Frank’s Place was created by Hugh Wilson, a long-time MTM guy who was also part of the creative team behind WKRP. (I had a friend who worked as a PA on Frank’s Place.)
Was Mad About You underrated? I can’t remember, but that’s one of the few sitcoms I really enjoyed. There were some very funny and very moving moments. In fact, there was one episode when the two characters, Jamie and… her husband, whose character name I can’t recall now, were having trouble, and they were sitting on a bench, talking, and it was so well-written and well-acted that I felt like I was eavesdropping on a private conversation. It was uncomfortable to watch, it felt so real.
Designing Women, also.
Both those shows lost some steam and went on longer than they should have, but when they were good, they were really good, I think.
Btw, can I further nominate ANY promising sitcom that was axed by Fox before it hit its stride?
In addition, Sports Night
acsenray writes:
> Duck Factory with the then unknown Jim Carrey and Geena Davis as cartoonists.
Geena Davis wasn’t on The Duck Factory. Are you thinking of Teresa Ganzel, who was the female lead? She was the widow of the old owner of the company who had inherited it, but she wasn’t a cartoonist.
Though it was funny, Freaks and Geeks wasn’t really a sitcom, but rather a one hour “dramedy” ( as opposed to Undeclared from the same exec. producer, which was a sitcom ).
- Tamerlane
Paul Reiser followed a long-established tradition by being known as Paul Buchman on the series.
As for the thread title, I’d nominate either Green Acres or Frank’s Place, even though they have little in common save for being underrated and funny.
One of the best shows on in a long time, though I struggle to catagorize it as a sitcom, was Wonderfalls. Axed by Fox after four episodes, and I believe three different time slots. All 13 episodes are out on DVD though. The beautiful Caroline Dhavernas was amazing! Not too sure if it was underrated, IIRC the critics loved it.
And let me add one more vote for Arrested Development. Lets hope it sticks around.
key west.
It so sucked that that one didn’t make it.
No, I’m sure it was one time slot, but only 3/4 episodes.
I’ll toss in my vote on Night Court. I loved that show when I was young.
Clerks: The Animated Series had the bad luck to premiere the same season as “Who Wants to Be a Millionare.” They aired two episodes and axed it for another episode Millionare.
Scrubs deserves to be on this list as well. It gets okay ratings but gets lost in the network shuffle. New episodes won’t even be on until midseason this year. :mad: There’s always the dvd I guess.
This has been mentioned a couple of times, but the word underrated may be relevant here. For me I consider it underrated because I barely knew it existed during it’s original run, and never had any desire to watch it. I discovered it long after it was cancelled and viewed the entire series through re-runs. I just don’t remember hearing any hoopla about it at all while it was a “new” show.
Maybe this is also true for others here who have mentioned it 
No way!
(Quoted from memory)
*A scientist both wise and bold
Set out to cure the common cold
Instead he found this power pill
Which, he said, certainly will
Turn a lamb into a lion
Like an eagle he’ll be flying.
But, he found, this power pill,
Made the strongest man quite iill
So the mighty search began
To find the one and only man.
What they found, made them squeamish
For only Stanely Beamish
A meek and drooping daffodil
Could take the magic power pill
That sent him soaring thru the skies
Fighting foes and fighting spies!
- Mr. Terrific*
Compare that to
*Look! It’s the enemy of all that’s illegal!
Look! It’s a man that flies around like an eagle!
Look! At the muscles in those arms, they’re like hammers!
Look! It’s some nut who flies around in pajamas!
That’s no nut, boy - that’s Captain Nice!
– Captain Nice*
My vote is for The Tony Randall Show. He was a judge, and his assistant was named Mario Lanza. Brilliantly funny - it could never last.
Regards,
Shodan
The Tom Arnold Show - He played the egomanical star of a hit TV sitcom. It was actually a really funny show but suffered from the backlash at the overexposure that Arnold and his then wife Roseanne were getting.
Sports Night is, IMHO, the greatest show to be cancelled before its time. Except for the episodes in which they used an awful laugh track, that show was flawless.
And major props to Phish Head. Men Behaving Badly was hysterical. I miss Duckman too.
Yeah, AND it aired against the first season of Survivor. AND they insisted on showing the two episodes they did air out of order, so the central joke of the episode they aired first was completely lost. That episode was #2, and it was a “clip show” where they had nostalgic flashbacks to #1. Since #1 hadn’t aired, it was just weird and meaningless. Oh, ABC screwed that show but good.
I actually came in here to talk about Car 54, Where Are You? They used to run it on Nick at Nite in the late '80s and I remember being impressed by how much diversity it had in terms of ethnicity, and not in a way that smacked of tokenism. Several plots revolved around interactions between the Catholic and Jewish communities in their precinct, and it was always part of the backdrop. In one episode, a kid on the Little League team the officers coached is practicing his song for his bar mitzvah, and the gag is that he’s been practicing it so long, all the gentile kids on the team now have it memorized and can give him cues when he forgets. A lot of former Yiddish vaudeville stars like Al Lewis and Molly Picon were either regulars or semi-regulars. Nipsey Russell was also a regular. He played one of the cops in the precinct and he interacted with his fellow officers just like anybody else. The show ran from 1961-1963, so that was pretty progressive for the time. Plus, it was funny and frequently risque, but in ways that managed not to upset the censors. I wish it was available on DVD, because I think it’s fairly unique to that era. I know Carl Reiner was prevented in being the star of Man of the House (which became The Dick Van Dyke Show) because the network said he was “too ethnic”, which of course meant “too Jewish”.
No Scrubs until midseason? I’m officially starting to hate NBC.
Geena Davis was on the Dabney Coleman vehicle BUFFALO BILL around the same time.
RE cartoonery- I nominate NEWHART in which he wrote a comic book. I even have the comic book product-tie-ins somewhere.
I’m starting to lose faith in the SDMB. It took 39 posts to get to Sports Night!?!
<Homer>
Lobo… Lobo… Bring back… Sherriff… Lobo!
</Homer>
I always liked The George Carlin Show