E! cable channel recently ranked the 25 greatest TV comedies. I can’t get the link to work but their list is:
Seinfeld
All in the Family
The Cosby Show
Cheers
The Simpsons
MASH
I Love Lucy
Friends
Taxi
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Honeymooners
Frasier
Roseanne
The Andy Griffith Show
Happy Days
Family Ties
The Jeffersons
The Dick Van Dyke Show
Will & Grace
Golden Girls
The Larry Sanders Show
Sex in the City
The Bob Newhart Show
Murphy Brown
Everybody Loves Raymond
They made some obvious mistakes, such as naming Seinfeld as the best one. Heck, during its run Seinfeld was routinely beaten badly in the ratings by Home Improvement , which to my mind was a much funnier show and which the knuckleheads at E! didn’t even rank in the top 25. Other notable omissions from E!'s list include Barney Miller , Soap , Sanford & Son , Get Smart! , The Beverly Hillbillies , Newhart, Married with Children and WKRP in Cincinnati .
Shows I’d boot out of the top 25 are Larry Sanders, Sex in the City, Golden Girls, Will & Grace, Everybody Loves Raymond, I Love Lucy, Roseanne and All in the Family . I’m sorry, but Archie constantly calling his long-suffering and loving wife “Dingbat” and his jerk son in law “Meathead” got real old real fast. It was shocking in its time but it doesn’t hold up well now.
My top ten would be:
The Simpsons
Cheers
MASH* (before it got all preachy toward the end)
Taxi
The Cosby Show
Married with Children
The Dick Van Dyke Show
Home Improvement
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
Frasier
Thoughts? Comments? (Other than that I may be watching too much Nick at Night )
I’m almost in agreement with you, PatrickM, but I’d have “Friends” in my list after “Taxi”, and I’d kick "Married With Children "out. I hated that show - so crass, so vulgar, so completely unredeeming. I love “Friends” in spite of myself; there hasn’t been any criticism of the show that I don’t agree with, and I find myself laughing out loud until I cry when watching it anyway. To me, that is the mark of a great comedy - it really makes me laugh. I’d probably replace “Home Improvement” with “Newhart”, too. I don’t have any idea why “Newhart” was funny, but it was another of my consistently laugh out loud shows.
So, according to you, there were NO situation comedies that were actually funny in the 1960’s.
Uh-huh. Tell me when the shuttle lands.
Just to let you know, the audience laughter from I Love Lucy is still being used in sitcoms today, nearly 50 years after the show aired.
Oh, you made some obvious mistakes, such as your comments about I Love Lucy and All In The Family.
You apparently know knowing about the concept of context, which is precisely while All In The Family doesn’t seem shocking to you.
Ask yourself this question–if All In The Family were a “new series” being pitched to the networks today, woth the exact same storyline/actors/format, would it get picked up?
Norman Lear himself was asked this question and the answer was unequivical: “Never.”
Amen! How can any list not include the exploits of WNYX and its staff? Watch episodes like “Goofy Ball”, “Bill’s Autobiography”, “The Secret of Management”, or “Bitch Session” and tell me that this isn’t a great show. I never understood why NBC couldn’t do more to get people to watch.
If we were to restrict this to “the first three seasons of”, and to “original showing of”, rather than reruns – would that change things for y’all?
For me, I’d have:
All in the Family
I Love Lucy
Taxi
Dick Van Dyke
Mash
Cheers
Mork & Mindy
Seinfeld
etc.
I’d take off:
Everybody Loves Raymond, Golden Girls, Married with Children, Will and Grace, and anything from HBO. The fact that they are on cable and can get away with more, while not their fault, puts them on a different playing field than the rest.
I’d move Friends much further down the list.
I’d add: Sanford and Son, Barney Miller, Beverly Hillbillies, Leave it to Beaver, and Newsradio.
I really do like Will and Grace. But the show that makes me laugh more than any other is That '70s Show. I really don’t know why. It’s just so incredibly ridiculous that I find it amusing.
WSLer, WSLer, WSLer, from your other posts on this board I know you can read. It is a shame that in your haste to rip my opinion you failed to read my OP. You incorrectly wrote that I said there were NO funny comedies in the 1960s, this despite the fact that I had The Dick Van Dyke Show in my top 10 and added *Get Smart! * and The Beverly Hillbillies to my top 25, which already included The Andy Griffith Show from E!'s list. I’m no math major, but that puts 4 shows from the 1960s on my list.
As for All in the Family I still say it is way overrated. I was alive and watching TV in 1970s and found Archie Bunker’s show not so much shocking as obvious and heavy handed. I knew people like Bunker and seeing louts like him on my TV, even getting his weekly well-deserved comeuppance, was a waste of my time and electricity.
About Lucy, my feelings about the show were summed up in the first *Back to the Future * movie; its always a rerun of an unfunny one I’ve already seen before.
I Love Lucy got the longest laugh in history (it may have since been beaten by All in the Family but I doubt it) in a scene where Lucy gets a shirtload of eggs smashed into her chest, and the show ran for 6 years. Golden Girls ran 7 years. Obviously somebody must have thought they were funny.
The Andy Griffith show ran for 8 seasons, and bored me to tears whenever I tried to watch it. But it did run for 8 seasons, so again it deserves placement somewhere on the list for the reason mentioned in my first paragraph.
The Larry Sanders show was totally forgettable.
And Sex In The City is a comedy? Granted I’ve only watched a half dozen episodes, but I don’t think I’ve ever so much as chuckled at anything I’ve seen on that show.
just because shows run for years and get insanely high ratings doesn’t necessarily make them funny.
damn, britney spears has outsold just about everyone, but no one’s calling her shit classic (at least, no one over the age of 13). home improvement was completely mediocre, and in no way competes with the creativity of seinfeld.
this is a digression, but my parents always told me there where two types of people: elvis people and beatles people. in the nineties it was home improvement and seinfeld. i can’t relate to anyone who likes home improvement over seinfeld, nor do i really want to.
Au contraire. The only thing that keeps a sitcom on the air is a constant stream of yucks from the viewers (measured in terms of ratings). Show not funny, viewers not watch. Viewers not watch, sponsors pull ads. Sponsors pull ads, sitcom gets cancelled.
You personally may not have found a show funny, but if the show gets high ratings and runs for years, that says more about you than it does about the show. As I mentioned, Andy Griffith did absolutely nothing for me in the yucks department. But I can accept that enough people found it sufficiently amusing to keep it running for 8 years, thereby justifying its placement on a universal “best of” list. But it’s sure as heck not on my “best of” list.
Whoo boy, what a can of worms! Shows I enjoyed as a kid, such as Gilligan’s Island, Alice, One Day At A Time, Mork & Mindy, The Cosby Show, MASH, and Square Pegs, don’t get the same yuks from me now that I see them on reruns. Here’s a list of shows that have stood the test of time for me:
All in the Family
Barney Miller
Cheers
Night Court
The Honeymooners
Roseanne
Bob Newhart
Match Game (yeah, it’s not a sitcom but it sure was/is hilarious)
More recent fare that I’ve laughed at more than a few times:
Drew Carey Show
Grace Under Fire
South Park
Newradio
The King of Queens
Hmmm, I was sure I’d think of more. I rarely watch network television anymore and haven’t found many sitcoms on cable channels.
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