Good morning and welcome to another exciting entry in my definitive, unarguable list of the best 50 sitcoms ever.
The list is the result of me and my wife working together, trying to find a compromise between our differing tastes, reckoning that the result would give a perfect balance between our often opposing worldviews.
What has actually happened is that we've created a kind of monster - a lopsided, insane creature that rampages through the concept of good sense, destroying all in its path. It tosses perfectly good shows into the lake, while clutching some really odd choices close to its chest, growling at anyone who suggests that maybe they're not that good.
This is part four. Part one is here, part two is here, part three is here.
And now, because the world is cruel, comes part four. I warn you now - you're probably not going to like it.
20.
The Good Place 2016 - 2020 Netflix
Not a bad start. This definitely deserves its ranking in the top 20. The Good Place has a startling and original premise for a sitcom. Eleanor (Kristen Bell) has died and gone to Heaven. That's where the show is set. That's the Good Place. It's a sort of day-glo paradise village, where you can do what you want. If that's not good enough, it's presided over by sitcom royalty Ted Danson, proving that Sam Malone was not his only brilliant trick.
Except, right - Eleanor is not really meant to be in The Good Place. She was a bad, bad girl and she's only there because of an admin error. So here we have a pretty solid set up for a show. She's got to pretend to be good, which is funny to watch because she is, by inclination, selfish and a bit mean. There's also fun to be had with the 'Heaven as an administrative system' gag. And there are some fun supporting characters in Eleanor's fellow Good Place residents.
All of which would have probably got it a place in the top 40. But there are several wrinkles which elevate it. One is the way the show develops over its seasons. This is not a sitcom that stands still, and it pulls of the rare trick of changing up the scenario, while keeping the core of the show - and the characters - intact. Pretty smart.
The other is that the show uses the concept of 'being good' as a philosophical touch stone. That doesn't sound like comedy high jinks at all, does it? Well, you'd be surprised. Or perhaps you wouldn't. All comedy is, at heart, about the human condition and the tensions between who we want to be and who we know we are. The Good Place leans into that heavily, and the result is an absolute joy.
19.
Extras 2005-2007 iPlayer
I tend to think of Extras as a relatively light follow up to The Office, with less edge and with most of its success coming from a parade of gimmicky celebrity cameos. There's some truth in that, and I would have had it lower down the rankings than its predecessor. However, Wifeface likes Extras better - probably for those exact same reasons, and so here it is.
Rewatching it helps to dispel some of my criticisms. It is gentler, that's for sure, but I think Ricky Gervais deserves some credit for letting it be that way. One of the great things about The Office was that it looked cynical, but actually contained some real warmth and optimism. Balancing those is tricky, and there's great pleasure in watching Andy Millman - Gervais's character here - negotiate the two sides of his personality.
This is even more clear these days, when Gervais seems to have lost the ability to maintain the balance. His more recent offering, Afterlife, hasn't made our top 50 and there's good reason. It started well, but by the end had become little more than a showcase for Gervais's hectoring put downs on anything he didn't like, along with an inexplicable desire to show how good he was at sports. We get it - you're not as fat as you were in The Office. Sit down.
Back in Extras he still had the comic instincts to put vanity aside, letting David Bowie insult him in front of the world. Let's remember him like that.
18.
W1A 2014-2017 iPlayer
Now. What are you doing all the way up here, W1A? I remember that the wife and I liked you a lot when we watched you, that's fair enough. But look... you've beat Cheers, The Office... Alan Partridge. Does that feel right?
Maybe it's fine. I do recall this being a consistently funny, well observed piece of work that hummed with quiet confidence. It had a great cast, playing characters with strong, distinct personalities and preoccupations. And even though it was primarily about working at the BBC, the concepts resonated with anyone who's worked in any kind of institution.
Perhaps that's it. This is a brilliantly drawn world of buzzwords, pointless meetings and nonsensical corporate systems. Unlike most sitcoms we don't really have an identification character, as far as I recall. We're just invited to observe the world and draw our own conclusions. OK, W1A... you can stay here, for now. Just don't cause any trouble.
17.
M.A.S.H. 1972-1983 Available to buy on Prime
When I first met Wifeface, many years ago, she was positively evangelical about MASH. I didn't call her 'Wifeface' back then - that would have aroused suspicion. I called her by her real name, which is, of course, 'Attractive Woman I've Just Met Face".
She loved MASH and she still very much does, hence its inclusion here. I can't really remember much about it. I loved it as a kid, I know that much. Hawkeye - played by the brilliant Alan Alda - was one of my formative heroes, along with Vila from Blakes 7, Number Six from The Prisoner and Murdoch from The A-Team. Yes, you're right, I was very cool and popular at school.
I enjoyed Hawkeye's healthy disrespect for authority, and felt that there was a great similarity between his struggles with an uncaring military bureaucracy and my struggles with Mrs. Robertshaw and her constant demands that I did my homework.
Last time I watched MASH, I seem to remember that there was an annoying laugh track, which absolutely killed it for me. Some shows seem weird and bleak without a laugh track - we watched the Duty Free Christmas Special a few years ago, and its lack of audience laughter reframed it as an incredibly sad exploration of a failing marriage. MASH, despite being an older show than Duty Free, has the sensibilities of a more modern show. You wouldn't put a laugh track on Ted Lasso, and I don't think one belongs here. That's how good it is.
16.
The Young Ones 1982-1984 iPlayer
Oh, The Young Ones. If I had my way, you'd be right up there near the top, looking down on all the other sitcoms and, if we're honest, probably weeing on their heads. You mad, gorgeous, peculiar thing.
I do not have my way, though. My cruel, cruel wife watched it with me a while ago and I'm sorry to report that she was not that bothered. There was me, bouncing up and down on the sofa, trying really hard not to do all the lines along with Rik, Neil, Vyvyan and Mike, hardly able to contain my excitement at sharing this amazing show with my partner.
She just sort of stared at it, like a cat looking at the Bayeux Tapestry. What was this and why was it supposed to be good? And for a moment, I saw it through her eyes. Here was an entirely male cast, shouting at each other in a cheap studio set with few jokes and no real story. This was incoherent nonsense, like a child's painting on a fridge had come to life and started swearing at the postman.
And then... Then the beautiful, luminous Rik Mayall said "Hands up who likes me?" and it all came flooding in again. The wonder of being a thirteen year old misfit, finding this incredible explosion of ideas and chaos and thinking, for the first time, "It's here. Something made for me is finally here." It's the very definition of 'You had to be there'.
I was there. And I still am.
15.
Brooklyn 99 2013-2021 Netflix
I avoided this show for a while. It looked like a very obvious 'American Sitcom about cops'. Which, of course, is exactly what it is. But for some reason I didn't like the look of it. It looked frenetic and loud and full of daft stunts, which felt like it might get wearing after a while.
I was, of course, quite wrong. Not about it being loud and daft - it certainly is those things. And it doesn't have the same level of wit that defines a great sitcom like Parks and Recreation, for example. But what I'd not reckoned with was the brilliance of the writing.
The characters are fairly standard - the cop who thinks everything is an adventure, the gruff sergeant, the detective who needs everything to be perfect. But the writing, and some great performances, elevate each of them to someone you grow to love. There's an enthusiasm and joy to the relationships that makes each episode hum and also allows it to, occasionally, touch on serious stuff.
"Touch on serious stuff". Name of your sex tape.
14
The Thick of It 2005-2012 iPlayer
I have a vivid memory of watching the first episode of The Thick of It and not liking it. It looked very "post The Office" - cameras swinging all over the place in pseudo documentary style. Naturalistic performances where characters are low-key mean to each other. It didn't look very original and - worse - it looked drab and uninviting.
It's fair to say my opinion has shifted considerably since then. I think a little of that of that is due to the show developing into something more enjoyable. The camera work calms down a little and there's a widening of scope in terms of the characters. But mostly it's about me adjusting to understand the genius of what I was watching.
Nowadays The Thick of It is most often referenced in terms of real world political events. Barely a month goes by without some governmental calamity being likened to this seemingly prescient TV show. You've got to wonder why all politicians aren't sat down on day one and forced to watch every episode, with someone next to the TV shouting "Don't do any of these things."
This is a breathtakingly clever show, hitting satirical targets with surgical precision while always feeling like a loose, shambolic fragment of real life. Devastating in its social commentary and painfully funny to watch, this is one of the best sitcoms ever made.
13
Rev 2010-2014 iPlayer
It was quite a while before Wifeface and I remembered to put Rev on our list. It sort of slipped our minds. When we did recall its existence, we gasped in horror, as if we'd just remembered that we had a child and we'd left it behind last time we moved house. How could we have forgotten Rev?
The answer is that Rev is quiet and unassuming. It bumbles along, much like it's adorable protagonist, Reverend Adam Smallbone, being gently funny and brilliant without really disrupting your life. It doesn't seem to get talked about much, and it seems to have fallen through the cracks of sitcom debate.
Well. It should be talked about more. It a funny, clever show about human nature. People are excellent and stupid and courageous and weak and a hundred other things, all competing for dominance inside fragile egos. It's not an advert for religion, but it does use it's set up (small church in a big city) to explore failure, forgiveness and community.
Rev does some work, I think, to pave the way for Fleabag. Maybe I'm just thinking that because of the priest. But I think there's something else - the way it manages to be a consistently funny sitcom, while also nudging against the darker edges of human frailty. It's very good.
12
Community 2009-2015 ITV-X
Wifeface and I find ourselves in a brief period of agreement. Community is great and deserves to be high up on our list. Hurray. Maybe we can go back to our normal lives after we've finished this list, after all.
Community is a show which inspires fanatical devotion, and that was certainly reflected by our reaction to it. It feels like the closest US sitcom has got to something like Spaced - a show that loves geeks and wears its creative, nerdy intelligence on its sleeve. Where a show like The Big Bang Theory parades geeks as objects of ridicule and invites us to laugh at them, this show takes misfits as its primary audience and shows them all the love.
The premise is regular enough. Here is a bunch of people with differing experiences and perspectives, thrown together randomly and forced to get on. In this case, it's a study group at community college. So far, so sitcom. But the show reaches far, far beyond that, letting ideas run wild and having tremendous fun with the very form of television comedy. It's a cine-literate, postmodern explosion of wonder that assumes the audience is as smart as the writers.
We watched this on Sony TV, back in the days when you had to find programmes on 'a channel' and 'record them to watch later'. Yes, like the cavemen did. For some reason the episodes on Sony were edited to the point of being incomprehensible. Maybe when we watch it again, in unedited form, we'll discover that the show is full of incredibly racist and transphobic jokes. In which case, I'm very, very sorry and this was the wife's choice really.
11.
Peep Show 2003-2015 Channel 4, Netflix
Very narrowly missing out on the top ten, here's one of the best sitcoms I've ever seen.
Peep Show distils sitcom to its very essence: the difference between how we are on the inside, and how we present ourselves on the surface. Jeremy and Mark are a fairly standard sitcom couple - one is too uptight, the other too loose. There is enormous fun in seeing them muddle along together, but the genius of the show is in letting us inside their heads. The contrast between their internal monologue and the stuff they actually do and say is at once hilarious, shocking and uncomfortably resonant. That's us, right there, in that contradiction.
The 'point of view' conceit could easily be a gimmick, but it always remains integral to the appeal and humour of the show. It's odd that this style of filming hasn't bled out into other shows, in the way that the pseudo documentary format of The Office has.
If it's so good, you are asking, why does it miss out on the top ten? Well, you're going to have to ask my wife about that, because apparently she'd rather vote for a load of beautiful Americans being consistently funny, than vote for two nebbish blokes who spend all their time failing and being sad.
While you're asking her, could you also ask where we keep the weighing scales? I know it's one of the cupboards in the kitchen, but honestly there's so many of them.
There you go - that's all for now. We're into the top ten next, so there's that to look forward to. Here's where to find all the other parts:
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