What does 'limited by their laughtracked, live action, living-room-with-a-couch setup' mean?

Hello everyone. Can you please make this sentence in bold type more clear?

The Simpsons premiered just two weeks before the 1980s ended, instantly going beyond “hit show” and becoming a cultural sensation. 1990 was the year of “Bartmania”, famously epitomized by t-shirts emblazoned with a picture of Bart underneath the word “Underachiever”; slingshot in hand, he declared “And proud of it, man!”. The huge reaction to the show, both positive and negative, was greatly abetted by all those years of timidity and repetitiveness on the part of the three major networks. The revolt had begun with shows like Married . . . with Children and Roseanne, both of which took as a given a working class, explicitly anti-“Cosby” mentality. But while those shows had the attitude, they were inherently limited by their laughtracked, live action, living-room-with-a-couch setup. The Simpsons had no such restrictions, and cast its scorn over everything.