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I read a long time ago that Fran Drescher of The Nanny fame was huge in replacing those audiences with extras instead of random people.

https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/flashback/how-fran-...

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That’s true, but the article also explains it isn’t nefarious; she had a stalker (after past horrible trauma), and was terrified, so replaced the live audiences with extras. It just happened to work so well it caught on and became a mainstay of sitcoms after that.

The Academy Awards can’t even trust the extras to fill empty seats in the audience, so they use lawyers and accountants who have already signed NDAs with the Academy for their day jobs.

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