Bracket Challenge: Best American Comedy Series - Round One

We begin our quest to crown the greatest American comedy series of all time.

A new bracket challenge is finally here, and we have decided to take on quite a task. This time around, we are going to crown the greatest American comedy series of all time.

I’ve put together a field of 32 comedies spanning 75 years, and a variety of production techniques. Team selection and seeding was done through a process of researching an array of Best Sitcoms lists online as well as delving deeply into TV: The Book by Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz. This research was combined with my own rubric looking at things like innovation, hilarity, staying power, and overall cultural relevance. Over time, I trimmed a list of more than sixty series to settle on our final field of 32.

I kept the series to shows airing on American TV networks or streaming services upon original broadcast. This meant including the US version of The Office and excludi…