Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

PC has nothing at all to do with it for me. Just my opinion: the show is horrible with bad writing and overacting (including Ritter).

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

I've only seen a handful of episodes over the years (it was before my time), and this is was my take away as well.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

Ritter was a good sport about it!

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Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

I would have just said "it's gonna suck", but I get where you're coming from.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

Most US Sitcoms. Two and a Half Men, Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens, Modern Family....the list is almost endless. The UK has its fair share as well. Hi-de-hi, Are You Being Served, It Aint Arf Half Mum, Last of the Summer Wine, Allo Allo, Sorry.....and thats just the tip of the iceberg.

I tend to hate comedies that have idiot, sorry i mean Laugh tracks added to them. Moronic comedy for the moron who needs prodding to know when to laugh.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

Surely you understand that there's a distinction between "bad" and "worst of all time" though, right? Even if you think 90% of all sitcoms are bad, 90% of all shows can't be the "worst of all time." There's some that are worse than others.

Of the US sitcoms you mentioned, none have laugh tracks. Two and a Half Men, Everybody Loves Raymond, and King of Queens were all recorded in front of a live studio audience, so the laughter was there when the show was recorded, not added later.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

And of course Modern Family doesn't have an audience or laugh track.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

I also don't think most people care if it's a live audience, a pure laugh track, or a combo of the two. The point is that any sit-com is that much worse when you got what people generically call "the laugh track" bringing down every episode. And I agree with them. So many great comedies never had any of it, and it really makes even the better shows that do, really stick out as some what worse because of them.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

I personally care, because I don't think a live audience necessarily "brings down" a show. Are late night talk shows brought down by a live audience? Is Saturday Night Live? How about the live episodes of 30 Rock?

Live audiences in comedy traces back to radio, where they did the same, back further to vaudeville. Even movies originally weren't without audience laughter; that was provided spontaneously by everyone in the movie theater. It wasn't until theatrical comedies were shown on TV that people experienced comedies without audience laughter.

There are some really smart, clever shows that make good use of audience laughter and the 3 camera setup. I enjoy a good amount of single camera, laughter free shows too, and I do abhor an inserted laugh track, but I feel that dismissing all audible laughter in sitcoms, whether real or fake, is a bit snobbish.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

A lot of great sitcoms never had them, true, but the ones widely considered the best sitcoms of all time did have them.

Seinfeld, Cheers, Friends, Frasier and Married With Children to name a few.

It may be an antiquated practice to use a laugh track/live audience these days but I'm hard pressed to agree that the shows I mentioned above were made any worse by having it.

My opinion on laugh tracks has always been that if a show is good enough, you won't realize that it's there. It's the shows that aren't funny that make the laugh track unbearable.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

Well, some canned laugh tracks can call attention to themselves, especially when they repeat the same canned laugh throughout the episode, not even going with a wide variety of canned laughs. You start noticing the same laugh being used over and over. Like on this clip from the Flintstones:

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

To be more specific, is that I think that over time more awesome shows went without it became how clear how much it sticks out when they are there. I didn't post that I don't enjoy the classics that have them, but I certainly would like them better if they were gone. And that's the point. Now that it's obvious that they are not needed, they are not wanted.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

This comparison deserves a laugh track.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

Or the one guy who literally "yuks" in the Brady Bunch laugh track. Once you hear it, you can help but notice it every single joke.

I'll also defend Mama's Family. Back in the 70s\early 80s, it was common for a home to have one "good TV", usually in the living room. As the dad got raises and promotions, a new (bigger) TV would replace the living room TV, and the now "second-best TV" would get moved to the parent's bedroom, and their existing bedroom TV would be moved to the basement, guest room, garage, or - if you were lucky - one of the kid's rooms. And a lot of kids weren't allowed in their parent's room or the guest room. Point is, a lot of homes only had one decent TV, and since you were a kid, you watched what your parents wanted to watch. My mom was a huge Carol Burnett fan, and, by extension, loved Mama's Family. It was amusing for its time, hardly the worst sitcom of all time. Has it aged well? I haven't seen it in 30+ years, but my guess would be "certainly not". But I think a lot of people under 30 don't get that, growing up in the 70s, if your parents wanted to watch Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons and Mama's Family, your choice, as a kid, was to watch those shows too, or just do something else. And even if you didn't like Little House, it wasn't like you could just flip the channel to Better Call Saul or Fargo... the other two networks weren't much better. Even cable TV wasn't that great in the late 70s: mostly ancient reruns or "that same fucking movie HBO has already run 200 times this month".

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

I have no problem if you didn't like it, but it was intentionally written to be stupid and John Ritter's characters was supposed to be over the top, along with Suzanne Somers being a total ditz (she got dumber each new season). In a sense, Three's Company was the first show about nothing (before Seinfeld coined the phrase in 1992). It was a far fetched premise with a far fetched plot every week that revolved around all of the characters totally misunderstanding the situation they were in by walking in at the wrong moment. Either you got it and loved it like me, or didn't get it and didn't find it remotely funny like yourself.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

There were also far fewer options, so many people watched crap like Mama's Family simply because it might have been the best option that night, in that time slot.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

Strongly agree, it was always weird to me how that seems to be a common complaint these days when it wasn't a problem before.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

The word you're looking for is "farce."

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

When I was a kid there was a color tv in the livingroom, and a black and white portable in parent's bedroom.
After supper the kids would hit the livingroom to watch tv, the parents the bedroom. At 9pm(8 central) we were shuffled off to bed and the parents took over the livingroom tv.
On Friday and Saturday nights the parents always went out and the kids had the livingroom tv all night.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

Your parents were way too accommodating. When my parents wanted to watch TV, they did so in the living room; the kids were relegated to the basement with the older color TV with channel knobs that would have to "warm up" before it showed an image (and you'd sometimes have to press the reset button on the back to jumpkick it).

When we were older, we had the luxury of a "portable" 13" B&W that we could wheel between bedrooms. I believe I first watched Citizen Kane on that TV at something like 3 am in the morning.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

When we were young there was one B&W TV. Then we went to color but we were the last ones of the people we know to get a color TV. My parents had a 13" B&W in the bedroom at some point and I had to go in there to watch anything I wanted to watch. I remember being relegated to the parents bedroom for The Odd Couple for a season or two before they caught on.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

By the time I was 10, the TVs in my house had filtered down such that I had a 5" (yes, 5") Sony B&W in my room. Mom would send us to bed between 10 and 10:30, and I'd usually read until 11:30, when Carson came on. One fateful night, I dozed off during Carson and woke up to some new show... Late Night with David Letterman. I guess a lotta posters are too young to remember, but Letterman was the goddamn KING of late night in the early 80s. Good times!

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

For the longest time, we only had one TV in the house. In a 6th grade raffle, I won a radio with TV station tuning, and finally had an option to at least listen to my shows when it wasn't my turn with our living room set.

Re: Worst sitcoms of all time
 

Yeah, I agree too. Certain laugh tracks are worse than others but for the most part none are so bad that they ruin a show for me. A bunch of older shows that I like have them so it's something I'm used to I guess.