I very fondly remember Dinosaurs (which was AWESOME), Step by Step and Family Matters (Urkel!!).

Not exactly a sitcom, but I really liked the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Man those were great!

I remember hating (with much passion) Full House, disliking Growing Pains, and loathing Roseanne, which my brother liked and forced me to watch 'cause he could beat me up for control of the tv.

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Dinosaurs drove me absolutely mad... yet i watched it. i'm exactly sure why i kept watching it... but i did.

i use to hate Roseanne when i was younger. now that i'm older i actually get it and like it. Plus Darleen was/is hot.

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I actually liked "Roseanne", although I never watched it regularly. I never liked the show's divergences into drama, though.

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Really? Young Indiana Jones? I thought the entire point of them was to retroactively turn Indiana Jones into a complete pussy? They made such a gonk out of him in those that you almost want to slap him for what he was, or give him a medal for turning out cool after growing up as that guy.
I still maintain that Raiders of the Lost Ark would have ended the same way if Indy had stayed home and had a cup of tea, though.

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My parents preferred the hourlong dramas that competed with the sitcoms, so I never developed a taste for the sitcom format. I am addicted to procedural dramas now.

I hatehatehate the "doofus-schmuck-husband with attractive-competent-wife" trope that keeps showing up--Home Improvement, Everybody Loves Raymond (except me godwhywon'theDIE?), King of Queens.

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I hate that trope, but that's why I hated Roseanne, too. Seriously, who would't want to leave that house as soon as possible? She was an obnoxious, grating twit and aside from saying mean things to her husband and kids, she wasn't funny.

Personally, I wanted the cast of The Cosby Show to contact the cast of Roseanne and annihilate each other explosively.

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See, that trope, I think, has its genesis in "The Cosby Show" too - or at least really got stuck in the cultural landscape because of Cliff Huxtable.

And while 'men's rights' groups (and Orson Scott Card) can whine all they want about the degrading of the American father figure, what's really going on is frankly damaging to perceptions of women. I mean, not only has it been, ever since classical Greek times, safe to mock the powerful in popular entertainment, but also what does Tim Allen and Ray Romano teach husbands - it's okay to be lazy around the house, because that's just what your all-useful wife expects?

Bah. Give me Homer Simpson and Peter Griffen any day.

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I'm not big on sitcoms, overall. I can't think of any that I watch now, apart from "Seinfeld" reruns. The only TGIF-era sitcoms I watched with anything approaching regularity were "Roseanne" and "Perfect Strangers". Both jumped the shark (well, let's be fair; they all did, eventually), but before they did, they were brilliant, in a lot of ways.

I only watched the first two seasons of "The Cosby Show" before I realized I was watching the Black Brady Bunch: a gaggle of wisecracking kids, coupled with a pair of tut-tutting, all too understanding adults. And don't get me started on Raven Symone. *cringe*

The rest were more or less nonentities to me. Most of them conflicted with some geeky sci-fi show I was hooked on at the time. "Full House" was ruined because of the Olsen Factor. (Yeah, I even thought they were odious when they were babies. I'm a bad, bad man.) "Family Matters" was just a half-hour of bone-grating annoyance. Urkel was probably the most obnoxious sitcom character since J.J. Evans.

I miss Ellen, and I will always miss The Drew Carey Show.

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The more I read your stuff, the more I like you. Like me, you appear to like your comedy to have a bit of a mean streak. :-)

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Thanks...and right back at you :).

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I loved the Drew Carey show. Like Roseanne it jumped the shark after a bit, but was very similar in tweaking a formula.

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Agreed. Drew took the sitcom idea and spun it around blindfolded. Plus, most of the characters were like people I've known in real life (even Mimi). And I thought the April Fool's Day episodes were genius.

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It's a terrible injustice that "Everyone Loves Raymond" gets heavy syndication but not stuff that's actually original and dynamic like "The Drew Carey Show" or "3rd Rock from the Sun."

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you make me feel so damned old

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Awww, I'm sorry...

I'm sure, though, it will be my turn soon enough.

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without a doubt ;)

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I hated Family Matters. /shiver

i was a huge fan of Salute Your Shorts and Round House. Other Nick shows that I dug was Guts and Dare... and Double Dare. I also watched 90210 with my sister and Mother every Wednesday evening.

my favoriate show ever was Pee Wee's Play House.

i was a product of 'sit and watch tv while your dad and i are out.' i watched a lot of TV as a kid.

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I liked "Salute Your Shorts" too...and, of course, the ever brilliant "Pete & Pete"!

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pete and pete season one should be out soon. i loved that show.

the strongest man... in the world

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You know my proclivities.

I loved Roseanne. I loved Perfect Strangers too, in a vastly different way. I remember watching step by step and family matters because I thought they MUST be joking. (They weren't)

Full House should have international laws preventing it from reaching the eyes of the general viewing public.

TGIF was one of the reasons I hated shows about quirky instances in the lives of your average family/group of friends. I watched a few, but I switched from cartoons to X-files in terms of what I always made time to watch.


GOLDEN GIRLZ 4 EVA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Plus: I had a tremendous love for Third Rock From the Sun.

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ME TOO!!!!

i loved the female characters on that show. jane curtin was totally brilliant and awesome, sally had an awesome 'tude and a bodaciouos bod, and that one chick the youngest kid dated was cool. not alex mac, the first one. i remember her being real snarky and damned smart.

did anyone else really like cybil?

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Cybil was awesome to the x-teme. Maryann ruled and Zoey was great as well as hotter than the lovehole of Aphrodite.

It's also the closest America could ever get to producing an Ab Fab, points there too.

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I really liked "Cybil". I think I didn't really appreciate it, but I did watch it semi-regularly.

I also really liked "Murphy Brown" and I think I owe a great deal of my liberalism to it.

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I liked Alex Mack. Mrs. R and myself used to watch it in the mornings in the summer, then we would go out to the Fry Bar and get them to fry up some bananas for us. Ah, good times.

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"The Simpsons" parodies of sitcoms are always dead-on ("Don't Go There" and "Ethnic Mismatch Comedy #4081); it seems just as true today as it did then.

Ooh, and how can I forget "Golden Girls"! Usually I didn't like comedies that mixed in drama, but "Golden Girls" and "Roseanne" were both exceptions.

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you know, it's funny, because up until recently i actually thought something was WRONG with me for not liking full house or the cosby show. i'd always get these incredulous looks like "what is your PROBLEM!!>??! you don't like the cosby show/full house? what are you, racist/a goth child-hater???" it's been nice to come to terms with the fact that i am neither, and just had good taste, even as a wee tyke. i think perhaps we could both see through the bullshit and realize that no family EVER has been that perfect, and if they were, they'd be boring as hell.

that said, i did watch my share of crap tv, but most of it was on nickelodeon. i think we once talked about how i would pretty much watch everything that came on that station-- both brilliant and mind-numbingly retarded (legends of the hidden temple, what would you do?, wild & crazy kids.....)

also i watched family matters. i have no excuse for that, really. GOD i loved that show.

oh!!! and there was a period of time when i was a religious boy meets world viewer. that show was pretty fucking terrible from the beginning, but i had this massive bewildering-in-retrospect crush on rider strong, you see.

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You were far from alone, mon ami.

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Yeah, my tastes weren't perfect. I admit confessing to you that I really had a fondness for "The Facts of Life."

I think our 'deal' was that we're just not inclined toward escapist entertainment. I just can't fathom why anyone wants to go seeing the Huxtables are living a much better (and much nicer) life than yours when you can laugh at and about things and people you can actually, you know, relate to.

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I may have liked Cosby when it started out, but I was young then and had no taste.

It's been years since I've seen a comedy show I liked well enough to make an effort to watch on a regular basis, and even then, it was mostly workplace comedies. SportsNight and Newsradio were the last TV comedies I actually cared about. Scrubs and Malcolm have been OK when I've seen them, but I never could stomach an entire episode of Friends or Seinfeld.

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"Friends" I'm totally with you, but I'm a huge "Seinfeld" fan, to be honest. And "Newsradio" rocked my socks - hopefully they'll push the whole series out on DVD, although I can't exactly afford DVD box sets right now.

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Oh, and "Full House"...that show should be registered under psychological torture devices.

Amen.

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In some states, I think it is so qualified.

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Log up another in the "you make me feel old" camp. My favorites were M*A*S*H and Sanford and Son (really!) when I was a kid. I later learned that the original M*A*S*H movie was vastly superior to the show, but it was imprinted at an early age.

My perspective is skewed too, because our local PBS station began showing Monty Python's Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers sometime in the '80s, and after that American comedy seemed vacuous and lame. My entire week, though, revolved around staying up late on Friday nights and watching SCTV. Not a sitcom, but gutwrenchingly funny.

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