A Stroll Down Sitcom Lane

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My all-time favorite sitcoms are (in approximately this order): I Love Lucy, Seinfeld, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and All in the Family. There are many runner ups; The Bob Newhart Show was in the same family as MTM; Love that Bob had some of the same charms as I Love Lucy. But the shows I selected above were 1st in their respective categories, and still hold a special place with viewers of syndication, Nick at Nite or TV Land.

The 50's gave us many good shows, and another one of my favorites is Leave It To Beaver. The show puts a 20th century spin on "Huckleberry Finn" and offers some excellent 50's pop culture; it's a piece of American pie. But Beaver had its adult characters a bit too ersatz and pristine to be believable. The other 50's comedies, while funny, were not any more inventive or nearly as funny as Lucy was. The 1960's, oddly, gave us mostly gimmick sitcoms like Bewitched and Petticoat Junction. Two that weren't so gimmicky are The Andy Griffith Show and Dick Van Dyke. Both of these were excellent in certain respects, but I don't make any note to circle them in TV Guide, or stop what I'm doing to watch. The 70's were a schizoid decade that gave us the social realism of Norman Lear and also wacky offerings such as Laverne and Shirley and Three's Company. All in the Family and MTM broke the ice and allowed TV to broach sensitive topics (e.g., racism, abortion, politics) and to develop genuine character-based (as opposed to situation-based) comedy.

The 1980's gave us at least two really good shows, Cheers and Taxi, but neither was particularly new or earth-shattering in its scope. Both found humor in ordinary situations, ordinary people (like the MTM series) and helped us thru a decade that was otherwise schmaltzified w/ shows like Family Ties and Facts of Life. If you care to count animated series, The Simpsons is unbeatable for its capturing of the hapless, lowbrow Homer and his family. Roseanne was a fresh look at a working class family in Lanford, Illinois but badly "jumped the shark" when it showed the family winning a lottery in the last season. A lot of people liked Cosby but I didn't think the Huxtables (or even the family surname) were very credible. The 90's of course gave us the manic and magnificent Seinfeld. Honorable mention might go to Everybody Loves Raymond, Ellen, King of the Hill, King of Queens , Murphy Brown and even Designing Women. Friends was watched by many, but it seems like a soapy, poor imitation of Seinfeld to me. For the cable blessed, Sex and the City blazed some new trails with its wild and yet sensitive portrayal of four Manhattan single women.

The pantheon of four programs listed in my opening sentence represent the first in their respective classes, and loom large in our minds. Maude was arguably as funny as All in the Family, but it came later, appealing to a smaller audience. Many shows have borrowed from the beautiful, interpersonal simplicity of MTM (eg, Cheers, Raymond) but nobody has captured it as well. My four favorite programs deserve much more attention, and in future articles (maybe not all right away) I'd like to review them individually. Exactly why do I love Lucy??? Stay tuned. :-)