The sitcom is the most restrictive format in television. Twenty-two minutes. A handful of standing sets. A cast that has to be recognisably the same people next week. It is a sonnet, not a novel — and like the sonnet, the constraints are exactly why the good ones are so good.
What separates a great sitcom from a merely popular one is usually a single structural idea. Seinfeld's was refusing to teach anybody anything. The Office's was letting the camera be a character. Fleabag's was letting you become the character's accomplice. Everything else — the jokes, the cast chemistry, the theme song you can hum on command — follows from that one decision.
Here are twenty-five sitcoms that earned their place, grouped by what they actually did.
The Foundations
The shows the rest of the list is arguing with.
Cheers
Network: NBC · Years: 1982–1993 · Seasons: 11
Almost cancelled after a first season that finished close to the bottom of the ratings, Cheers went on to become one of the defining shows in American television and produced a finale that drew one of the largest audiences of its decade.
Its innovation was the bar itself — a single set where anyone could plausibly walk in, which solved the sitcom's oldest problem of how to introduce new people into a closed world. Almost every "hangout" sitcom since is descended from it, and its spin-off did something almost unheard of by outliving its parent in critical esteem.
Seinfeld
Network: NBC · Years: 1989–1998 · Seasons: 9
The show that broke the rules on purpose. Larry David's famous internal mandate — no hugging, no learning — meant characters never grew, never became better people, and were never rewarded for kindness. The final episode literally puts them on trial for it.
Seinfeld's other invention was scale: entire episodes built from things too small to be plots, like waiting for a table, losing a car in a parking garage, or the etiquette of a shared bowl of dip. It proved that the sitcom didn't need a story, only a premise and four people who were slightly worse than you.
Frasier
Network: NBC · Years: 1993–2004 · Seasons: 11
The most technically accomplished writing in sitcom history. Frasier took a supporting character from Cheers and built a farce engine around him — mistaken identities, escalating deceptions, doors, and dialogue that assumed the audience had a vocabulary.
It won 37 Emmys, including five consecutive Outstanding Comedy Series awards, and it did it while being about class anxiety, sibling rivalry and a man who cannot stop being pompous even when it is destroying his life. Almost nothing since has trusted its audience as much.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
Network: NBC · Years: 1990–1996 · Seasons: 6
A fish-out-of-water premise delivered with a cold open that an entire generation can still recite from memory. Its lasting significance is how casually it slid serious material — class, race, absent fathers — into a broad family comedy without ever announcing that it was doing something important.
The scene where Will asks why his father doesn't want him is still the standard by which sitcom dramatic turns are measured.
Everybody Loves Raymond
Network: CBS · Years: 1996–2005 · Seasons: 9
The last great traditional multi-camera family sitcom, and an unusually honest one. Its subject was not wacky misunderstandings but the low-grade, permanent friction of an extended family living too close together — in-laws across the street, a marriage negotiating the same argument for a decade.
It is the least fashionable show on this list and one of the most accurately observed.
The Workplace Era
The 2000s discovered that the office is a family you didn't choose, and the single-camera mockumentary gave it a new grammar.
The Office (US)
Network: NBC · Years: 2005–2013 · Seasons: 9
Adapted from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's much bleaker British original, the American version made one crucial change: it decided to love its characters. Michael Scott is a disaster, but the show grants him competence and dignity in exactly the moments that matter.
The documentary conceit does the heavy lifting — a look directly into the lens replaces a punchline, and the audience becomes a co-conspirator. Two decades on, it remains one of the most-streamed comedies in the world, largely powering an entire generation's background-noise viewing habit.
Parks and Recreation
Network: NBC · Years: 2009–2015 · Seasons: 7
Started as an Office clone and became its philosophical opposite. Where The Office mined humour from apathy, Parks and Rec built its comedy on a protagonist who cares enormously about something small and unglamorous — local government in a mid-size Indiana town.
Its bet was that sincerity could be funnier than cynicism, and it won. The modern wave of warm, kind-hearted comedy essentially starts here.
30 Rock
Network: NBC · Years: 2006–2013 · Seasons: 7
The densest joke-per-minute rate ever attempted in American television. Tina Fey's sketch-show satire ran on absurdist cutaways, corporate parody and a willingness to abandon realism entirely if a better gag was available.
It is the sitcom that rewards rewatching most, because roughly a third of its jokes go past too fast to catch the first time.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Network: FOX / NBC · Years: 2013–2021 · Seasons: 8
A police procedural parody with an unusually well-engineered ensemble — every character is funny in a distinct register, which is much harder than it looks. Cancelled by Fox after five seasons and picked up by NBC within a day following a public outcry, it is one of the very few genuine fan-rescue stories in television.
Its later seasons took on the uncomfortable question of what it means to make a warm comedy about policing, with mixed but sincere results.
The Big Bang Theory
Network: CBS · Years: 2007–2019 · Seasons: 12
The most commercially successful sitcom of its era by a distance, and the most critically contested show on this list. Twelve seasons, an enormous global audience, and a laugh track in a decade when the laugh track had been declared dead.
Whatever your position on it, it demonstrated that the traditional multi-camera format was not obsolete — just unfashionable.
The Cult Classics
Shows that were under-watched at the time and became canon later.
Arrested Development
Network: FOX / Netflix · Years: 2003–2019 · Seasons: 5
Cancelled after three seasons for the entirely predictable reason that it was too complicated for a mass audience. Its structure is closer to a farce novel than a sitcom — running gags planted seasons in advance, narration that argues with the characters, jokes that only resolve on a third viewing.
It is the most influential low-rated comedy ever made, and the Netflix revival is best treated as optional.
Community
Network: NBC / Yahoo · Years: 2009–2015 · Seasons: 6
A sitcom about a study group that used its premise as an excuse to make a different kind of television every week: a paintball western, a stop-motion Christmas special, a documentary parody, an episode that splits into six parallel timelines.
Its fandom's rallying cry — "six seasons and a movie" — went from a joke inside the show to an actual outcome, which is the most Community thing that could possibly have happened.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Network: FX / FXX · Years: 2005–present · Seasons: 16+
The longest-running live-action American sitcom, made for almost no money in its first season and never once asking the audience to like anybody in it. If Seinfeld's rule was no hugging and no learning, Sunny's is that its characters get actively worse every year.
Its durability is the joke: two decades of five people failing to improve in any measurable way.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Network: HBO · Years: 2000–2024 · Seasons: 12
Larry David playing a version of himself, working from outlines rather than scripts with the dialogue improvised on the day. It's Seinfeld's philosophy taken to its logical end — social rules examined, violated, and litigated at length by a man with no incentive to stop.
Its plotting is quietly brilliant: episodes routinely set up four unrelated irritations and then collide all of them in the final two minutes.
The New Guard
Comedy after the sitcom stopped resetting.
Fleabag
Network: BBC / Amazon · Years: 2016–2019 · Seasons: 2
Twelve episodes total, and one of the most complete pieces of television anyone has made this century. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's fourth-wall breaks start as a comic device and are gradually revealed as the show's actual subject — a coping mechanism, a way of narrating your life so you don't have to live inside it.
The second season's central relationship turns that device into the plot itself. When another character notices her doing it, the entire show reframes in one second.
Schitt's Creek
Network: CBC / Pop TV · Years: 2015–2020 · Seasons: 6
Begins as a mean comedy about rich people losing everything and slowly becomes one of the warmest shows ever made, without a visible seam where it changed. The town simply refuses to be cruel, and the family gradually stops being able to sustain contempt against it.
At the 2020 Emmys it swept all seven major comedy categories in a single night — something no comedy had ever done.
The Good Place
Network: NBC · Years: 2016–2020 · Seasons: 4
A sitcom about moral philosophy that is genuinely about moral philosophy — Kant, contractualism, the trolley problem staged literally — while remaining a fast, silly network comedy with a joke rate to match 30 Rock.
Its first-season twist forced the show to reinvent its premise repeatedly, and it chose to end after four seasons rather than dilute the argument. The finale is one of very few in television that earns the word "graceful."
Ted Lasso
Network: Apple TV+ · Years: 2020–2023 · Seasons: 3
An American football coach hired to manage an English club he does not understand, played entirely without irony. It arrived at a moment when audiences were exhausted by cruelty and offered relentless decency instead.
Its second season is braver than its reputation suggests, taking its own sunniness apart and asking whether unbroken optimism is a virtue or a symptom.
Abbott Elementary
Network: ABC · Years: 2021–present · Seasons: 3+
Proof that the mockumentary format still has fuel in it. Quinta Brunson's underfunded Philadelphia public school comedy has the rhythm of The Office and the sincerity of Parks and Rec, plus an actual argument about public education underneath.
It is also the strongest evidence in a decade that network television can still produce a genuine hit comedy.
New Girl and Modern Family
Networks: FOX / ABC · Years: 2011–2018 / 2009–2020
Two shows that made the 2010s network schedule work. New Girl was a loft-share comedy that quietly assembled one of the best ensembles of the decade — its supporting characters eventually outgrew its premise. Modern Family took the mockumentary format mainstream for family audiences and won five consecutive Outstanding Comedy Series Emmys between 2010 and 2014.
The British Contingent
Shows: Only Fools and Horses (BBC, 1981–2003) · Fleabag (BBC, 2016–2019)
Only Fools and Horses is the most beloved sitcom in British history — a Peckham market-trader comedy about two brothers permanently one scheme away from becoming millionaires. Its Christmas specials regularly drew audiences that American networks would consider Super Bowl numbers.
It is also the clearest illustration of the structural difference between British and American comedy: short series, long gaps, definite endings, and a willingness to let the characters remain exactly as trapped at the end as they were at the beginning.
Will & Grace
Network: NBC · Years: 1998–2020 · Seasons: 11
A conventional four-hander that happened to put two gay lead characters into American living rooms weekly at a moment when that was still genuinely unusual on network television. Its cultural significance considerably outweighs its formal innovation, and it is a useful reminder that sitcoms do social work simply by showing up every week for a decade.
The Data
Every show here — network, run years, country and season count — is available as a structured, downloadable dataset.
Related: Best TV Shows of All Time → · Animated TV Shows → · Crime TV Shows →
Settle the Argument
Seinfeld or Frasier. The Office or Parks and Rec. Everyone has a hill. Very few people have a sample size.