I’ll watch Everybody Loves Raymond re-runs a billion times before I waste half an hour of my life on the dreck they show now. ELR was on for 9 years and won over a dozen Emmy awards. Of course, Frank and Marie were actually the funny ones.
I nominate Friends. I only watched a couple of episodes and apparently I just didn’t get it. I hated each and every one of them so much I couldn’t be bothered to watch long enough TO get it.
Any show featuring a stupid fat load married to a slim hot wife. Avoid. Like. Plague. That would include The Honeymooners, which spawned the imitations.
Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley ran for more than 20 years when added together. Today they are almost unwatchable: terrible writing, bad acting, predictable formulaic plots- it’s like it’s written by and the sets are built by a band of not particularly bright 9th graders. No idea why it lasted that long.
Love Boat- 5,000 different stories of people on cruises and every one of them the same.
Yeah, whenever i was able to sit through an episode, it was only to see those two. Every minute that Romano was on screen was painful.
For me, it is often the case that, in sitcoms centered around stand-up comedians, the comedian himself is the least interesting part of the show. Even on Seinfeld, which i really liked, i found Jerry far less entertaining than the others, and while Seinfeld himself might be an excellent stand-up comedian he’s actually a pretty mediocre actor.
Two and a Half Men
Yes, Dear
Veronica’s Closet
Suddenly Susan
Dharma and Greg
The Brady Bunch
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (They actually had the audacity to use “adventure” in the title of a show so mindnumbingly dull that 60 Minutes has more laughs than a typical Ozzie and Harriet show.)
Family Affair
Seinfeld had a lot of great moments but the main problem, as I see it, is also a common problem with a lot of shows that are on a long time is the characters eventually become caricatures of themselves, and in Seinfeld’s case by the time it became popular they were already at that point and as it continued on they only became more and more so.
As it became established that the main characters were insane in their own particular ways, the writing of the show merely became an exercise in putting those characters into situations, plausible or no, that would accentuate those individual insanities to the point that the show routinely went wildly off the rails but in an oddly predictable manner.
OMG, I’ve had the same thing happen with a lot of shows which, at the time, I thought were the creme de la creme. The Brady Bunch, for example :rolleyes:
2 1/2 Men. There are only two good things about that show, and neither one is a main character: Conchatta Farrell’s Berta and Taylor Holland’s Evelyn. If they gave those two a show of their own, it would be funnier than 2 1/2 M ever was.
The Honeymooners was, I think, the original of this genre. IMHO, it was great and is still quite watchable, at least once you account for the gender attitudes of the day.
