Category: Entertainment

Married… With Children
This show was never supposed to be popular, with its unrelievedly hostile approach to the subject matter.  And yet it was, enormously so, perhaps as an antidote to all the saccharine TV families that had gone before, with their wise mothers, irascible yet good-natured fathers and spunky but lovable children.  Instead, we got Ed Neil’s snarling loser father, Al Bundy, his slatternly non-housewife partner Peg (Katey Sagal), with snarky sex-starved son Bud (David Faustino) and the slutty daughter Kelly (Christine Applegate).  When I first watched this show, I spent much of the time helpless with open-jawed laughter, and it became one of the very few TV shows I looked forward to each week.  And while I loved the buxom Peg, I have to admit that young Kelly Bundy turned me into a Dirty Old Man every time she flounced onto the screen.  I don’t think that I’m alone in this, either.

Frasier
Quite possibly one of the only spinoffs that was even better than its host series (this one from the above-mentioned Cheers ), Frasier was not just the chronicle of the exploits and catastrophes of the pompous (and hapless) psychiatrist Frasier Crane.  What set this show apart from all others was the relationship between Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier and his onscreen brother, David Hyde Pierce’s Niles, which was absolute perfection — as was the brothers’ relationship with their father, John Mahoney’s Martin Crane.  I think I’m pretty safe in saying that no better family relationship — at times hostile, affectionate, prickly, loving, irritable and always fraught with tension — has ever been written for the small screen.  While the female co-stars played a large part in the show’s quality, the three men were absolutely exquisite.  And speaking of the women, let’s not forget the very-much-underappreciated radio show producer, Peri Gilpin’s Roz:

I know that what constitutes the “best” of anything is very much a personal issue, especially as it pertains to entertainment — Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles has been hailed as one of the best movie comedies ever made, for instance, yet I can’t watch it past the first five minutes — but I think when to comes to TV sitcoms, it’s not too difficult a job to create a list of at least eight which could be classified as “really, really good, if not the best”.  So here’s what follows for the next eight Saturdays:  my personal favorite TV sitcoms, being defined as those which I could watch (and sometimes have watched) from Episode One through Episode Final, and which I can safely call “the best”.  They are in no specific order, and as with all my lists, their popularity is irrelevant:  I  happened to love them, and that’s all that counts.  Note too that the list doesn’t include many (or any) of the newer shows, simply because I gave up watching TV to any degree in about 2005.  And I’ve excluded cartoons (with one exception), because I’ve only ever watched a few, and none all the way through. Here goes with 1…

Cheers
As ensemble casts go, this one pretty much had it all.  Almost every character was funny and outrageous, and they seemed to take it in turns — sometimes within the same episode — to make the viewer roar with laughter.  My absolute favorite character was George Wendt’s Norm, whose comebacks on entry were one-line classics:

“Hey Norm, how’s the world been treating you?”
“Like a baby treats a diaper.”
and:
“Can I pour you a draft, Mr. Peterson?”
“A little early, isn’t it Woody?”
“For a beer?”
“No, for stupid questions.”

And finally, I will be forever grateful to Cheers for introducing me to Kirstie Alley: