We love ranked lists of pop culture, but you always have to look at the source to decide whether one will be worth a look. This list of 100 sitcoms is from Rolling Stone magazine. They go back to the ’50s, and aren’t limited to American television, nor to broadcast TV, so the list had to be winnowed down from the mountain of shows that make us laugh.
To choose the 100 greatest sitcoms ever, we first had to decide how to define the term. Sketch comedies were out, from the explicit, like Saturday Night Live and The Muppet Show, to the more ambiguous, such as The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Ditto comedy-drama hybrids that ran around an hour — Freaks and Geeks, say, or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Half-hour dramedies presented a blurrier picture; we took those on a case-by-case basis, applying our own version of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” Where Enlightened and The Wonder Years seemed to fall just too far onto the drama side of the line, for example, Atlanta and Better Things had enough comedy to qualify. This list is also composed entirely of English-language comedies, primarily American ones, with a handful of British and Canadian shows making the cut.
So what’s left? An amazing array of sitcoms spanning 70 years and several continents. Sure, you will disagree with their rankings here and there, but you’ll probably appreciate that the top 20 are all golden. And you might find some new-to-you shows that you’ll want to watch. -via Digg
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Source: neatorama