Well first off, in all honesty, I don't watch sitcoms and never have. I dislike them. Unfortunately this means I don't have any personal experience with the things that have been discussed really.
However I do have some knowledge of an episodic way of storytelling, even if it's more from childhood cartoons. When a series is set up episodically, it is less a connected story and more a collection of events that happen to a group of people. At the end of every episode, all is normal, and nothing's changed. The audience is taught a lesson, but the characters don't seem to learn anything, and are back to their normal selves the next week. Things are fixed and unchanging from one story to the next going as far as having characters that never seem to age. A story is set up and resolved all in one episode and is never mentioned again.
A show that seems to be very episodic (in what I've watched of it) is The Simpsons. At this point I think all the kids; even Maggie the baby might be older then me but they haven't aged a day. Similarly, Homer seems to get in some trouble every episode but in the end it's all solved and life continues unchanged from one week to the next. This works for the show because they have found what works for them and episodic writing allows them to stay with that. Sitcoms aren't very serious and audiences don't expect deep characters or situations. They just want something amusing and predictable. If they had to have serious development, it wouldn't be as funny, which would go against the point of a sitcom. Maybe the shallowness is why I don't like sitcoms. Or maybe they aren't funny to me.
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