I was born in '71 and can attest 80s sitcoms were absolute shit, notwithstanding an outlier like “Cheers” (which I still didn’t like, but it’s less sticky and annoying than its brethren). I think that’s why certain of my cohort are so obnoxious about The Simpsons and how it’s fallen from its glory days; we remember what a radical and welcome departure it was from pretty much everything else in prime time.
Cheers held up? Really? Slapping women across the face is something you regularly do?
It was Sam’s method of sobering up from his drinking days. It’s not like he slapped Rebecca to teach her who was boss or show her he loved her or something. Maybe not every aspect of Cheers aged well, but when you have 270 episodes of a show over eleven years that ended almost thirty years ago not everything is going to be great. Yeah, overall I think Cheers held up very well.
“That damn bar.”
I suspect that the reason so many don’t hold up well is that they always had some sort of “lesson” embedded in them. The new generation hates preachiness, and much prefers sitcoms like the Simpsons, Seinfeld or Friends, which were simply funny for funny’s sake or at least knew how to deliver lessons with a punchline rather than as a distinctly non-comedic element.
Hey, I’m 42 and still love the Golden Girls!
I’m sorry, What about Rosanne?
I was a teenager in the 1990s, and for me, a lot of the stuff from that decade has withstood the test of time. The TV shows, the fashion, the music. I’m a 90s kind of guy.
I find I can appreciate humor across decades. Even when things are dated, you can find a lot of funny stuff in older material. Just the other day, I ran into a show that I had never heard of, “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” (ran 1959 to 1963). I watched two episodes on Dailymotion. The setting is as 50s as “Leave it to Beaver” (but much more wry humor, hinting at the subversiveness that would hit society during the 60s mostly in the period after the show ended its run). I found them very funny, maybe because I understood the historical context. For that matter, I love comedy films from the 1950s and early to mid-60s. Things like “Some Like it Hot”, “Good Neighbor Sam” or “Boeing Boeing”. I think one reason why the humor in these may appeal to me is that this was at the tail end of the “Hays Code” (properly the Motion Picture Production Code), a voluntary agreement among studios that strictly regulated what you were allowed to portray. Since you couldn’t film vulgar or overtly sexualized scenes, you really had to be creative in the humor. You could sometimes let innuendo slip in, and some of these films do this masterfully. I also find Laurel and Hardy really funny.
As an example of humor that for me hasn’t aged well, I would mention many old cartoon shorts from the 20s to 30s and even in some cases the 40s, from the time before “Looney Tunes”, Tex Avery cartoons, Donald Duck, and the in-color Micky Mouse shorts came into their own (for example, material from Betty Boop, Disney Silly Symphonies, MGM Happy Harmonies). I don’t want to say that these are all bad, but the humor in many of these seems to be based on gags just for the sake of gags, e.g., characters singing in weird voices, dancing skeletons, what amounts to various weird visual puns, or people using machines that do things that it would be more logical to do the old-fashioned way. As for humor in silent film, while I’ve never cared much for Charlie Chaplin’s “tramp”, I can see why people would have found this funny when the genre was new. And I’ve seen some early silent film on Youtube recently, and I can see that the filmmakers of circa 1900 were putting an effort into making their short silent films fun with their visual effects.
A bit of a digression there. To go back to sitcoms, M.A.S.H. has (of course) been referenced above. This is a show from the 70s and seems for many people to have withstood the test of time - it appears to be wildly popular. To me, though, it has never had any appeal. The setting and underlying humor seems to lack relevance to me.
It’s not something anyone on the show regularly did either. Are you perhaps referring to the scene where Diane slaps Sam, which triggers a rhythmic, drawn-out, completely harmless slapping bout between them? If so, are you familiar with the notion of slapstick comedy?
Remember, though, that MASH was an allegory. In 1972, the US was still involved in Vietnam, the antiwar movement was in full swing, and MASH wanted to show the silliness of war in Korea–that is, Vietnam.
In 1972, there were still plenty of Americans who were absolutely terrified of Communism, and who saw it take over countries by brute force–China, North Korea, North Vietnam, and so on, those of whom wanted Communism to take over the world. At the same time, there were plenty of Americans on college campuses who saw nothing wrong with that. Why, I have no idea.
MASH showed the silliness embodied by both sides, illustrated by the MASH doctors’ love of booze, and the North Korean/Chinese ineptitude at finding the MASH unit in order to bomb it. They didn’t succeed, but the MASH doctors certainly got bombed. 
Interestingly, in one episode, the Canadian Army stopped by. For what, I don’t know, but the truck that the so-called “Canadian Army” pulled up in, had the insignia of a Royal Canadian Air Force squadron on the truck’s side panels. And it’s supposed to be an Army truck? Oops!
Let’s see:
Murphy Brown
Family Ties. . .with Michael J. Fox.
Mr. Belvedere - I always likes that one.
Cosby
Cosby was big in syndication for years. But, you know. . .
I’m not sure. . . much of the stuff from the 80’s was very light and breezy, more flash than substance. Maybe that’s it.
I liked a lot of 80’s TV. Let’s see:
Cosby show and Family Ties (already mentioned)
Growing Pains (his best friend’s name was Sylvester Stabone lol)
The Hogan Family (early Jason Bateman!)
Who’s the Boss? (teenage Alyssa Milano)
Mr. Belvidere
Different Strokes was one that I loved as a kid, but doesn’t hold up too well now
Golden Girls is still great
What’s Happening?
Cheers and MASH, of course
Sturgeon’s Law?
“Family you choose” vs. regular family.
Which IIRC was itself a reaction to the critique that TV was shallow and insubstantial and only interested in creating consumers for the sponsors.
True that. It also occurs to me that the family ones, by definition, had kids who (a) usually aren’t great actors and (b) have kid-oriented plots about breaking vases or skipping a test or not getting on the basketball team. Not that it’s impossible to make those funny – see The Simpsons – by the constraints of the Very Important Lesson and offense-free nature of prime time television, they were hobbled from the start.
Cheers, MASH, WKRP in Cincinnati, The Bob Newhart Show, and Taxi all rank among the best sitcoms in history.
A lot of the 1950~1970s sitcoms benifit from nostalgia, initial competition with only two other shows at a time, and endless after school reruns. Cable TV blew all that up in the 1980s. The real question is why the sitcoms from the 1990s hold up better than those from the 1980s. The simple answer is that they are ten years fresher.
Reading this thread, I was wondering why I don’t have fond memories of 80s sitcoms. I watched tons of them in the 60s and 70s, and remember a lot. Good and bad, popular and obscure.
And I realized it wasn’t that they were bad, but it was that for half of the 80s I was in college and didn’t have a TV. I missed a lot! What I did watch was actioners and detective shows: Magnum, Simon & Simon, Miami Vice (oh lordy we could have a thread about how THAT aged badly!) and the like. I never watched Cosby or Family Ties or Cheers at all. (When I lived in LA, I went to a Preview House screening of a new sitcom, The Tortellis. I had no idea it was a spin off.)
The only comedy I watched was Police Squad! All six episodes.
Nobody likes Are You Being Served?
Designing Women, Golden Girls, Murphy Brown,Roseann, The Facts Of Life, Gimme A Break, Kate and Allie - just off the top of my head are ones that were female-led, not counting ensemble pieces with female co-leads like Three’s Company, Who’s the Boss, etc…
Both of these involve men who were rather controlling of their more capable female counterparts. The stories were about how a normal, mortal man would deal with a supernatural woman who loved him.
I definitely can think of many times that the second Darren came off like an asshole to Sam.