One I think no one will remember, because I was probably one of the about half a dozen people in the weekly audience:
**United States **(1980) lasted only six weeks. Starring Beau Bridges and Helen Shaver.
Nominally a family comedy (husband, wife, two kids in suburbia), it didn’t have gags and pratfalls so much as situations and reactions, with observational humor dominating (in my recollection).
The reason I call it ahead of its time is that it was a boundary pushing sitcom about 35 years before boundary pushing was allowed. It wasn’t afraid to go dark, and the situations always had that realistic part-comedy, part tragedy aspect that a lot of real family situations have. One episode, “Uncle Charlie” has stuck with me all these years. I would say that if it had aired this year, it would be up for an Emmy.
[spoiler] The show starts centered around the couple getting ready to go to a weekend garden party. She’s not ready, he is getting increasingly irritated, they go back and forth, she finds something new to delay them each time he thinks they are ready to go. Pretty bog standard sitcom, yes?
As he gets more and more irritated, she gets more and more defensive. Finally,as he reaches the end of his rope and explodes at her, she tells him she does not want to go. Then, in a superbly performed scenes, she breaks down and tells him that “Uncle Charlie”, a long time friend of her parents will be at the party. When she was a little girl, on vacation with the family at a lakeside cabin, “Uncle Charlie” followed her into the woods, got her alone, and molested her. The puzzlement as to what she did to bring this on herself, the self-loathing, the shame as she tells her story was heartbreaking.
After persuading her husband not to immediately go after “Uncle Charlie” (who is presumably in his 60’s now), they end up not going to the party and spending the evening at home.[/spoiler]
Non stop yuks.
As I said, way, way ahead of its time. The TV audience was not ready for this show.