NEW & IMPROVED What's on TV, ILX? It's the American Sitcom Tournament Round 1/Group 3

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Whine down, there.

Frasier, Sports Night, That '70s Show, Good Times for me.

Ditto.

The Addams Family, One Day at a Time, The Beverly Hillbillies, Mork & Mindy

ha i am yer opposite in every way

dont really give a shit about the bev hillbillies but fuuuuuck that 70's show what a terrible piece of shit

mork and mindy getting just barely the edge thx to jonathon winters

That's Orson to you, pal.

Addams Family over Frasier makes no sense to me at all. Cognitive dissonance. I'm betting on Frasier this round and probably the one after it, too. A staple.

Wait, Jonathan Winters wasn't Orson. Orson was just a voice. Jonathan Winters was... someone else that I don't remember very well.

Addams, One Day, Hillbillies, Good Times

Frasier, One Day, That 70s show, Good Times. One Day at a Time mostly because I loved it as a kid, no doubt I'd think it was steamy crap if I saw it now. Remember little about Good Times and liked M&M much more at the time, but in retrospect one can see in it everything that made Robin Williams awful later, so Good Times.

Frasier, Sports Night, That '70s Show, Good Times.

Sports Night is my favorite sitcom ever.

Mork & Mindy definitely had its selling points (Pam Dawber, yowza!), but it was basically just a vehicle for Robin Williams to act a fool. Good Times kind of became the same thing for Jimmy Walker toward the end of its run, but it had several really good years before that happened.

How anyone can enjoy an episode of Frasier is beyond me.

As mentioned in a previous thread, Frasier is classic farce. The closest American tv has gotten to one since Three's Company. Even if you have a particular distaste for the actors/characters, you should at least concede that it did what it did quite well.

How anyone can enjoy an episode of Frasier is beyond me.

I don't think we'd get along very well.

Yes, farce. It's very theatrical, lots of wordplay, lots of one-liners, loads of absurdity, and it's exceptionally sharply written. One of the best sitcoms ever, even if (and possibly because?) it doesn't quite fit the mold of American sitcoms.

Never quite got the Roz character, though. There are all these jokes about how she's this big slut, but the character is never played that way at all. Were they afraid that if they made the slutty character act... I dunno... SLUTTY... they'd get too many angry letters?

I think the Roz thing is just something that wouldn't be funny if we'd actually seen it. The humor comes from Roz being a perfectly normal-seeming person, but having a reputation counter to the one we know.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

bump

Frasier was better than Cheers. Addams Family is interesting but ultimately annoying/negligible. My Mother the Car is probably a better show...or the one portraying a nuclear family of humans raising chimpanzees.

Have been witness to wise people repping for Sports Night, but I've never actually seen it. Will go with One Day at a Time. Schneider, Bonnie, Valerie & Mackenzie, wow.

That 70's Show was actually funny for the first half-dozen or so episodes.

Good Times, Mork & Mindy is a tough one!

the one portraying a nuclear family of humans raising chimpanzees

Ooh! I have a vague recollection of this show. What was it called?

The Hathaways aired from October 1961 until August 1962 on ABC.

The Hathaways were a family of 5, all of them wearing normal clothes and eating together at the same table, but only 2 of them were people. Walter Hathaway ( Jack Weston), was a real-estate agent and Elinore ( Peggy Cass), was his wife. Charlie, Enoch, and Cindy were chimps-the Marquis Chimps-and very bright chimps at that. Elinore, besides treating them like her children, was the booking agent for their show business act, which included riding bicycles and making faces. ( They also had a formal talent agent named Jerry Roper played by Harvey Lembeck). Walter had mixed emotions about the whole arrangement, wondering if the chimps meant more to his wife than he did, and their suburban neighbors also had some difficulty adjusting to " the kids next door." One of the neighbors was played by Belle Montrose, the mother of comedian Steve Allen.

hype hype

xp The Hathaways doesn't sound familiar as a title at all. Of course, who knows where or when I even saw it, so that very well could be the one I'm thinking of.

Frasier was better than Cheers.

aw. so so so so RONG.

if both were on at the same time, i'd take frasier tho

really? there's some great performances in frasier, but the scripts devolved to predictable farce pretty early on, and the cheers characters are deeper.

am a total cheers stan tho, so...

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

i like mid-era cheers: end of diane and beginning of rebecca were kind of like friends w/ more compelling characters and funnier joeks. prior to that the show got a little sloppy-maudlin from time to time (i.e. the whole coach stuff), and afterward it devolved into predictable 'wacky hijinks.' there was a good sweet-spot, tho.

Low turnout! Boo.

Frasier - 23
The Addams Family - 23

Sports Night - 26
One Day at a Time - 20

The Beverly Hillbillies - 17
That '70s Show - 29

Good Times - 26
Mork & Mindy - 20

How do we settle a tie? Runoff or some other method?

Substitute! They're both dead, a new challenger steps up to take their place.

Using iatee's # of mentions w/in the thread tiebreaker, Frasier wins 13 to 5 over Addams Family. So Frasier it is!