At a live taping of The Hollywood Reporter's "It Happened in Hollywood" podcast during the TV Academy's Televerse Festival in Los Angeles, Difficult People creator Julie Klausner argued that comedy has become too dependent on phone-based, short-form video content, calling this shift "isolating" and "reductive". She said she wants to see a revival of the traditional, joke-driven sitcom, arguing that such shows serve an important communal and emotional function that has been lost as scrolling feeds have taken over comedy consumption.

Klausner spoke for an hour about Difficult People, the cult Hulu comedy she created and starred in alongside Billy Eichner, which premiered in 2015 and is now seen as having anticipated the rise of digital-creator culture. She noted that much of today's best comedy writing appears in dramas, citing Succession, and pointed to the continued popularity of reruns of Friends, Seinfeld and Golden Girls among younger viewers as evidence that audiences still crave classic sitcom rhythms and friendship-centred storytelling. She also reflected on the show's rule that her and Eichner's characters would never seriously turn on each other, a bond she linked to the real-life relationship between queer people and their close friends, broken only in the series finale.