100 Best Sitcoms of All Time

Having lost his fortune after being bled dry by a business manager, video-store mogul John Rose and his family find themselves relocating to Schitt’s Creek — a small backwoods town that John once bought for his son David as a joke. What starts out as a fish-out-of-water comedy turns into an ode to community and kindness, and it’s to the credit of co-creators and co-stars Eugene and Dan Levy that the series finds the perfect balance between genuine sweetness and side-splitting snark. Catherine O’Hara’s Moira Rose is the diva to end all divas; Annie Murphy’s Alexis completely updates the ditzy-socialite type for the 21st century (her theme song is priceless); and if eye-rolling were an Olympic sport, both the older and younger Levys would be gold medalists. By the time Dan pulled the plug after six seasons, he’d already given the world a modern TV classic — one that swept the comedy categories at last year’s Emmys. D.F.

Watch Schitt’s Creek online on Netflix

The most hard-to-find show on this list (muddy VHS transfers of a couple of episodes are on YouTube, but otherwise you’d have to visit the Paley Center to see it), this warm-hearted gem reunited WKRP in Cincinnati creator Hugh Wilson with one of that show’s stars, Tim Reid, for a serio-comic trip to New Orleans. Reid played Ivy League professor Frank Parrish, who inherits the family restaurant and travels home with the goal of selling it and leaving quickly, only to fall victim to a voodoo curse that forces him to stick around and run the place. Usually more wistful and sweet than laugh-out-loud funny, Frank’s Place explored class and race — like an episode where Frank learns about the “paper bag test” a local black social club uses to keep out darker-skinned men like him — in ways that felt years, even decades, ahead of its time. A.S.

Watch Frank’s Place on Amazon Prime here

Against the backdrop of the Troubles in 1990s Northern Ireland, headstrong Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), her kooky cousin Orla (Louisa Harland), uptight Clare (Nicola Coughlan), and party girl Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell) — plus her cousin, “wee English fella” James (Dylan Llewellyn) — stumble through teenage antics from burning down the local chip-shop owner’s flat to clogging the toilet at a funeral repast with weed-infused scones. Creator Lisa McGee wrote the show based on her own experiences growing up in Derry, which explains its earthy charm and gimlet-eyed nostalgia. These are characters full of heart but devoid of sentimentality, as only people who’ve been getting on with their lives amid generations of conflict can be. Bonus points to Siobhan Sweeney as the deadly-dry Sister Michael, beleaguered headmistress of the girls’ school, and Game of Thrones’ Ian McElhinney as curmudgeonly Granda Joe. M.F.

Watch Derry Girls online on Netflix

Comedian/magician Harry Anderson made such an impression in a handful of Cheers episodes as con man Harry the Hat that he was rewarded with his own show. Night Court was the silly tale of a genial young judge, Harry Stone (Anderson), presiding over nightly hijinx involving ridiculous low-stakes crimes, the lechery of prosecutor Dan Fielding (John Larroquette, who won four straight Emmys for the role), and the eccentricities of public defender Christine (Markie Post), court clerk Mac (Charles Robinson), and bailiffs Bull (Richard Moll) and Roz (Marsha Warfield). The underrated utility player of NBC’s Eighties comedy empire. A.S.

Watch Night Court on Amazon Prime here

An Australian animated series targeted at preschoolers, Bluey is primarily a sweet, heartwarming show with a lot of lessons about the power of imaginary play and the challenges of growing up. It is also a screamingly funny depiction of the indignities of parenthood, as dad Bandit (voiced by Aussie indie rocker David McCormack) routinely suffers public humiliation and physical pain from his willingness to go along with whatever role-playing game his little girls have chosen for the day. A.S.

Watch Bluey online on Disney+ or Disney Now

“Don’t be sad; you’re not that kind of clown,” Chip Baskets’ estranged wife once told him. Baskets, though, tended to be a sad kind of show. Or at least a bone-dry comedy that took various broad, familiar comedy devices — Zach Galifianakis played both failed clown Chip and his petty twin brother Dale, while Louie Anderson got in drag to play their mother Christine — utterly seriously. There was still plenty of room for laughter, particularly via Martha Kelly’s deadpan delivery as Chip’s only friend. But Baskets was ultimately great for embracing the sad-clownhood that Chip was told to avoid. A.S.

Watch Baskets online on Hulu

Over four seasons (the fifth and final arrives later this year), the trials and tribulations of Issa Rae’s neurotic alter ego Issa Dee have been a study in the messy realities of being young, single, and perpetually lost. Through Issa, her friends Molly (Yvonne Orji), Kelli (Natasha Rothwell), and Tiffany (Amanda Seales), her exes Lawrence (Jay Ellis) and Daniel (Y’lan Noel), and more, Rae presents black lives in full, hilarious imperfection, delivering a classic hangout show firmly rooted in her native Los Angeles (not to mention one that features a lot more sex than Sex and the City). TV Issa hypes herself up by freestyle rapping in the mirror. Real Issa doesn’t need the hype — the woman looking back at her is a comedy legend in the making. M.F.

Watch Insecure online on HBO Max

This unabashedly prurient animated comedy has middle schoolers battling real hormones and their randy avatars, Hormone Monsters (voiced by Maya Rudolph and co-creator Nick Kroll), as they enter puberty. In one recent meta exchange, best friends Andrew (John Mulaney) and Nick (Kroll) ponder a show-within-the-show inspired by Hulu’s Pen15, which, like Big Mouth, features adults playing horny adolescents. “I mean, the main characters are kids,” Nick says, “but the show is so filthy.” Andrew replies, “It’s too much! And I like dirty stuff.” Big Mouth may be filthy enough to scare off these kids, but it’s also thoughtful, imaginative, and kind in a way that makes it a welcoming look back (or, depending on who’s watching, look ahead) at a physically and emotionally tumultuous time of life. A.S.

Watch Big Mouth online on Netflix

For every teenage girl who quietly balked at being sugar and spice and everything nice, Daria Morgendorffer was an icon in combat boots and glasses. The titular hero of this animated Beavis and Butt-Head spinoff took sardonic to new heights, deadpanning her way through interactions with her dopey high-school classmates, her oblivious white-collar parents, Jake and Helen, and her pretty, popular, and ditzy younger sister Quinn. Daria’s wry observations, delivered in a jaded monotone (often to her equally dry-witted, artsy friend Jane), were a clarion call to budding slacker-feminists everywhere. M.F.

Watch Daria online on Paramount+

Nobody played irascible, chauvinistic sons of bitches in the early 1980s better than Dabney Coleman — and instead of trying to soft-pedal the Texas character actor’s toxic-caveman persona for primetime audiences, this NBC sitcom doubled down on it. Coleman’s Bill Bittinger is the Number One-rated daytime talk-show host in Buffalo, New York, railing against the smut peddlers and immoral businessmen tainting our great nation. He’s also a quick-tempered hypocrite, a nightmare of a boss, a selfish bastard, and a womanizing, sexist pig. A critical hit from the get-go, this was one of the rare sitcoms of the time to truly revel in its lead character’s bad behavior; the pilot concerns Bill finding out that his best friend has just died… and then desperately trying to get the guy’s job at 60 Minutes. The fact that it only lasted two seasons is an injustice that still inspires Bettinger-level tantrums in fans. D.F.

Watch Buffalo Bill on Amazon Prime here

Many shows on this list needed time to find themselves, but none required quite as much time as The Big Bang Theory, which took the better part of three seasons to solve two crucial problems. The first was deciding that viewers should be laughing with, not at, its nerdy heroes, particularly Jim Parsons (giving a remarkably specific performance) as the fussy, almost-certainly-on-the-autism-spectrum theoretical physicist Sheldon. The second was recognizing that Sheldon’s neighbor Penny (Kaley Cuoco) needed friends of her own, rather than just being Sheldon’s straight woman and the object of lust for his roommate Leonard (Johnny Galecki). Adding Melissa Rauch and Mayim Bialik to the existing ensemble (which already featured Simon Helberg and Kunal Nayyar) better balanced the tone, as well as the gender composition, and unlocked the best in everyone. A.S.

Watch The Big Bang Theory online on HBO Max

Originally a Cosby Show spinoff about Denise Huxtable’s life at the fictional all-black Hillman College, the series quickly settled around Jasmine Guy’s pampered Southern belle Whitley and Kadeem Hardison’s ambitious Dwayne Wayne, sporter of TV’s most famous flip-up sunglasses. (Cosby banished a pregnant Lisa Bonet from the cast after the first season.) Starting with Season Two, showrunner Debbie Allen brought her real-life experiences at Howard University to the show’s stories, presenting a diverse roster of African American students from all different backgrounds who faced all kinds of challenges. The result was a topical sitcom that was anything but corny. These were young adults wading through the issues of the day — date rape, the AIDS crisis, race relations, sexism — without any speechifying from parents. One more sign of the show’s cultural footprint: For four of its six seasons, Aretha Franklin herself sang the theme song. M.F.

Watch A Different World online on Amazon

Are we having fun yet? This series about a dysfunctional team of cater-waiters leaned into the “situation” part of situation comedy, while simultaneously playing with the genre’s traditionally static nature. Every episode involved failed actor Henry (Adam Scott) and friends working a party and pondering their thwarted ambitions. But the nature and location of the event varied wildly from week to week, from a debauched adult-film awards afterparty to a guest-free birthday celebration at the home of actor Steve Guttenberg. The crackling ensemble — including Lizzie Caplan, Ken Marino, Martin Starr, Ryan Hansen, Jane Lynch, and Megan Mullally (who replaced Lynch in Season Two) — worked well in any setting, in any smaller combination. A little-watched failure at the time, it’s become the rare potential revival that everyone’s rooting for. A.S.

Watch Party Down online on Hulu

Designed as a parody of soap operas, writer-producer Susan Harris’ cult sitcom replicated the target of its mockery to a stunning degree. The Tate and Campbell families at its center seemed to suffer through new melodramatic plot twists every five minutes — not just murder and adultery (of course), but alien abductions, courtroom accusations, Satanic possession, and more. Mob bosses, Latin American revolutionaries, and a ventriloquist stepson also show up just for good measure. It’s best remembered today for introducing Robert Guillaume’s wisecracking butler Benson, who’d go on to star in a much more accessible spinoff, and for giving the world the first openly gay primetime character, courtesy of Billy Crystal’s Jodie Dallas. D.F.

Watch Soap on Crackle here

The first four decades of television’s existence were dominated by the Big Three networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC. As Fox, UPN, and the WB came onto the scene, they attempted to build ratings by going after underserved audiences, with comedies aimed at nonwhite viewers a priority. There was a stretch in the Nineties where those networks featured sitcoms fronted by, among others, Martin Lawrence, Jamie Foxx, Steve Harvey, Eddie Griffin, and Robert Townsend. Not all of the shows were great, but Living Single — with overflowing chemistry among Queen Latifah, Kim Fields, Kim Coles, and Erika Alexander as a quartet of friends navigating life in the big city — definitely was. In time, all three upstart networks whitewashed their lineups, and similar shows with all-white casts like Friends and Sex and the City got more mainstream hype. But Living Single got there first, and was terrific. A.S.

Watch Living Single online on Hulu

“Say goodnight, Gracie.” “Goodnight, Gracie!” Real-life married couple George Burns and Gracie Allen brought their radio-show double act to television, and turned the whole thing into an early example of the meta-sitcom: The first episode kicks off with Burns breaking the fourth wall and explaining the concept of the comic “straight man.” The idea was that audiences were watching a “typical day” in their lives (that’s the couple’s actual Beverly Hills house in those exterior shots), with Allen’s daffy version of herself baffling their neighbors, traveling salesmen, doctors, dinner party guests, and — in between his constant stream of peanut-gallery commentary — her loving husband. D.F.

Watch The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show on Amazon Prime

Pilot episodes are hard. Comedy pilots are almost impossible. The vast majority of shows on this list started with half-hours that didn’t come close to suggesting their eventual greatness. With Modern Family, though, comedy vets Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd knew exactly what they wanted to do from the start. The premiere even plays great on later viewings, after you already know the twist: the three seemingly separate families you’ve been watching — aging Jay (Ed O’Neill) and trophy wife Gloria (Sofia Vergara), bickering suburbanites Phil (Ty Burrell) and Claire (Julie Bowen), and new parents Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cam (Eric Stonestreet) — are all part of the same extended clan. The downside of arriving so fully formed is that the show’s adult characters didn’t have as much room to grow, and later seasons so curdled the relationships that it was a wonder none of the couples divorced. But that start gave Modern Family enough early momentum to carry it to a record five consecutive Outstanding Comedy Series wins at the Emmys. A.S.

Watch Modern Family online on Hulu

“Pitter patter, let’s get at ’er” is one of this Canadian comedy’s many catchphrases, and patter is its specialty. Set in a rural Ontario town populated by “hicks, skids, hockey players, and Christians,” the series is mostly talk — each conversation turns into competitive wordplay among the show’s weird character combinations  — punctuated by periodic action where alpha male Wayne (Jared Keeso, who developed Letterkenny with co-star Jacob Tierney) and friends brawl with a rival crew. Though Wayne never loses a scrap, Letterkenny clearly values his brains — or, at least, his wit — over his brawn. A.S.

Watch Letterkenny online on Hulu

Live by cleverness, die by cleverness. In its best moments, the story of lonely architect Ted Mosby’s (Josh Radnor) quest for true love creatively bent the laws of time, space, and reality. And, through Ted’s friends Barney (Neil Patrick Harris), Robin (Cobie Smulders), Lily (Alyson Hannigan), and Marshall (Jason Segel), HIMYM introduced more new conceits for urban single life (like Barney’s attempt to institute a lemon law for dating) than any comedy this side of Seinfeld. But when the final season introduced the Mother, a.k.a. Tracy (Cristin Milioti), who was everything viewers could have hoped for, then killed her off so that Ted and Robin could get together in the future, it ended things on the sourest of notes. Still, for those first few seasons, few comedies of its era were smarter or more endearing. A.S.

Watch How I Met Your Mother online on Amazon or Hulu

He’s a lawyer and she’s an interior decorator. He’s gay and she’s straight. They’re longtime BFFs Will and Grace (Eric McCormack and Debra Messing), and along with their two closest friends — the boozy, bawdy Karen (Megan Mullaly) and the Cher-idolizing Jack (Sean Hayes) — they manage to get out of social scrapes, sling scathing insults and help each other through numerous romantic ups and downs. This immensely popular Must-See TV staple featured a quartet with off-the-charts chemistry and attracted a who’s who of guest stars; it’s easier to list who didn’t drop by for a cameo or two-episode arc. When then-V.P. Joe Biden admitted that Will and Grace was instrumental in changing his opinion about gay marriage, it was evident that the show had transformed the public conversation around queer culture. It was so beloved that, 11 years after its series finale, NBC brought everyone back for three extra seasons. D.F.

Watch Will & Grace online on Hulu

Redd Foxx could read the phone book and it’d still make for one of the best sitcoms of all time. Here, he plays the titular Fred Sanford, a widowed junk dealer who lives with his “big dummy” son Lamont (Desmond Wilson) in a rundown apartment in L.A. With its mostly black cast and Norman Lear at the helm (adapting the show from a British comedy), the series sliced and diced the racial politics of the day. But it was Foxx who sold it all, with a gift for physical comedy that had viewers at home howling right along with the studio audience. In one scene where Fred is reporting a robbery, the cop asks if the perps were colored. Foxx rears his head back and cocks an eyebrow. “Yeah,” he says after a beat. “They were white!” M.F.

Watch Sanford and Son on Amazon Prime or Starz

When you’re responsible for one of the single funniest half-hours in the history of American television — “Turkeys Away,” where the titular radio station’s program director foolishly attempts to drop live poultry from a helicopter because “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!” — then you’re already a contender for a list like this. Add indelible characters like cynical morning-show DJ Dr. Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) and soulful overnight DJ Venus Flytrap (Tim Reid), plus a smart culture-clash premise about the stuffy old station introducing rock & roll to its playlist, and you’ve got an all-time winner. A.S.

Watch WKRP in Cincinnati on Amazon Prime

This Britcom (co-created by Succession showrunner Jesse Armstrong) became a word-of-mouth cult favorite even in the U.S. Stars David Mitchell and Robert Webb — who did their own brilliant sketch series, That Mitchell and Webb Look, a huge influence on Key and Peele — played a couple of socially inept London mates, bumbling and slacking through life; the actors wore head-mounted cameras for a point-of-view feel. Peep Show was also where future Oscar winner Olivia Colman first turned heads. Most classic scene: Webb gets up at his uncle’s funeral to give a bizarrely poignant rant comparing Jesus to Enya. R.S.

Watch Peep Show online on Amazon or Hulu

Most reboots have little reason to exist beyond the availability of a familiar brand name. The smart ones find a purpose of their own. So Gloria Calderon Kellet and Mike Royce’s remake of Norman Lear’s Seventies sitcom about a single mom raising teenage daughters makes its heroine, Justina Machado’s Penelope, into an Army veteran dealing with PTSD. She’s also a Cuban-American raising a queer daughter (Isabella Gomez’s Elena) and slick son (Marcel Ruiz’s Alex) in a world increasingly fraught for their areas of intersectionality. Even goofy building superintendent Schneider (Todd Grinnell) was reimagined as a recovering addict, and, along with Elena, a woke comedic counterpoint to Penelope’s conservative Cuban mother Lydia (the great Rita Moreno, chewing scenery like her life depended on it). Like the best of Lear’s original sitcom empire, this One Day deftly juggled broad family comedy and serious discussion of the problems of modern life. A.S.

Watch One Day at a Time online on Netflix and Paramount+

Early New Girl episodes were almost entirely about Zooey Deschanel as Jess, a quirky young woman who moves into an L.A. loft with three guys to get over a bad breakup. The series put all of Deschanel’s off-kilter charm to great use, including her singing voice. But its magic came from gradually revealing that the three roommates — Max Greenfield’s repentant douchebag Schmidt, Jake Johnson’s eccentric bartender-novelist Nick, and Lamorne Morris’ prank-loving Winston — were each somehow weirder than Jess. The premier hangout comedy of the last decade. A.S.

Watch New Girl online on Netflix

A dream team of U.K. comedy in the Eighties: Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Miranda Richardson, Rik Mayall. Blackadder was a time-travel fantasy — each season took place in a different era of British history, with Atkinson as the wily wit Edmund Blackadder. The first season didn’t really count — a dull medieval Richard III parody. But after that, it was all gold, moving through the Elizabethan era, the Jane Austen era, World War One. In one of the most beloved moments, Blackadder warns a fellow soldier about German brutality: “Their operas last for three or four days, and they have no word for ‘fluffy.’” R.S.

Watch Blackadder online on Hulu or Amazon

The Simpsons is an impossible act to follow in the present, so Matt Groening decided to leap forward a thousand years for this sci-fi comedy about a guileless pizza boy named Fry (Billy West), accidentally frozen for a millennia, who joins an interstellar delivery service alongside alcoholic robot Bender (John DiMaggio) and one-eyed alien warrior Leela (Katey Sagal). Futurama mostly lacked the human element that made its predecessor so special, but it was able to compensate with a satiric scope in which alien civilizations could be modeled on anything from Willy Wonka to Ally McBeal. A.S.

Watch Futurama online on Hulu

The British comedy team of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders created a friendship for the ages in Absolutely Fabulous. Saunders starred as Edina, a debauched fortysomething fashion scenester; former Bond girl Joanne Lumley was Patsy, a glam magazine doyenne. Together, these two raised hell in Swinging London. They drank. They smoked. They terrorized Edina’s studious daughter. Ab Fab was a Nineties sensation — at the height of the Britpop boom, it was a shock to see these women behaving badly, like a pair of Gallagher brothers, with no comeuppance or consequences. Years after the show ended, Edina and Patsy live on. R.S.

Watch Absolutely Fabulous online on Amazon or Hulu

As a star of Friends, Lisa Kudrow is rich and famous enough to do whatever she wants for the rest of her life. But what if she had the bad luck to instead wind up on one of those mediocre shows that always wound up airing right after Friends? That’s the premise of this acidic tragicomedy Kudrow created with Sex and the City producer Michael Patrick King. She plays largely forgotten sitcom actress Valerie Cherish, whose desperation to keep working forces her to debase herself time and again. Kudrow and King were unflinching in depicting the indignities of a business that is indifferent at best to women above a certain age, to the point that viewers may have felt the need to recite Valerie’s “I don’t want to see that!” catchphrase as her latest humiliation approached. A.S.

Watch The Comeback online on HBO Max

Rick and Morty began life as a pornographic spoof of the Back to the Future films called The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti, created by Justin Roiland. When he teamed up with Community creator Dan Harmon, the idea evolved into one of the most imaginative — and darkest — comedies ever put on television. As mad scientist Rick and his victimized grandson Morty (both voiced by Roiland) travel to strange alien worlds and parallel realities, there seems to be no limit on what they can do or what the series can be. In perhaps the defining episode, Rick transforms himself into a pickle to avoid family therapy with Morty, daughter Beth (Sarah Chalke), and granddaughter Summer (Spencer Grammer), then battles rats and a drug cartel, and eventually has to go to the therapy session anyway to confront his inner demons. There’s nothing else quite like it. A.S.

Watch Rick and Morty online on HBO Max

or Hulu

Meet Master Sgt. Ernest G. Bilko, commander of the Fort Baxter motor pool and the craftiest scam artist in the U.S. Army. Former vaudeville comedian Phil Silvers’ creation was so popular that most folks simply refer to the series as “Sgt. Bilko.” Every week, his officer would bilk the men in his barracks out of their earnings via con games, get-rich schemes, and any number of complicated swindles. If Bilko could convince an underling to do his job while he dreamed up ways to make a quick buck off the base’s blowhard boss Colonel Hall, all the better. Silvers almost single-handedly set up the template of the lovable-stinker sitcom archetype — it’s no surprise that both Larry David and Ricky Gervais are huge fans of the show. D.F.

Watch The Phil Silvers Show on Amazon Prime

Comedians Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie had billed themselves for years as “the almost-award-winning, fourth-most-popular folk duo in New Zealand.” In their HBO series, they played fictionalized versions of themselves, struggling to break through in America with the help of unqualified manager/consulate employee Murray (Rhys Darby), and fending off the advances of stalker/fan Mel (Kristen Schaal). The guys tended to be polite and reserved to a fault, only to cut loose a few times per episode with inventive, catchy musical numbers. A whimsical treat that ended only because Clement and McKenzie had exhausted their entire back catalog of songs after just two seasons. A.S.

Watch Flight of the Conchords online on HBO Max

On Seinfeld, when Elaine appears in the Hamptons wearing an old-fashioned sun hat, Jerry cracks, “And then there’s Maude!” That sums up the Maude legacy. It was a revolutionary hit from Norman Lear, starring Bea Arthur as TV’s fiercest, funniest, most sarcastic feminist yenta. And while the show began as an All in the Family spinoff — she was Edith Bunker’s cousin, always battling Archie — it eventually broke new ground, with a famous abortion episode (two months before Roe vs. Wade) and another where Maude became the first pot-smoking grandma on TV. In every way, Maude was ahead of her time. R.S.

Watch Maude on Apple TV here

One of the grandfathers of the modern sitcom, this series sprang from entertainer Jack Benny’s popular radio show of the Thirties and Forties. Based on a fictionalized Benny’s life in Hollywood (possibly the original “show about nothing,” its plots followed Benny traveling to gigs or hosting a dinner party), its show-within-the-show format and self-deprecating skewering of the entertainment world would reverberate decades later in The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Beloved regulars from the announcer Don Wilson to the singer Dennis Day and Eddie Anderson as Benny’s African American valet, Rochester, kept audiences coming back, while tons of high-wattage “special guest stars” (Sinatra! Liberace!) hooked new viewers. Through it all, though, the biggest delight was in Benny’s masterful comic delivery — full of pregnant pauses, deadpan stares, and fourth-wall-breaking asides that influenced everyone from Bob Newhart to Stephen Colbert. M.F.

Watch The Jack Benny Program online on Tubi

Among the catchphrases of James Bond wannabe Maxwell Smart (Don Adams) was a claim that a bullet “missed me by that much.” When master of satire Mel Brooks teamed up with future Graduate co-writer Buck Henry to lampoon the Sixties spy craze that gave us Bond and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., they didn’t miss at all. Brooks, Henry, and Adams made Max into a parody not just of secret agents, but of a certain breed of arrogant American man oblivious to his limitations. (More often than not, Max had to be saved by his more capable partner 99, played by Barbara Feldon.) And some of Max’s iffy gadgets — a shoe phone, a Cone of Silence that always did the opposite of its intended purpose — have outlived 007’s comparable devices in the public imagination. A.S.

Watch Get Smart on Amazon Prime

Despite having title characters who are among the most literally inventive in television history, this animated series sure liked doing the exact same thing every week, making the repetition a crucial part of the joke. In each episode, brothers Phineas (Vincent Martella) and Ferb (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) spend a day of summer vacation on an impossible quest — say, building the world’s biggest roller coaster — while older sister Candace (Ashley Tisdale) tries to bust them in front of their mother. In parallel subplots, the boys’ pet platypus, Perry, is a secret agent foiling the schemes of not-so-evil genius Dr. Doofenschmirtz (voiced by Dan Povenmire, who created the show with Jeff “Swampy” Marsh). The characters’ increasing awareness of how each day is exactly the same elevates a kids’ cartoon into something smarter than most comedy geared towards adults. A.S.

Watch Phineas and Ferb online on Disney+

This ranking will probably feel absurdly low within a few years, since Jemaine Clement’s TV spinoff of the 2014 vampire mockumentary film he made with Taika Waititi is already a monstrous generator of laughs, and could grow even more powerful in seasons to come. For now, take pleasure in the abject, centuries-old stupidity of this crew of undead living in Staten Island — libidinous Laszlo (Matt Berry), arrogant Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), fussy Nandor (Kayvan Novak), terminally boring “energy vampire” Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), and their hapless familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillen) — and dream of what foolish heights they can scale together. A.S.

Watch What We Do in the Shadows online on Hulu

At first blush, this series about a quartet of Georgia women working at an interior design firm would seem to be a classic example of clapter — where a punchline is designed less to elicit laughter than to generate applause from audience members who approve of its message — in action. After all, at least once per episode, the show’s sharp-tongued heroine Julia Sugarbaker (Dixie Carter) would unleash verbal fire-and-brimstone upon someone foolish enough to disagree with her, to the thunderous response of the studio audience. But that would ignore not only how funny those rants (many written by creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who clearly put a lot of herself into Julia) tended to be, but how well each member of the ensemble — including Delta Burke, Annie Potts, Jean Smart, and Meshach Taylor — got under one another’s comic skin. In the right hands, laughter and applause don’t have to be mutually exclusive. A.S.

Watch Designing Women online on Hulu

Armando Iannucci’s scathing satire of backstabbing among the Prime Minister’s toadies introduced viewers to Malcolm Tucker, a spin doctor for Number 10 Downing St. and one of the most profane comic antiheroes to ever grace the small screen. Thanks to actor Peter Capaldi’s ability to turn the most baroque, obscene insults into something close to poetry (“I will tear your fucking skin off, wear it to your mother’s birthday party, and will rub your nuts up and down her leg whilst whistling Bohemian Fucking Rhapsody!”), Tucker became the raging id of England’s political class. Iannucci would export his take-no-prisoners attack on power brokers to the U.S. with Veep, but he’d already perfected the format back home. D.F.

Watch The Thick of it online on Amazon or HBO Max

A romance that plays out in the wrong order: American businessman Rob (Rob Delaney) and Irish-born teacher Sharon (Sharon Horgan) have a one-night stand while he’s in London on a business trip, find out that Sharon is pregnant, reluctantly move in together, have the baby, get married, and only then really fall in love. Created by Delaney and Horgan, Catastrophe was equal parts juvenile and profound. Rarely has a show been so creatively vulgar in discussing sex and other bodily functions. (Rob’s friend Chris, played by Mark Bonnar, describes childbirth as “a little troll tobogganing out of your wife’s snatch on a wave of turds.”) And rarely has a show been as emotionally blunt in depicting the hard work that goes into maintaining an adult relationship, even between two people who are clearly better suited for each other than anyone else in the world. A.S.

Watch Catastrophe online on Amazon

There’s a long history of TV shows reorienting themselves around minor characters who unexpectedly explode in popularity, from Happy Days’ Fonzie to Family Matters’ Urkel. Perhaps the messiest example came in this spinoff of Norman Lear’s Maude. Good Times was intended to be an issues-oriented comedy centered on parents Florida (Esther Rolle) and James (John Amos) as they raised three children in a Chicago housing project. Then comedian Jimmie Walker became a sensation as lazy eldest son J.J., with his catchphrase “Dyn-o-mite!” As the producers gave audiences more and more J.J., the show’s original stars grew increasingly frustrated. Amos was fired after three seasons, and Rolle quit the following year. Despite that tension, the best parts of Good Times threaded the needle, thoughtfully exploring lower-class black life (like youngest son Mike, played by Ralph Carter, explaining why his school’s IQ test is racially biased) while making room for J.J. to crack wise. A.S.

Watch Good Times online on Peacock

Before they’d make a name for themselves with the zombiepocalypse comedy Shaun of the Dead, director Edgar Wright and star Simon Pegg — along with co-writer and co-star Jessica Stevenson — would give the world this Britcom about two twentysomethings who pretend to be a couple in order to secure a cheap two-bedroom apartment. A pop-culture-saturated take on life in a Gen X bubble circa the late Nineties, it was fueled with a buzzy mix of comic-book nerdom, Star Wars obsessiveness, London’s rave scene, and movies references ranging from The Shining to Pulp Fiction. At its heart, however, was the story of two friends trying to figure out how to slouch their way into maturity and adulthood. D.F.

Watch Spaced online on Tubi

Garry Shandling’s first sitcom found the stand-up playing “Garry Shandling,” amazed and bemused that he was starring in his very own TV show. Breaking the fourth wall, Shandling would conspiratorially turn the viewers into his co-stars, often at the expense of interacting with actual castmates. Occasionally, real-life friends and celebrities would make guest appearances; Gilda Radner dropped by to joke that she hadn’t been working lately because she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. (Which was true.) Shandling and former SNL writer Alan Zweibel had created the ultimate self-aware take on the comic-plays-version-of-himself sitcom — here, the series was his life. Even the opening song was in on the joke: “This is the theme to Garry’s show, the theme to Garry’s show/ Garry called me up and asked if I would write his theme song.” D.F.

Watch It’s Garry Shandling’s Show on Amazon Prime

A romantic comedy about two people who had no business being in one… until they did. Selfish author Jimmy (Chris Geere) and self-destructive publicist Gretchen (Aya Cash) hook up for what both assume will be meaningless sex, and each is horrified to discover they’re developing real feelings for the other. You’re the Worst generated tons of comic mileage out of their combustible pairing, while also finding real pathos in the damage that brought these two dysfunctional people together. Gretchen stands as one of the medium’s most nuanced depictions of someone battling clinical depression. A.S.

Watch You’re the Worst online on Hulu

Though she had successfully hosted SNL several times, Candice Bergen was generally viewed as a serious actor who seemed most at home in dramas like Gandhi. Then Diane English cast her as network newsmagazine anchor Murphy Brown, a recovering alcoholic grappling with sobriety, middle age, and the realization that liberal Boomers like herself didn’t change the world nearly as much as they’d wanted to. Bergen’s delivery was as sharp as the features that once made her a successful fashion model, and she had great chemistry with the stacked ensemble (particularly the late Robert Pastorelli as housepainter-turned-nanny Eldin). She also wasn’t afraid to make a fool of herself if, say, English wanted her to belt an off-key Motown classic. Bergen made the fictional Murphy seem so real that Vice President Dan Quayle once started a very public feud with her — and lost, of course. A.S.

Watch Murphy Brown on Paramount+

“Can two divorced men share an apartment without driving each other crazy?” asked the narrator in the opening credits of Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson’s adaptation of the famous Neil Simon play and movie. Clearly, the answer was no, and not just because sportswriter Oscar Madison (Jack Klugman) was a slob and photographer Felix Unger (Tony Randall) a neat freak. Despite a lifelong friendship, the two were temperamental opposites in every way, and Klugman and Randall made such weekly magic out of their arguments that their version of this familiar story stands tallest above every other. A.S.

Watch The Odd Couple online on Paramount+ or Hulu

Some stand-ups, like Eddie Murphy or Pete Davidson, are lucky enough to break out when they’re young. Bernard Jeffrey McCullough, a.k.a. Bernie Mac, toiled in the clubs for more than 20 years before his work in the Original Kings of Comedy Tour (and Spike Lee’s concert film of it) finally got him an eponymous network sitcom, where a fictionalized Bernie and wife Wanda (Kellita Smith) took in the three children of his drug-addicted sister. By then, Mac had honed his comic persona to the point where all it took was a subtle change in expression or a half-swallowed plea to the heavens during periodic addresses to the audience to create big laughs. His death in 2008 left a giant, exasperated hole in the comedy universe. A.S.

Watch The Bernie Mac Show online on Amazon or Hulu

Young doctors J.D. (Zach Braff), Turk (Donald Faison), and Elliot (Sarah Chalke) begin their hospital internships full of optimism, only to learn that medicine is a lot harder, and sadder, than they expected. This sounds like the premise for a drama, and Scrubs had no shortage of genuine heartbreak along the way, as patients died and lessons were learned. But the series managed to unleash those tears in the context of what was otherwise a bright, goofy comedy filled with dance numbers, J.D.’s Walter Mitty-ish fantasies, and the precision rants of his prickly mentor Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley). A.S.

Watch Scrubs online on Amazon or Hulu

Having been banished from his BBC talk show for killing a guest, TV broadcaster Alan Partridge finds himself living in a small-town hotel while salvaging his career. Over two seasons, Steve Coogan’s signature buffoon went from a parody of celebrity-presenter smarm to one of the greatest Britcom characters ever. His recreation of The Spy Who Loved Me credit sequence alone is a testament to how Coogan could turn one man’s idiocy into television-comedy bliss. He’d go on to resurrect the character a number of times (see also: the hilarious This Time) but this two-season series is peak Partridge. D.F.

Watch I’m Alan Partridge online on HBO Max

Only six episodes were made of this spoof comedy starring Leslie Nielsen as humorless cop Frank Drebin, from the minds behind Airplane!, and ABC essentially canceled it after only four had aired. But what Police Squad! lacked in duration, it more than made up for in apex value. No comedy before this one had nearly as high a ratio of jokes per scene, and only a few after, like Arrested Development, would even try. What failed on ABC turned into a trilogy of top-grossing Naked Gun films, making Drebin (or, at least, his alter ego Enrico Palazzo) an idol to millions. A.S.

Watch Police Squad! on Netflix or Disney+