Glad to see Growing Pains in the top 10! Tracey Gold is/was a fox…

My top 5 sitcoms from the ’80s/’90s are as follows:

5. The Jeffersons
4. Taxi
3. Golden Girls
2. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
1. Growing Pains

There was a show about some family I used to watch as a kid and in the opening they were having a picnic and some kid picked up a mustard bottle and acted like he thought it was his drink – attempting to drink it. I think maybe the kids had a garage band and played moanie moanie (however that song is spelled) at one point? I thought Corey Feldman might have been in it but I went through his IMDB and didn’t see anything that was familiar. I do know there was a motherly looking redheaded lady (a little healthy weight-wise) who has been in a lot of things.. This is killing me, if anyone knows what I’m talking about let me know!

NOT EVEN CLOSE…………espicially your top 10

Obviously, its all personal choice. My Choice is ( Wells it the 60’s, twilight zone),1) Happy Days( come on, how can a regular family beat out a group of friends) 2)TAXI( again, come on, how can a family beat out a group of friends)- 3)three’s company(same as above) 4) several other show, next) Married with children and cosby’s some where in the 15-20

Loved the list. A lot of the assessments I agree with, so where I might have changed my order in places I can see your reasons for placements. The awesome LOL and Sho-Nuf moment of this list: You are right, The Last Dragon ep from Different World was heresy! It addressed a topical and important issue, but when I saw that I was like ” Say it ain’t so, Last Dragon (Taimak)!”

I think you got #1 and #2 backwards! Cheers was the best …..ever!

Great list if not just for the memories it brought back! For that alone, I can give you some leeway on the rankings.

I don’t think Seinfeld is funny at all. I think I’d put Golden Girls at no1. It’s timeless and universal. You got some good ones that a lot overlook.

For those of us, like myself, who grew up in the 1980’s, and watched a lot of TV, I don’t think an objective list of what “the best” sitcoms are, it’s only possible to consider what is “best remembered”.

The defining sitcom of the era was, for me, “Different Strokes”. I liked Arnold, I watched the show every week since I can first remember watching TV, I even wrote a letter to NBC when I was upset that the show was pre-empted for the World Series – and an NBC executive wrote a gracious reply back to me, something I doubt anyone would do today.

80’s sitcoms fell into different categories, some of which overlapped. I realized reading this article that I have seen and heard more black people on sitcoms from the 70’s and 80’s than I ever have in real life. Different Strokes, Webster, What’s Happening, 227, Amen, Benson, Good Times, The Cosby Show – I watched them all regularly. In retrospect, I recognize it as a phenomenon of Jewish TV producers trying to promote good race relations in the wake of the civil rights movements by presenting positive views of black people – which means now that some of the humor and characterization are dated, and a bit shrill.

But Different Strokes also overlapped with the kid-centric NBC sitcoms like Punky Brewster, Silver Spoons, Saved by the Bell, and I’d put the early seasons of The Cosby Show in with them. My first crush as a child on a girl was my seven year old self crushing on Soliel Moon Frye. If I had to pick two playmates from a sitcom of the era, it would be Arnold and Punky. And Different Strokes also overlapped with The Facts of Life, which is representative of the way I remember those who were teenage girls back in the 80’s.

Some sitcoms I didn’t see too much of, because my parents kept an eye on what I watched, and steered me away from shows they felt were too liberal or had kids who were too impudent. Hence, I never saw that much of Who’s the Boss, Growing Pains, Kate and Allie…I did manage to eventually sneak in some Growing Pains, because by that time, I thought Tracey Gold was attractive, and then they had that spinoff Just the Ten of Us, with the blonde, the brunette, the redhead, and the nerd girl, and that piqued my interest in a way you don’t want to know about. And the more sitcoms with mouthy kids I watched, the more mouthy I myself became, my parents were right.

Some sitcoms that I watched back then and liked, I don’t like now. I keep seeing now that The Golden Girls has become a classic, with a whole new generation enjoying it that hadn’t even been born yet back then, and though I watched it every Saturday back then, now I don’t have the patience for it at all.

I loved Perfect Strangers too, it became my favorite sitcom after Cosby peaked in 86, but that was my Miller-Boyett exception. I started watching Full House when it at the bottom of the ratings, liked it, then lost interest at the time it started becoming popular (which was right after they moved it from Fridays to Tuesday, after Who’s the Boss, proving to me at the time that time slots were far more important to the survival of a show than its quality). But trying to watch Perfect Stranger again on DVD a few years back, some of it makes me wince. And I was never in for the whole Urkel bit on Family Matters.

And then by 1990, my TV viewing dropped off anyway. I think the last major sitcom I remember watching was Major Dad. I just finished up watching the complete four seasons on Hulu over the past few weeks, and I don’t believe I had seen any episodes of it since 1990, my primary recollection being that my sole interest at the time it was on air was because I liked the blonde girl that played the oldest daughter. But more than 25 years later, the fascination now lies with it as a sort of time capsule, as its run coincided with the Bush administration, and it sort of marks the transitional period between the 80’s and the 90’s.

The form now takes a beating, because it’s irony free, but I actual like the dim-witted “family sitcom” (which was eventually killed by those Friends). One of the reasons that The Big Bang Theory is the top rated sitcom is because it is perhaps the last sitcom to retain that “filmed before a live studio audience” vibe which used to be a mark of the family sitcom. Of course Bialik was Blossom and Galecki was on Roseanne, even if I don’t remember them as such. On the other hand, Big Bang Theory followed Friends into similar patterns of sexual humor. You may not believe it, but Big Bang Theory has had not only threesome jokes, but bestiality jokes and I think one about necrophilia, and I can only think at such times how far standards have fallen, none of those jokes were good ones, they could have left them out.