Certain shows simply refuse to fade. Generations who hadn’t been born when these sitcoms first aired will go on quoting them, discovering them, and forming fan communities around them.
Let’s set expectations first. This isn’t a ranking of the greatest sitcoms in history, and not all of them have aged well. A number contain jokes that don't land the way they used to, along with setups that make little sense today.
Even so, these 10 are permanent fixtures. They’re stitched into the fabric of television, and for as long as the medium survives, their names will keep circulating. Their loyal audiences have earned reasons to be loyal. Each one broke new ground on arrival, and nothing since has managed to duplicate them.
The show that invented the rerun
For most of its run, I Love Lucy sat atop the ratings in the United States, and it effectively created — or at the very least popularized — the syndicated show and the rerun. Television as we know it would look quite different otherwise. Seven decades after its debut, Academy Award-nominated biodramas such as Being the Ricardos continue to keep the series in the public eye.
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz play Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, a married pair making a life in New York City. The through line is usually Lucy’s push to break into show business, though she just as frequently ends up caught in whatever hijinks and situations her mix of innocence and ambition can generate.
A woman with a job and no husband, which was radical
In The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the actress of the title plays Mary Richards, a single, self-sufficient woman holding down a job she genuinely cares about at a local news station. Described that way today, it sounds almost quaint. Back then it was revolutionary, and it still stands as a pivotal moment for women’s representation on television.
Over seven seasons, Mary reaches her professional and personal goals without any man playing a meaningful part in them. No discussion of landmark moments in TV representation can leave this show out, and it also happens to rest on one of the finest sitcom performances ever recorded.
You know Cheers even if you’ve never watched it
Cheers belongs to that rare category of series you can describe in detail without ever having watched a single frame. There’s the setting, a bar. There are the characters, Norm, Sam, Diane. Even the comedic style is familiar, barflies killing time however they can. It may sit a handful of years too far back for the streaming crowd to bother diving in.
That’s unfortunate, because it works as a comfort sitcom every bit as well as The Office, Friends or Seinfeld, the reigning podium of comfort viewing. For something that launched in the early ’80s it feels remarkably modern, and its ensemble — Ted Danson, Kelsey Grammer, Woody Harrelson, Rhea Perlman and Kirstie Alley — each went on to notable and excellent careers.
Four women in Miami, treating age like a construct
The Golden Girls has turned into a kind of shorthand. The phrase now gets applied to any cluster of older women carrying on as though age were merely a construct. Yet the show sticks with you far past its premise, with Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty playing four elderly women who share a house in Miami.
Together they navigate aging and life while squeezing everything they can out of their late-life freedom. Almost nothing else on television or in film resembles it, and the imitators have landed nowhere near. When you want something in precisely that register, it’s the only place to go.
Seinfeld is too funny to disappear
Grant that three out of every four jokes have lost some punch, whether thanks to the dated laugh track or the sheer volume of imitators they spawned. A quarter of the jokes in a Seinfeld episode still adds up to plenty of laughs.
Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Michael Richards and Julia Louis-Dreyfus portray four friends who land in absurd and unfortunate predicaments, nearly always thanks to their own selfishness and absence of tact. However the era changes, the show holds up, so long as people continue to act purely in their own self-interest.
Bel-Air still holds up
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is still fresh, even with its star’s cultural standing having slipped somewhat. Credit goes to the comic ability of the whole cast and to writing that shines. Following a heated basketball game in West Philadelphia, a young Will (Will Smith) is shipped off to live with his bougie relatives in Bel-Air, California.
The collision between Will’s street-wise outlook and his family’s buttoned-up, upper-class manners is reliably funny. The premise simply doesn’t wear out. What sustains the show’s relevance is how firmly it handles its dramatic threads, from Will’s troubled home life to the discrimination a black family in the United States encounters regardless of income bracket.
The prototype everyone copied
Friends is a lovely sitcom about, naturally, friends. It sits toward the modern end of this list, and it still reads as the template for a great deal of what followed. This is the sitcom in its purest form, packed with every trope you could name, from romances within the group to enormous apartments no barista could ever afford.
There’s real warmth in the comedy, and it’s one of those sitcoms where a full start-to-finish watch rewards you. The goofy gags and outlandish scenarios gradually make room for tearjerking arcs among romantic partners, families and friends. A sweeping series with something in it for everyone.
The most honest show about American families
Everybody Loves Raymond holds a distinctive place in the pantheon. Ray Romano plays Ray Barone, a Long Island sportswriter sharing a home with his wife and their three kids. Directly across the street sit his intrusive, overbearing parents, along with a dopey older brother who works as a local cop but logs more hours on Ray’s couch than in his patrol car.
A standard sitcom premise, no argument. Even so, few shows have been more truthful about family life in America. It rarely ventures past the core family unit at all, a sign of just how deeply it wants to dig into the idea of the nuclear family. That disciplined approach to storytelling should keep it relevant for years to come.
Twenty years later, everyone’s still shooting mockumentaries
The Office made the mockumentary-style sitcom mainstream, and the format is still a fixture of network and streaming comedy more than 20 years on. That contribution alone justifies its inclusion. It also pulled off the difficult trick of converting a sharp, hilarious British series into an American sitcom capable of standing on its own.
Above all, it produced nine years of brilliant, hilarious writing. Jokes from the first two seasons are exactly as funny today as they were on air, and it can almost feel as though comedies have grown slightly less funny since, as if they’re afraid of falling short of a series destined to be remembered for years.
Then there are the hangout shows nobody talks about
One more note: the lower-profile hangout sitcoms, the ones with charming casts and relatable character-driven humor that get passed over again and again in favor of the more mainstream classics.
New Girl gets rediscovered every decade
New Girl is the newest entry here, which for some people makes it too early to judge. But so much of it works that you can already sense this is the kind of show that gets rediscovered every 10 years.
Not many American sitcoms can boast a cast with chemistry like this, where any pairing of characters yields a funny and compelling storyline. Jess (Zooey Deschanel) makes for an incredible point-of-view protagonist, and someone everybody can relate to in some fashion.
Put your faith in the ones that keep resurfacing. At this very moment, some teenager is stumbling onto Lucy Ricardo shoving chocolates into her mouth off a conveyor belt, 70 years later, laughing just as hard as the audience that saw it live.