Malcolm in the middle shows that life is not always fair, and shows how a realistic view of the world far off from the wishful nostalgia of The Wonder Years. It presents childhood with bullies ruling the school, teachers are indifferent, and being smart is akin to being radioactive. Even outside of the school life is rough for the family, not having enough time or food to make lunch for everyone and nobody is appreciated. Malcolm in the Middle knows what it’s like to be young, desperate for independence and disappointed by rules, and grownup, desperate for stability and disappointed by life. The show was ugly, unfair, and thoroughly lovable.
Will and Grace was a show, that was unique in the way it addressed the characters and their relationships to each other. The show was able to show that being gay was a part of life, and that it doesn’t define the character or the show. Even though critics thought that there couldn’t be a sitcom where the two main leads don’t have a romantic involvement, they were wrong. With Grace and Will we both get the crude humor jokes between them as they are best friends, and although Will is gay, it is never used as a means to advance the story. Many of the central conflicts within Will & Grace deal with standard problems such as finding work, romance, fighting with friends and having children.
Frasier is one of the few spin offs that was able to last, and do well. Over the 11 years, the show managed 127 wins, and 272 nominations, winning 3 golden globes. The show was mainly known for being highbrow, filled with high culture references and intellectualism. However it’s also a farce, where stuff like exploding cherries jubilee happen. One example of that scene is where Niles is trying to iron his clothes while classical music is going on, but he ends up passing out from a cut, and then ultimately lighting his clothes on fire, all by accident. The shows use of physical comedy in contrast to the wit, is part of what made the physically comedy that much more funny.
Winning and Emmy for writing in the first season, the show was popular due to it’s different approach to family sitcoms. It’s iconic opening of having Bernie Mac talk to the audience was a way of breaking the fourth wall and inviting a conversation with America. It also didn’t follow the norm of sitcoms by leaving the endings open and showing how real the show could be by not resetting back to the default. For a family sitcom, it was different in the fact that the kids on the show were not the children of Bernie Mac but that of his sister. The show began to fall in ratings after the middle of the second season due to the Larry Wilmore, the writer, being let go so the show could become more like other family sitcoms on television at the time.
Winner of 6 Emmy Awards and nominated for 25 more, mixed with a cult following that stuck through a 7-year hiatus, Arrested Development is the one domestic sitcom that you will find at the top of just about every “Best Sitcoms of…” list that you can think of. It is regarded both by critics and fans in a highly positive fashion. However, that only applied to the first half of Arrested Development, at least in the eyes of the critics. After its return from being gone for 7 years, and its placement on Netflix, critics did not think that Arrested Development lived up to its usual standards. Fans of course disagreed, for it was the effort of the fan base that allowed Arrested Development to return to the spotlight after Fox gave it the boot due to low ratings.
Gilmore Girls is a comedic sitcom that aired in 2000 on WB and then switched to the CW in 2006. It followed a single mother raising her daughter, and though it was a comedic sitcom, it was not filmed in front of a live audience. The series it known for the dry humored, witty repartee between the close mother-daughter duo. The show won an AFI award for TV program of the year in 2003 and the actors themselves, such as Lauren Graham, who played Lorelai Gilmore, even won many awards for her performance in the sitcom. The series initially ended in the year 2007 but has recently been making headlines again because they are releasing four episode miniseries to follow up the show, titled Gilmore Girls: A Day in the Life.
Winner of 2 Emmy awards and nominated 17 times. One of the most noteworthy episodes that Scrubs has to offer is an episode that is not even funny, which is rare for a series that is primarily meant to be a comedy. Season three, episode fourteen “My Screw Up” (which aired February 24, 2004), is not part of the usual formula that fans of Scrubs are not familiar with, for it sets aside the jokes and laughs and brings to light a real-life issue that everyone will eventually have to face within their lives and that is the issue of grief and loss. “It’s a brilliant and heartbreaking episode, one that tells a story about grief and loss without fully revealing the magnitude of that loss until the very end.” (A.V Club) “There isn’t really a sitcom we can remember that deals with issues like mortality and our relationship to it with as much tact as Scrubs” (Halden 10 Best Episodes of Scrubs).
Winner of nine Emmy Awards and twenty-eight nominations. There was much criticism surrounding the finale of the series. Many fans were upset with the ending and many claimed that they “wanted the last nine years of their lives back”. Critics both agreed and disagreed. Viewers were torn on how to feel about the finale. There was a question of whether a seemingly bad finale could in fact ruin the series in its entirety. Thankfully this was not the case. Whether you loved or hated the finale How I Met Your Mother will remain one of the most remembered shows of the decade.
The joint production of BBC and HBO series Extras began in 2005 and won a Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical in 2008. Ricky Gervais wrote, directed, and starred in this series, along with creative partner who also worked with him on The Office. The series highlights characters Andy Millman, who is always pushing to get past his roles as an extra, and land actual parts on his next job. Each episode features a different celebrity, or guest star, playing exaggerated versions of themselves to emphasize the world Andy is aspiring to enter. Although it is compared to The Office because of Ricky Gervais’ role as David Brent, the San Francisco Review states, it was still “fabulously funny while being both delightfully and insightfully cruel. ‘Extras’ was one of the precious few funny sitcoms on television anywhere during its run.”
“Ms. Louis-Deyfus is one of the funniest women on network television. If anyone can break the ‘Seinfeld’ curse, it should be the actress who played Elaine.” Starting a new series after the so-called, “curse of Seinfeld,” was a big step for “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. (Louis-Dreyfus starred in Watching Ellie before this. It failed.) Louis-Dreyfus starred in Seinfeld as Elaine, one of Seinfeld’s best friends. Louis-Dreyfus in The New Adventures of Old Christine plays a single, working mother in California who is friendly with her ex-husband. She soon finds that he is involved with another young woman also named Christine. This year, the show won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
