Rolling Stones 100 Best TV Sitcoms Of All Time

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10. 'The Larry Sanders Show' (HBO, 1992-1998)

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9. 'Parks and Recreation' (NBC, 2009-2015)

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8. 'The Honeymooners' (CBS, 1955-1956)

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7. 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' (CBS, 1970-1977)

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6. 'M*A*S*H*' (CBS, 1972-1983)

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5. 'All in the Family' (CBS, 1971-1979)

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4. 'I Love Lucy' (CBS, 1951-1957)

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3. 'Seinfeld' (NBC, 1989-1998)Yada yada. Master of your domain. Spongeworthy. Double-dipping. No soup for you! The catchphrases of Seinfeld have so wormed their way into everyday use, they’ve all but consumed the legacy of the rest of the series. Perhaps this is because one of those phrases, “a show about nothing” — from the Season Four arc where Jerry and George pitch a familiar-sounding show-within-the-show to NBC execs — undersells exactly what Seinfeld did so brilliantly. Yes, co-creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David obsessed over ephemera, but they did it with the kind of comic precision the medium had never seen before. In particular, David’s masterstroke was figuring out how to make each episode’s plots collide with one another at the end (like Kramer’s golf game inadvertently helping George play marine biologist) — now among the show’s most-copied (if rarely as well) elements. Seinfeld is the gift that keeps on re-gifting. A.S.

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2. 'Cheers' (NBC, 1982-1993)A girl walks into a bar. Her fiancé strands her there, and she’s condemned to spend her days enduring insults from the other waitress and shameless come-ons from the guy who runs the place. From that simple set-up sprang the best live-action sitcom ever. In its early years, Cheers was an alternately witty and raucous romantic comedy about the unresolved sexual tension between pretentious grad-student-turned-waitress Diane (Shelley Long) and smarmy ex-jock bartender Sam (Ted Danson). The formula was so successful, its will-they-or-won’t-they DNA has been baked into half the shows made since. When Long left to pursue a movie career, and Kirstie Alley arrived as hot mess Rebecca, Cheers nimbly pivoted into an ensemble comedy, understanding that with a cast including Kelsey Grammer, Woody Harrelson, Rhea Perlman, George Wendt, John Ratzenberger, and Bebe Neuwirth, it could make up in volume of punchlines what had been lost in that priceless Long-Danson chemistry. Decades later, sometimes you still want to go where everybody knows your name — and you’ll always be glad you came. A.S.

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1. 'The Simpsons' (Fox, 1989-Present)What else could it be? Some Comic Book Guy types would hold the animated comedy’s second, third, and now fourth (!) decades against it, but we’re not having that. There’s more good material in those later seasons than you’d think (Comic Book Guy himself recently starred in a clever and poignant Wes Anderson homage). Plus, those first 10 years cover so much ground in subject, style, and sheer density of humor, everything after could just be Frank Grimes listing his grievances against Homer, and it still wouldn’t drag the series’ batting average down. What began as a slice-of-life animated family comedy — really, as shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show — soon expanded into a broad social satire that saw Homer (Dan Castellaneta), Marge (Julie Kavner), Bart (Nancy Cartwright), Lisa (Yeardley Smith), and Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor!) traveling the globe, and occasionally orbiting it, mixing it up with ex-presidents, Hollywood celebrities, and homicidal kids’ show sidekicks. The sweep of the series has become so wide, and its jokes have cut so deep, that there is a Simpsons meme for nearly every topic imaginable (Homer backing into the bushes; “Old Man Yells at Cloud”), and not just because the show has been accidentally prescient about so many things, like the Trump presidency. In its early days, The Simpsons was condemned by conservatives as the show that was going to destroy Western civilization. Instead, no show will be a better artifact of what that civilization was like on either side of the millennial divide. A.S.

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