I have been watching some real old stuff. barney miller and mash hold up very well. Like you go into the eighties and with different strokes and the facts of life and ugh. I can't think of anything decent until like cheers. maybe we are going through a period like that.
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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The majority of sitcoms are terrible. When you think of good older ones and compare them to bad ones today you're doing the thing.
Mostly, yeah, but then again genuinely funny ones were always rare.
Worse (in terms of sitcoms as a genre) they almost never stand up to time. And that's where some of the older ones have an advantage. Survivor bias. The shitty ones aren't in syndication any more. So we only see maybe the top ten percent of all of them with any regularity.
But it is damn hard to come up with the right combo of writers, cast, and zeitgeist. Look at the Dick van Dyke show as an example. Some of the best comedic actors in the business all in one place, with the best writers or the era, making a show that is about a situation that's damn near immortal because it focused on core segments of life. Because of that, even the less acceptable humor (and it never went bad) is easy to shrug off.
Since the executives in charge production are a product of decades of cynicism and money only thinking (it was almost always money first, but that is different), they take no risks, and want mostly reheated dreck. That's never a good foundation for comedy. It has to happen by accident when that constrained.
That being said, it does happen from time to time. While I'm not a sitcom fan, and not into it, always sunny manages to work for most people because they're willing to keep riding absurdity so that they don't need a real sense of continuity. There was the office (which, again, isn't my thing) that was one of those perfect storms of on-screen and off talent being allowed to go ham in a situation that is damn near universal in scope for its target area. Even if you haven't been stuck in an office, you likely know someone that has. It makes the jokes hit better, and the ones that don't can get carried by the cast's talent.
But, yeah, I don't think the current era is good for sitcoms. The old networks are running scared and chasing an old paradigm. The steamers are past the point of throwing money and seeing what sticks. The audience is spread out even more than the cable dominated era. It's hard to justify a non proven formula, and formulas don't work as well as they used to
One problem everyone is facing--from music to TV to movies to books to videogames--is people have accessto the full history of awesome media. Who is going to watch a new TV show these days when they could be watching The Wire, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, ALF, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc. for the first time?
I'd say it's here that sitcoms have a real chance to shine, because, as you've said, most sitcoms have not aged well--the aforementioned ALF being a notable example--and even an ephemeral modern sitcom can compete in that space.
they could be watching The Wire, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, ALF, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc.
True. Mad Men is not centered around physical violence.
LOL!
Survivor bias is definitely a major factor here - I can vaguely remember at least a dozen sitcoms from my childhood and early adulthood that didn't survive (or got soft-rebooted into something better).
It's a kind of nostalgic survivorship bias.
You remember the dozen or so old ones that were good, and forget the hundreds that were not.
There are even ones that were popular back then which fell into a memory hole, like the 90's Brady Bunch reimagining.
On TV? People still watch TV?
Watching stuff on YouTube (or Nebula or whatever) is still TV.
Yeah this is how I see it too. When I say televised I usually mean commercially provided.
Watch an old sitcom without the laugh track. It's all just cringe.
Malcom in the middle doesn't have a laugh track and it is gold. You can have a good sitcom with and without a laugh track. And with a studio audience. But The Big Bang Theory without the track, oh god that was terrible.
With the laugh track it was still horrible
Which one? You are completely nuts if you think the original Malcolm In The Middle was bad. Now, The Big Bang Theory, I totally agree was awful, to me.
I meant big bang theory, as Malcolm in the middle does not have one
Yes, you are right, I misread. It is my alcohol time, lol.
Of course - a sitcom intended to have a laugh track, and edited that way, is always going to sound totally wrong when that element is taken out.
The presence of a laugh track in the original show doesn't automatically make it bad though. Many genuinely great comedies have had a laugh track included.
The presence of a laugh track is irrelevant. The necessity of one for people to find the show funny is a different matter.
Agreed - but with the caveat that examples where there was one, but it was later removed, don't really count, because the way it's done screws up the timing.
To judge them fairly you'd have to somehow see what the same show was like if intentionally made without laughter from the start. Some might pass, others wouldn't.
Some have actual studio audiences. Like IT crowd.
I think you're ignoring the core point of the above comment, which is that the long pauses in the show for the laughs are a planned part of the show. If you've never been to a recording, the audience noises aren't spontaneous. There are signs telling the audience when to make noise.
Live audiences sound better than canned laughs, but in terms of pacing for a sitcom, it's the same thing.
They had to tell the audience in Seinfeld to stop cheering for Kramer. And Seinfeld is still gold, baby!!!!!!
So did The Big Bang Theory
The audience laughing wasn't the problem with that show
Yea, they still added laugh tracks digitally, and also cue cards to laugh, as well as have a certain reaction. Yikes...
Oh yeah, definitely.
The history of the laugh track is pretty interesting
That was interesting, thanks for the link 👍
It is hard to not have a laugh track in front of a live studio audience.
I think there has always been funny and unfunny shows, just like there has always been music you will like and music you won’t like. Sometimes your sensibilities line up with cultural zeitgeist and other times you have to dig a little harder to find it. 🤷♂️ Don’t be that boomer being like ‘back in my day we had REAL music/comedy/whatever’
This isn't new.
I stopped watching TV in the mid-90s when Star Trek TNG turned out to be a disaster, and there was nothing else good on.
Most of the shows from that era (Seinfeld, Married with Children, Malcolm in the Middle), are about horrible people being horrible to each other - with a laugh track! - or about unrealistic people behaving in ridiculous ways (Friends, I'm looking at you!).
Sitcoms are rarely funny, but that's a long-standing tradition. Shitty and/or cringe-inducing behaviour rule the time slots.
Little has changed really, I find most sitcoms are just "meh", kind of like they've always been.
I know of 3 sitcoms that are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, and the most recent one has been off-air for 10 years ("Still Game", Scottish sitcom). The others are "'Allo!, 'Allo!" from 1982 and "Corner Gas" from the early 2000's.
New stuff I'm watching today isn't sitcom, because sitcoms are such a crap shoot and any teasers I've seen look awful.
Corner Gas is aggressively mediocre.
Not even a sitcom fan, but could probably name a dozen that are funnier.
I think its good but its not what I would call laugh out loud. I view it as closer to british comedy.
I LOVE CORNER GAS
Nah, there's some amazing sitcoms right now:
-
Workin' Moms
-
Shrinking
-
Platonic
Remember Sturgeon's Law.
I think there are two kinds of new sitcom episodes airing today:
- The ones on 'over the air' network, which are largely unfunny and cringey and have horrible laugh tracks.
- The ones on smaller 'cable' networks that are more edgy and usually don't have laugh tracks, and which are usually genuinely funny.
For me the sitcoms of old were mostly the unfunny, cringey, laugh-track plagued ones. So I don't think the need cringey ones are really any worse than most of the older ones.
You are also forgetting about ones with the in studio audiences that were genuinely laughing.
I'm not even sure what sitcoms exist today that aren't animated.
Maybe it's just bias and the bad shows are simply not remembered anymore?
Then again, many popular shows of old are just plainly unfunny.