TUESDAAAAAAYYY

Imagine that the past is a cat.

Specifically, the cat in the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment. Naturally, this cat is in a box. Mind you, you're not absolutely sure that there is a cat in the box; there's catlike hair lying around and some claw marks, but there is no evidence to contradict the theory that Someone Else could have come in and carefully placed those clues to throw you offtrack.

Now, excluding the hair samples and the broken claw stuck in the side of the box (wow that cat did not want to go in), you have no clues as to what breed the cat is, or its current state. You do, however, know a great deal about the box. The box is rigged to kill whatever is inside in a manner randomly chosen from a nigh-infinite list after one hour of occupancy. While you have only arrived at the box, you can generally surmise that it has been roughly four years since the cat was interred. Yes you can smell it. You cannot open the box and so, because the precise method of death cannot be discovered, the cat is simultaneously dead in a nigh-infinite number of ways.

The upshot is that deep in the past, our past, there is a mess of conflicting creation myths, hypotheses, and theories all clumped together, existing at once and as one. I present this as the original source of television sitcoms.