Comedy

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz filmed before a live studio audience with three cameras, inventing the modern sitcom and the rerun eco...

Ralph Kramden, Brooklyn bus driver, threats to the moon, and working class frustration as farce. Gleason filmed the classic 39 epi...

Sergeant Bilko, motor pool con artist, ran every racket at Fort Baxter. Silvers machine gun delivery and Hiken ensembles of chumps...

Mayberry, North Carolina: a sheriff with no gun, a deputy with one bullet, and small town wisdom. Griffith played straight man to ...

Would you believe: a spy spoof where the shoe phone outranks the gun. Brooks and Henry wrote the Cold War absurd, Don Adams played...

Cast as a band, then became a real one: a manufactured answer to the Beatles that won an Emmy for comedy and then fought for and w...

And now for something completely different: the surreal sketch show that ended sketch comedy as previously known. The Ministry of ...

Mary Richards, single career woman in a Minneapolis newsroom, tossed her hat and rewired the sitcom. The Brooks and Burns writers ...

Archie Bunker, Queens bigot, argued with his family and America watched itself fight. Lear took a British format and aimed it at t...

Korea stood in for Vietnam in the antiwar comedy institution. Alan Alda as Hawkeye grew the show from battlefield farce to moral d...

Milwaukee, the 1950s remembered through 1970s eyes: Fonzie thumbs up, Cunningham family warmth, and the Arnolds drive in. Henry Wi...

Twelve episodes only: Basil Fawlty, Torquay hotelier at war with his guests, his wife Sybil, and Manuel from Barcelona. Cleese and...

The Sunshine Cab Company: Latka and his alter egos, Reverend Jim, Louie the dispatcher from hell, with Andy Kaufman and Christophe...

Jim Hacker MP met Sir Humphrey Appleby, permanent secretary, and the bureaucracy won, politely, forever. Jay and Lynn wrote from g...

Del Boy, market trader of Peckham, forever promising that this time next year they would be millionaires. David Jason as Derek Tro...

Where everybody knows your name: a Boston bar, Sam and Diane verbal combat, Coach then Woody, and Frasier Crane incubated here bef...

Four eras of Edmund Blackadder, with Rowan Atkinson scheming downward through history. The first season was medieval spectacle, th...

Four retired women sharing a Miami house: Dorothy the sage, Rose the naive, Blanche the man eater, and Sophia with the sharpest to...

Kevin Arnold, 1968 to 1973, narrated by his adult self: the 1960s seen through a suburban kid eyes. Fred Savage became the younges...

Dave Lister, the last human alive, three million years from earth, travels with a hologram of the man he hated, a cat evolved into...

The show about nothing: Manhattan minutiae, a soup nazi, a puffy shirt, shrinkage, and a show pitched within the show. Seinfeld an...

Edina and Patsy, PR agent and magazine editor, drank, smoked, and dieted through London fashions for two decades. Saunders wrote a...

Frasier Crane moved from Cheers to Seattle radio, opera, and Eddie the dog. Kelsey Grammer played the character twenty years acros...

Six friends around a coffee house and two Manhattan apartments: Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe. Ten seasons, 52 ...

Three priests exiled to Craggy Island: Ted the schemer, Dougal the innocent, Jack the feral, and Mrs Doyle the tea tyrant. Linehan...

Four New York women, a sex column, cosmos, and friendship as the real romance. Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie, from the Candace Bu...

Larry David plays Larry David, social assassin, in outlined improvisation. The Seinfeld co creator took etiquette pettiness to HBO...

David Brent, Slough paper merchant, with the documentary camera as confessional and curse. Gervais and Merchant built the mockumen...

The Bluth family fortune collapses and the only sane son narrates the wreckage. Hurwitz layered jokes on jokes: callbacks, foresha...

The Cleavers of Mayfield: Ward, June, Wally, and the Beaver, childhood rendered as a gentle moral fable. Told from the kids point ...

Gomez, Morticia, Lurch, Thing, and Uncle Fester, the loving family next door if the door creaked. Built from Charles Addams New Yo...

Allied POWs run a sabotage operation from inside a German prison camp, played as barracks farce. The premise still startles, and t...

Adam West and Burt Ward fight a rogues gallery of camp: Pow, Zap, and Biff in graphic overlays. A mid season replacement that beca...

The Walmington on Sea Home Guard: too old and too young for the real army, ready anyway. Arthur Lowes Captain Mainwaring, pompous ...

Ronnie Barker as Fletcher, a professional criminal serving a stretch in Slade Prison and treating it like a career opportunity. Wr...

The Conners of Lanford, Illinois: a working class family that argued about money and won. Roseanne Barr and John Goodman as the mo...

A man child in a tweed jacket solves everyday problems with physical mayhem and almost no dialogue. Rowan Atkinson built Bean at O...

Will Smith, a West Philadelphia kid, sent to live with rich relatives in Bel Air. The sitcom that let rap be the texture, not the ...