In an average sitcom, what percent of the peoples' lives do you think we see? Surely we don't see them paying necessary bills, getting homework assignments or work duties, completing every single one, getting paid, etc.. We dont' see them buying groceries, or just hanging out having fun doing nothing because nothing interesting is happening thaat day. So, what would you have guessed we see? 30%? 20%? Whatever it was, you probably figured my headline was nuts. You might have guessed 5% but surely not aa fraction of 1% Butthat's what it is. Take 8766 hours in a yeaar. Figure 1/3 of thaat, approxiately, is sleepng. I'll even give you the hours of showers, bathing, driving to work or school, and so on each year. So, we can be down to a nice, round 5000 hours. Take a show with 24 episodes. That's 12 hours for 24 30 minute episode, or 12/5000. That makes 24/10,000, or 0.24 out of 100. A quarter of 1%, or a touch ess. But wait, you say, some episodes take place over days or weeks. Exactly - so you take an episode and figure 30 minutes over 2 days is covered. That's many hours eaach day that we don't see what the characters are doing, and many hours plus 15-20 minutes each day that we don't see what each is doing in days where the episode doesn't cover! You may wonder, do we know these characters at all then? Well, yes, the amount we see is enough to pick up their general characteristics very well, actually. It shows us their general modds, how they react to numerous different things - which gives us a clue how they'd react to other things - and often clues us in as to their relationships, though not with all their friends - only with the type of friends they'd have. We learn how smart or dumb they likely are, and also a little about their family, dreams, goals, etc.. But, we don't know everything. Some things, we need to judge on the basis of the traits we do see. Others we need to judge ont he basis of what we know about people - i.e.: students not shown to have homework on a sitcom will have homework assignments, and we can presume the types of grades to some extent. People have friends - soemtimes we see many of those friends ("Cheers," "Friends") that the person interacts with, sometimes we don't (People in numerous family sitcoms.)