TV S GREATEST SIITCOMS Copyright 2004 by Stephen
Winzenburg/Greatest TV Sitcoms (If you're impatient, jump to the boldface)
What is the greatest TV
sitcom of all time? Seinfeld? I Love Lucy? The Simpsons? All in the
Family? Everyone seems to
have his or her own opinion as to what were the great sitcoms, often
associating a particular
show with a specific time of life that emotionally meant something to them. We
hum the theme songs, repeat
the funny phrases, and even copy of the behavior of the characters that have
become our living room
friends. Sitcoms are the most popular type of programming on the most
influential
medium in history and have
had a major impact on how we think and what we think about.
Television is a cultural
reference point for most of us, a type of shorthand that makes it easy to
carry on a conversation.
Columnist Ellen Goodman wrote that to those born since the baby boom of the
late
‘40s, “All history begins
with television.” We compare ourselves to those on TV, we change how we dress
and cut our hair and talk
based on the latest television trend. Viewers pick up catch phrases and turn
them
into sidesplitting party
parodies that in turn become part of our culture. “Not,” as Jerry Seinfeld
would say,
“that there’s anything
wrong with that!”
Over time sitcoms acquire a
kind of second life, where people who don’t even watch a show
perceive the program as
being extremely influential. “Everyone watched Seinfeld” is a common
misconception when in
reality only around 20 percent of the population was tuned in on any given
week.
“Malcolm in the Middle is
the hot new show,” people shouted in 2000, yet it finished its first season in
19th
place with less than 15 percent
of America watching and soon lost almost half of those viewers. The media
reported that Sex and the
City was “a huge hit,” but the ratings showed that only seven million people
watched out of a population
of over 280 million people—that’s less than three percent!
The truth is few of the
situation comedies in the history of television have had much long-term
cultural impact. While
Frasier was a darling of the critics, was almost always near the top of the
Nielsen
ratings in the mid-‘90s,
and holds the record for winning the most Emmy Awards, only about 18 percent of
the people in America
regularly watched the show at its peak and 25 years from now viewers may wonder
why it’s being rerun in the
middle of the night on TV Land.
How can a critically
acclaimed series like Frasier end up having less cultural impact than a show
like TGIF teen show Boy
Meets World? The difference can be seen in examples from 1957: the highest rated
sitcom on TV at that time was the #2-ranked Danny Thomas Show (also known at
Make Room for Daddy) while the Emmy winner that year for Best Comedy was Phil
Silvers’ You’ll Never Get Rich (which it would win three years in a row).
Neither of these shows are familiar to viewers below the age of 50 today and on
the rare occasions when the reruns air, modern audiences wonder why people
watched in the first place—Danny Thomas comes across as a harsh caricature and
Phil Silvers’ scheming Sgt. Bilko is based on a one-joke premise.
However, there is one series from 1957 that was
cancelled by CBS in its first season, never
appeared in the top 25 of the ratings, was
ridiculed by critics, and didn’t win any major awards—yet it continues to air
successfully in reruns today. Leave it to Beaver was a flop when it first went
on the air, though ABC picked up the cancelled show after its first season and
ran it for another five years without any ratings success. Though it didn’t win
an Emmy and didn’t make the top 30 of the ratings, Beaver is the only TV series
from the late ‘50s that people still watch and even remember today. It was one
of TV Land’s five highest rated shows in 2002 and modern pop culture writers
make hundreds of references a year to the Cleavers as the quintessential ‘50s
family.
Though some older critics
may place You’ll Never Get Rich on their “best sitcom” lists, the series
had no serious long-term
impact. Make Room for Daddy, the highest-rated comedy of the late ‘50s, is so
forgotten today that one
web site devoted to television history failed to even list it among 2000 shows
because the site creator/TV
expert had never heard of the show! Instead it’s the under-appreciated Beaver
that deserves a place on
the list of sitcoms with the greatest impact due to the amount of cultural
influence
it has acquired over the
years.
There are similar examples
from other years: Get Smart was highly rated in the mid-‘60s, won the
Best Comedy Emmy twice, and
appears on many critics’ lists of greatest TV shows of all time. Yet few
under the age of 50 can
recall anything from the series. Instead, a low-rated show from the same time
period has had long-term
impact: Gilligan’s Island. Even CBS executives that aired the series about
seven
stranded castaways hated
the show and were embarrassed that it was on the top-ranked network. But today
most Americans can sing the
theme song, name the characters, and theorize why it took them so long to get
off the island. The sitcom
even spawned a new generation of island-themed shows, like the TV series
Survivor and the Tom Hanks
movie Cast Away, 35 years after the original series was on the air.
It happened again in the
early ‘70s. There is no doubt that All in the Family changed the course of
television, but similar
groundbreaking, highly-rated, award-winning series such as Sanford & Son,
Maude,
Chico & the Man and One
Day at a Time have failed to be successful in reruns. Instead it is a corny
little
series about a blended
family that we still talk about it today. The Brady Bunch never won an Emmy,
never
made a list of the greatest
TV shows of all time, never even ranked in the top 30 of the ratings, and yet
almost every person in
America can recall the personalities and plots of this family series that has
continued to influence
generations.
Influential sitcoms are
those that either made a major contribution to the genre when they initially
aired, such as when All in
the Family contemporized the format, or shows that years later hold long-term
appeal generation after
generation, such as The Brady Bunch gaining new viewers on Nick at Nite’s TV
Land.
Do not mistake innovation
for influence. Many innovative sitcoms have had little or no long-term
impact on the situation
comedy genre. The groundbreaking, highly-rated Maude was critically praised but
has had little long-term
impact. Shows such as Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, Ellen, and Ally McBeal
were innovative but not
influential. The most recent examples are Sex and the City and Will and Grace,
which critics point to as
introducing previously taboo subject matter. But the cultural influence of such
shows has so far been
limited to a small number of faithful viewers. The real test of time will be
whether
these programs attract a
large audience in syndication, if they inspire copycat series, and if their
characters
or phrases hold a place in
American culture decades from now.
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