There have been a lot of truly funny situation comedies on television over the years: The sublime personal comedy of ‘Taxi’; the good-hearted clownery of ‘Gilligan’s Island’; the button-down humor of ‘The Bob Newhart Show.’ Even if you get away from the type of sitcom that I personally love (like ‘Scrubs!’), you have your ‘Cheers’, your ‘Dick Van Dyke Show’, and the wonderfully bizarre variety comedy of ‘The Monkees.’ I could literally populate the entire front page of Major Spoilers with my list of also-rans and oh-yeahs and how-could-I-forgets, which leads us to today’s query, recorded live in front of a studio audience…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) will go to the mat for ‘How I Met Your Mother’ in my top five, but gives my top spot to ‘WKRP in Cincinnati’, asking: Which show do you believe to be the best sitcom ever?
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Man there are so many great ones. The Dick Van Dyke show is timelessly funny… Seinfeld could turn just about any mundane subject hilarious… M*A*S*H might be the only sitcom that could ever tackle serious subjects without it feeling out of place while still being genuinely funny in its own right… (Okay, I guess Scrubs was decent at this as well.)
But I think I’m going to award mine to a personal favorite. While I don’t think it’s the best one ever, Newsradio holds a place of honor in my sitcom hall of fame. Jimmy James might be one of my favorite sitcom characters of all time, although that probably owes more to Stephen Root’s performance than the character himself.
Newsradio was brilliant, the entire cast was fantastic. Dave Foley, Stephen Root, Phil Hartman. LOVED that show.
Currently, I think I’ll give it to The Good Place.