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The 20 best TV sitcoms of all time – readers' choice

What did Monitor readers choose as the best sitcom in the history of television?

11. 'The Honeymooners'

  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

"The Honeymooners" ran on CBS from 1955 to 1956 and starred actor Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, a bus driver who lived in New York City with his wife Alice. The two often spend time with their upstairs neighbors Ed and Trixie Norton. The gritty characters and working-class setting would serve as a template for many subsequent shows.

Gleason debuted "The Honeymooners" as a sketch on the TV program "Cavalcade of Stars." The sketch featured Gleason playing Ralph, but in the sketch, actress Pert Kelton played sharp-tongued Alice.

Because the show was on for such a comparatively short amount of time, fans often call the output of the year that the show was on the "classic 39" episodes. Gleason and CBS decided together to end the show, and Gleason later said that he felt "the excellence of the material could not be maintained, and I had too much fondness for the show to cheapen it."

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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