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 excluding the UK version. I also avoided sketch and skit based shows like Saturday Night Live, The Carol Burnett Show, or Monty Python. Other variety and talk show style programs were eliminated as well despite their comedic content. Additionally, I worked to stick with shows that more or less held to a half hour format. Many comedies are longer and were therefore not included, just as some drams are not a full hour, see The Bear.
The shows selected here are going to skew white and male dominated simply because of the culture and eras in which they were made. Additional weight was lent to series like I Love Lucy and Mary Tyler Moore because of the pioneering women that drove them, but they are fewer in number because of how few opportunities women and people of color have been given to run shows until very recently. In the end, seeding and selecting these shows was a subjective endeavor in which I did my level best to account for a variety of factors, tastes, and time periods.
Here is the field for your Greatest American Comedy Series Bracket Challenge.
As we have done in the past, each of the first two rounds will feature four matchups each week. As we get closer to the finals, we’ll focus on fewer matchups in each installment until we crown the eventual winner. You’ll have a full week to get your votes in before the polls close.
The first four contests feature the longest running family in TV history, a troubled trailblazer, friends of a sort in the City, a midwestern family, a snobbish shrink, a cynical psychologist, and the cast and crew of a chaotic sketch show. Let’s get to the matchups.
Polls close at midnight eastern on Friday, Sept. 20. Get to your polling stations.
Cheers,
Matty C
Love it, but damn, the most deserving winner, Community, got snubbed from the bracket entirely. Oof
It's all about the writing, Matty! So is all media (the movies you did recently, et al, for instance), but as a writer, former comedy writer (some might say current....😁), and fan of the classic American sitcom, I'll be all over this one! In fact, inspired by a one-panel comic, this morning, on Notes, I was inspired to come up with this sitcom idea/notion/treatment:
A half-hour comedy/detective series I’d have liked to have seen, say, in the ‘70s:
A bumbling duo of crime-fighting dicks who hash out their strategies and wisecracks on the fairway!
One’s a little caddy. One’s a little catty. But, they’ll work things out on the back nine.
Yes, it’s “Shanks and Dogleg,” this Saturday on NBC! You’re likely to find a hole in one.
Carry on!