Best Sitcoms

It turned cringe into network gold and its middle years are wall-to-wall quotable. It also kept going long after its lead walked out the door, and the memory of that slow deflation is what a short, ruthless run like Fawlty Towers never has to answer for.

Nothing on this list swings harder: paintball wars, a bottle episode about a missing pen, fake clip shows. The bill for that ambition is consistency, and whole stretches around the creator's firing and return are rough going. When it connects, no sitcom has ever been smarter.

Began as a limp Office copy and became the warmest show of its generation once Leslie Knope was allowed to be good at her job. The optimism is both the sell and the ceiling; by the final seasons everyone is so kind to each other that the jokes have to be imported from outside the cast.

The best pure joke engine of the post-Office network era, with cold opens that circulate on their own long after the plots fade. It plays things safe, though; conflicts resolve so cleanly that stakes rarely survive into the next episode, and Parks and Recreation reached for more with the same warmth.

The hangout sitcom perfected, and still the easiest thing on this list to put on at random. What it never had was a point of view; it chased whichever couple pairing kept people watching, and its humor has dated faster than Frasier's, which ran the same years on the same network.

A show about nothing that is really about airtight comic plotting and four people who never learn a thing. Its refusal of sentiment is why it aged better than Friends. It also gives you nobody to root for, and some viewers never make peace with that.

Jokes arrive faster here than anywhere else on the list, so fast the weak ones never get time to land before three better ones follow. The trade is heart; you can finish the entire run without caring about a single person in it, and the show would consider that a compliment.

Joke architecture nothing else on this list has touched: punchlines planted a season before they detonate, background signs doing script work. Demanding that much attention is why it died on the network that aired it, and the revival seasons quietly drag the whole average down.

The gold standard for the sitcom as a place: a bar where the regulars were arguing years before you sat down, and where Sam and Diane wrote the will-they template every later show here borrows. It survived losing Coach and then Diane outright, though the late years mostly coast on familiarity.

Larry David re-running his Seinfeld worldview with no censor and no script, just outlines and improvisation. At its best it is squirm comedy nothing else matches. The looseness cuts both ways; scenes wander, and whole seasons rise or fall on whether the year's big arc works.

Two short seasons and out, every episode a farce wound tight enough to snap, with Basil Fawlty as the angriest man the format has produced. Quitting early kept it flawless, and that is also the honest knock: it never had to survive a bad year the way Cheers and The Office did.

A spin-off that outclassed most originals by betting a network audience would sit still for farce and wordplay. It won that bet for years. The Crane brothers' sherry-and-opera snobbery is a real barrier for some viewers, and its emotional range never matched the Cheers barroom it left behind.

Everything the format takes for granted was proven here, from filming in front of a live audience to the scheming lead the camera adores, which is exactly why it plays slower today than anything else on the list: every trick it pioneered has been stolen and sharpened by everyone since.

Seinfeld's awful-people premise pushed to its logical extreme, with the gang actually punished for every scheme. Refusing to soften across two decades on the air is its own achievement. The floor is the problem; when an episode misses, there is no charm to fall back on, just volume.