Titus
What begins as the true story of a Missouri boy whose best friend Ken gets shot by the boy’s own father becomes, in one of the great cold opens in sitcom history, the story of a family that simply decides…
Genre Comedy
The Critic
Jay Sherman reviews movies on a local Boston television show watched by almost nobody, hates nearly everything, and does it brilliantly. Simpsons alumni Al Jean and Mike Reiss built the sharpest Hollywood satire of the decade around Jon Lovitz’s nasal…
Who’s the Boss?
The premise was the whole ad campaign: Tony Danza, a former ballplayer, moves into the Greenwich home of Judith Light’s advertising executive as the housekeeper, and America tuned in to watch the gender roles swap and then settle into a…
The Real Ghostbusters
After Gozer got tossed through the skyline, the franchise’s smarter move was to animate the property instead of chasing it. The Real Ghostbusters keeps the firehouse, keeps the containment units, and turns the team loose on a weekly parade of…
Johnny Bravo
A pompadoured gym rat with Elvis lips and zero self awareness flexes at women who recoil, and the joke holds for three seasons because Van Partible built the perfect machine: Johnny never learns, never lands, and never stops trying. The…
Married… with Children
Before Married… with Children, television families fixed each other over kitchen tables. Al Bundy (Ed O’Neill, selling every shoe counter monologue like a solo stage act) hated his wife, his kids, his couch, his job, and the audience was expected…
Friends
It starts with a bride in a wedding dress running into a coffee shop, and somehow that soft focus setup became the most watched comfort television in history. Six twentysomethings hang out between an apartment, a balcony across the hall,…
A Man on the Inside
Ted Danson plays a retired professor turned amateur undercover sleuth in Mike Schur's gentlest comedy yet: 93% on RT, IMDb 7.6, 16 episodes across two seasons on Netflix.
Blackadder
The granddaddy of British parody, and still the funniest thing Rowan Atkinson has ever done. Across four seasons, Blackadder reinvents itself each time: a snivelling medieval prince, a courtly dandy surrounded by gits, a butler in Georgian Bath, and finally…
Twenty Twelve
Before W1A, there was the Olympics. Twenty Twelve follows the fictional Olympic Deliverance Commission as it prepares London 2012, which mostly means finding a way to agree on the shape of a traffic cone, arguing about whether the clock should…