A while back, I watched a few episodes from the first season of Mork and Mindy. Robin Williams was fun to watch, but any scenes that didn’t involve Mork were lame conventional sitcom dreck.
Zoomers and Gen Alpha are already starting to say that Simpsons is for old people. They’re going to keep finding new ways to make us feel older.
I only watched snippets. But the “humor” was typically “You’re such a bitch” “Well, at least I didn’t sleep with the mailman.” Ha Ha.
ETA: All at high volume. Lots of yelling.
I’m not saying that Married . . . With Children was high art or anything, but I really don’t think you can judge it based only on having watched snippets here and there.
Fair enough. But I watched as much as I could stand. I’ll grant you they might not have been representative samples.
It was genuinely funny, but if you don’t like the kind of show where the characters are all awful people who are mean to each other, it’s not for you.
We had grown up with the cliches of the family sitcom, from Father Knows Best to The Brady Bunch.
Married . . . With Children savagely parodied all of them. It was funny because the father did not know best.
When Married… with Children first premiered, I was in grad school, and had a graduate assistantship with a department of the university extension; one of my fellow graduate assistants was a guy from West Germany.
He would say that he didn’t like American television, but he loved MwC: “I’m not sure what it is, but it is not American television!”
I looked at some lists of popular sitcoms from the 80s. I intentionally excluded ones that sort of spanned across decades that felt more 70s or more 90s.
But looking at this list, a lot of sitcoms were of the “family” variety. And from what I recall, a lot of those shows sucked. I can’t even remember what the various episodes were about. I just recall them mostly being happy, idealized, middle class homes (even if they were sometimes atypical family structures) with inane problems to drive the plot (so and so likes this girl at school or the dog at my homework). Every so often there would be a “very special episode” where someone was offered drugs or a girl at school was raped or whatever. But they would resolve by the end of the show.
I feel like Cheers was sort of an exception as it felt like a precursor to the sort of “shows about nothing” and “group of oddball friends hanging out all day” that became a staple in the 90s and beyond (everything from Seinfeld, Friends, HIMYM, Big Bang Theory, etc).
“Subversive” family sitcoms like Married With Children, The Simpsons, and Rosanne also appeared at the end of the decade. Which leads me to believe that the sort of idealized generic family of the 80s sitcom no longer resonated with many American audiences. Instead you started to see a shift towards families dealing with real day to day struggles in humorous and absurd ways and young adults forming non-traditional family structures (i.e. Cheers, Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City, etc).
Family Comedies
The Cosby Show / A Different World
The Facts of Life
Silver Spoons
Family Ties
The Wonder Years
Family Matters
Charles in Charge
My Two Dads
Valerie / The Hogan Family
Doogie Howser
Alf
Workplace Comedies
Cheers
Murphy Brown
Night Court
Random Shit
Mork and Mindy
Busom Buddies
You say that as if most audiences and critics don’t consider those sitcoms some of the best shows of the 90s.
“Traditional” sitcoms depict the kind of family you aspire to become.
“Subversive” sitcoms depict the kind of family you fear you might actually be.
Laughing at them is gallows humor. Whistling past the graveyard.
hey i like all of all of those, actually I think they’ve missed out … you could make airwolf today and it would be relevant because didn’t airwolf use a sort of virtual reality to control the helicopter (hawks helmet was hooked up to something where he could see things in a 3d view or something like that)
And mcguyver was supposed to be scientifically checked out so yeah it could be done but well they cheated a bit on the details
One thing you should keep in mind when you’re watching sitcoms that are more than 20 years old for the first time is most weren’t that highly regarded when they were new. A show that’s lame now was likely lame in the '80s (or '70s or '60s, or '50s). You’ll find this fact out if you dig up some reviews from the era.
I don’t know anything about “Airwolf,” but the Boeing AH-64 got a helmet-mounted display in 1985.
The overwhelming majority of heterosexual men would say that there was at least one redeeming quality among the cast.
https://www.julienslive.com/images/lot/2124/212429_0.jpg?1634360576
actually, the only thing a lot of people seem to still like from the 80s is the music …and only certain types …
Seinfeld isnt funny anymore nor is Friends.
You forgot Barney Miller - the very best sitcom- 1975-1982.
WKRP-1978-1982
Night Court- 1984- 1992.
By this I conclude the early 1980s was the high point of broadcast sitcoms. I have recently binged watched them (I am only part of the way thru Night Court) and I find they hold up. Barney Miller especially.
Yes, and Friends was “a misclassified soap opera”, with a bad laugh track.
Yeah, Bob has always been great, but too many stupids on that show- five at least- Larry, his two brothers, Stephanie Vanderkellen & Michael Harris- all made me cringe to watch. The Bob Newhart Show was comedy genius.
Married with Children obviously owed its success to the broad humor. But they threw in a few delightfully out of place middle-brow lines.
In the episode Route 666, the Bundy’s are vacationing out west and their car breaks down in a nightmare of a desert dustbowl town. When Al asks the only people in sight (three drunks sitting by the road) where he could find a gas station, one of them points out that there’s one right across the street, adding, “You probably missed it because of all the hurly-burly of the traffic”. He may be a pathetic drunk, but he can still call Al an idiot, in Shakespearean English. Notably, the audience didn’t laugh.
Later, when Peggy notes, “The rubes think I’m sexy”, Al replies, “I would too if I had whiskey for breakfast”.
Married … With Children was genius, in my opinion. Low brow? Sure. But it took a piss on sitcom conventions, and it was, in my opinion, genuinely funny. When I lived abroad in Europe, I met so many people who knew of it and loved it. It crossed cultural borders and somehow struck at some experiential commonality. Hell, when I lived in Budapest there even was a shoe store called “Al Bándy Cipõk” (or something similar), and looking up on the internet, there’s an Al Bundy Shoe Store in Bucharest, Romania. A lot of folk identified with it. It’s a great series.
That’s how I feel about Family Matters a.k.a. “The Steve Urkel Show”
One quintessentially 80s sitcom was “Square Pegs,” which lasted 20 episodes in 1982-83. It was a teen comedy of the John Hughes variety and I recall it being pretty funny and rather subversive. The kids weren’t anything like those on wholesome family sitcoms. Most importantly, there were no parents ever seen, except for one during a Christmas episode.
Though pretty well regarded in its time, the show was cancelled because of a scandal involving a lot of sex, drugs and rock & roll going on behind the scenes. It’s rarely been televised since.
One of the leads actually earned a Master of Social Work degree from USC and ditched show biz entirely, so I guess she grew up OK.