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

From Lucy Ricardo trying to make it into show business to four friends sitting in a diner talking about nothing, sitcoms have been one of TV audiences' favorite forms of entertainment for decades.

To come up with the "Best TV Sitcoms" ranking, Monitor editors compiled a list of 20 sitcom contenders which we felt encompassed a wide range of television history and showed how TV has changed since the medium was created. Then, we put a poll on our website and almost 1,900 readers weighed in. We won't give away which sitcom took the top prize, but it got 19 percent of all votes (360 votes), with the second place show following closely behind at 17 percent (314) of the total.

Here they are in the order of the least-to-most-votes received, the best TV sitcoms ever.

CBS/AP

20. 'Will & Grace'

Chris Haston/NBC

The NBC program ran from 1998 to 2006 and starred Eric McCormack and Debra Messing as Will, a lawyer, and Grace, an interior decorator, who were best friends in college and dated briefly before Will came out of the closet. The two spend time with their other best friends, wealthy society wife Karen (Megan Mullally) and flighty, flamboyant Jack (Sean Hayes).

"Will & Grace" co-creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick based the show on Mutchnick's relationship with a friend, Janet, whom he dated before he came out. NBC president Warren Littlefield was the one who hit on the idea of a show featuring the friendship between a straight woman and gay man, and during the development period, Kohan and Mutchnick faxed Littlefield the box office grosses for hit movies such as "My Best Friend's Wedding" and "The Birdcage," demonstrating that stories with gay characters could succeed financially.

"Will & Grace's matter-of-fact gay characters undeniably made a big difference, thanks in large part to the smart writing of creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, and the direction by one of the grand masters of the form, James Burrows," Bloom and Vlastnik wrote in their book "Sitcoms."

1 of 20

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.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.