle again in The Lucy Show).

There never was a more fertile time for the sitcom to stage a comeback. America doesn’t simply want to laugh – we need to.

When Seinfeld was pitched and sold to NBC by Jerry Seinfeld and his best friend Larry David 20 years ago, the best credit Larry had going for him was a sketch show called Fridays that ran on ABC a half-dozen years earlier. Seinfeld, who had a flourishing stand-up career, had just spent a short and unremarkable stint as an actor on Benson. But what they lacked in credits and heat, they clearly made up for in passion and a strong point of view.

As the story goes, NBC took a shot on, in essence, these two nobodies. Virtually, the same thing happened when Lucy and Desi pitched I Love Lucy a half century ago. If you check your history books, more often than not, this is always the common thread to most television classics – and the best way (in my opinion, the only way) to replicate or come close to any of these successes is by returning to that simple axiom.

If not, we’re looking at another dearth of bad situation comedy… a endless conveyor belt of crap being packaged and sent through the airwaves while a make-shift network executive hollers, “Speed it up!”