Best US Sitcom of the 1970s

The two best sitcoms of the 1970s were Barney Miller and WKRP. Start over.

can't believe Chico and the Man didn't make the cut

I have recently realized that Newhart's schtick = Porky Pig + pants

(voted the Bob Newhart show obviously)

that's only if you reduce BN to the stammer

the show was more about "listening to nuts chatter on and on"

my rankings, sanford & son is probably tops for laughs/minute

The Mary Tyler Moore Show
All in the Family
The Bob Newhart Show
Sanford and Son
The Odd Couple
The Jeffersons
Maude
M*A*S*H
Happy Days
Good Times
Laverne & Shirley

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5243/5258630464_3b5cd40375.jpg

the show was more about "listening to nuts chatter on and on"

absolutely, his 1st and 2nd shows are incredible ensemble comedies

list seems too arbitrary and short

golden age of us tv sitcom and you leave out popular ones (e.g., brady bunch), yet don't include the lesser known ones like co-ed fever and the flying nun

also why leave out que pasa usa?

not sitcom per se, but i'd throw in ghost busters

just remembered the fitzpatricks, not a sitcom though

Brady Bunch and Flying Nun debuted in the 1960s and Qué Pasa USA in 1977, thus outside of my parameters.

Barney Miller is a legit oversight - I didn't realize it was that old - so if you love that show just declare it the winner in your head and vote on what's on the ballot

ha! bb debuted sept 1969

didn't realise flying nun debuted in the mid-60s

sorry you need to re-do the poll .

this always comes down to AitF vs MTM for me, and while MTM hit its peak in its last 2 seasons (6&7), AitF was consistently well crafted in seasons 2 thru 5 or so while being revolutionary in themes and dialogue. So that one.

gtfo w/ the camp-juvenile garbage

Miller doesn't debut til Jan '75 and that's really like a different era from AitF four years earlier. Also, it's a very nicely executed show but nowhere as ambitious or great as the best of the early '70s.

WKRP, you booger.

Gotta be one of the Norman Lears, but hard to pick which one. AitF for "best," Maude for "favorite."

Fun fact: Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, AitF, and MASH all aired on the same (Friday?) night, one right after the other.

Can't think of any other concentration of sitcoms that approaches that...maybe Cosby, Family Ties, Cheers, and Night Court (aired Thursdays)...

Saturday night

newhart was a genius, i recently discovered his early standup albums and they're gloriously well-paced, gentle, funny

i guess i'd vote for his show, tho i'd happily rewatch almost all of these

^I just watched the first season of Newhart during a five-day stretch of having a °103 fever; it was the only thing that didnt seem completely nightmarish under the circumstances. Bob is pretty much a master of comedic craft.

the MTM/Newhart Saturday night double-header is all-time of course. but back then I probably derived more pleasure/laughs from funky Fred Sanford tho I doubt it's aged as well. voting Bob.

which 70s sitcom had the best supporting cast? TS: Mr. Carlson vs Bubba vs Ted Baxter

"I want my daddy's records!"

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All I know for sure is that the Garry Marshall shows are hot garbage (maybe not The Odd Couple, since I really haven't seen enough to judge). I'm hard-pressed to think of a sitcom with a more unlikeable cast of characters than Laverne & Shirley.

LOL @ "I want my Daddy's records!" I recently watched S&S Seasons 2 and 3, including that ep, and I'd say they hold up like crazy. Lots of brilliance in acting and script. Season 3 has those few episodes where Grady basically takes over Fred's role when Redd Foxx was on strike and that gets a little contrived but there's still enough laughs to carry it through.

The Odd Couple I kind of took for granted for a long time, thinking of it as decent-to-good, but watching it now I see that it's very special and yes, seemingly on a whole different level than Gary Marshall's other stuff. The timing between Randall and Klugman is consistently perfection and the best episodes often have movie-like plotting. One favorite episode is the one where Felix gets fussy about the location of his cemetery plot (Season 2).

Btw CBS's amazing Saturday night would always conclude with The Carol Burnett Show

Write in for Monty Python and Faulty Towers. American 70s sitcoms kind of sucked, tbh.

well one of those isn't a sitcom, but yes fawlty towers is better than most shows

How was "Archie Bunker's Place"? I used to watch it before Alice and The Jeffersons.

it was basically All in the Family - Mike & Gloria + Marty Balsam for the first year, and then a pretty humdrum workplace comedy after Stapleton left. I stopped watching before he adopted the pubescent Jewish girl.

Archie, that is

Oh, then you missed the episodes where he became a small town police chief in the Deep South.

has to be Bob Newhart, All in the Family, or MASH. Can't decide. Thank you for not putting Three's Company in here.

Wonder if Soap holds up at all.

Three's Company is a different era, debuted in 1977

http://images-cdn.moviepilot.com/image/upload/c_fill,h_200,w_285/t_mp_quality_gif/happy-birthday-norman-fell-319247.gif

American 70s sitcoms kind of sucked, tbh.

I am challenged by this opinion

voted MTM but Newhart was just as good

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/8c/13/6f/8c136f036ea5f92e65f1e399b275fd31.jpg

Missing so many, plus the cutoff makes no sense to me. I don't get why 1976 is OK and 1977 is somehow a totally different era. These shows all coexisted in my youth along with:

Chico and the Man
What's Happening
Different Strokes
Silver Spoons
Facts of Life
One Day at a Time
Family Ties
WKRP
Taxi
Harper Valley PTA
Beverly Hillbillies
Gilligan's Island

And they were typically arranged in pairs:

Chico/Sanford
Alice/One Day
Strokes/Spoons
Good Times/What's Happening
Happy Days/Laverne
WKRP/Taxi
Hillbillies/Gilligan

And as the afternoon wore on, the one-hour shows also arrived in pairs, e.g. Love Boat/Fantasy Island

Why has Eazy posted a pic of John Stapleton?

We can do a separate poll for the late '70s crop. I feel if a show arguably peaked in the '80s (WKRP, Taxi, Facts of Life…) that's not the same vintage as the ones on the ballot.

One thing that changed was the institution of the "Family Viewing Hour" rule in the Fall of 1975, under which you could no longer put adult-oriented themes in the 8-9pm EST slot. It was legally repealed in 1977 yet the custom sort of tacitly continued, resulting in a bit of dumbing down of programming. I think if you take a broad look at it, you can see how the new shows of 1976-77 and after are of generally more frivolous nature than the more challenging ones of the prior era.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show, then All in the Family. I liked WKRP but don't think it measured up to those two.

apparently One Day at a Time is being rebooted w/ a Latino cast

I saw it maybe once or twice, ditto many other non-Lear or MTM Productions shows mentioned above. WKRP seemed utterly mediocre to me.

roughly speaking, the '71-76 shows (led by AiTF) attempted to bring new levels of 'real' comedy to the format -- as has been thoroughly written about, CBS didn't want Mary Richards to be single aka boyfriendless (AND by implication, occasionally having sex with dates) cuz they weren't sure there was an audience for such a character.

I feel if a show arguably peaked in the '80s (WKRP, Taxi, Facts of Life…) that's not the same vintage as the ones on the ballot.

M*A*S*H ranked No. 3 show of the 1982-83 season. No. 4 of the 1980-81 season.

Taxi

Cool that u can fp a poll tho!

yeah M*A*S*H was a habit by the early '80s, all the characters had turned into Alan Alda; boring.

70's sitcoms ruled over 80's sitcoms, IMO. the 80's stuff got watered down, milquetoast, and not very challenging, at least until Rosanne and Married with Children. For every Cheers there are a dozen Perfect Strangers.

"not sitcom per se, but i'd throw in ghost busters"

what, that awful cartoon version with the gorilla? WTF.

Perfect strangers wasn't that much better than cheers!

also, what about the Partridge Family? that started in 1970. it also sucked. Brady Bunch forever (which I guess started in 69 so doesn't count)

"Perfect strangers wasn't that much better than cheers!

― Ecomigrant gnomics (darraghmac),"

either you are being funny or you really misunderstood me

i don't buy this didactic stuff

i wanna be entertained

The first three seasons of "The Cosby Show" are as good as any '70s sitcom that isn't All in the Family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_Busters

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/91/The_Ghost_Busters_%28TV_series%29_cast_photo.jpg

need toxic cleanup funding for this thread

didn't know Neil Young was in a sitcom!

xpost

I watched most of this list regularly as a kid. Rewatching now I just can't stand Happy Days or Laverne and Shirley (or Welcome Back Kotter, 1975 and not listed here.) I also watched Odd Couple and Newhart but never really connected with them, they were just something that was on.

Tie for All in the Family and MTM for me, although most recently I've been watching a number of MASH reruns, a program I didn't watch as much when it was new, and really enjoying them.

I've seen about half of these, I think the next era of US sitcoms was better represented on UK television (subject to regional variations, i.e. the dreaded announcement, "Viewers in *insert UK region* have their own programme")

As far as I'm aware, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, Maude were never been shown on British television. Have seen the Bob Newhart Show, but only later ones. All in the Family and Laverne & Shirley were shown fitfully. Mary Tyler Moore I don't really remember, though I'm pretty sure it was on - I remember Rhoda pretty being popular though. I don't know what Good Times is.

(... and I only know about Maude and The Jeffersons from references in Family Guy tbh)

MASH was such a blind spot for me--didn't watch it very often, didn't like it when I did. My antipathy was made worse when the TV was taken over every night in residence for MASH reruns.

yeah M*A*S*H was a habit by the early '80s, all the characters had turned into Alan Alda; boring.

― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, March 9, 2016 4:34 PM (30 minutes ago)

rare point of agreement

i had no idea Ghost Busters was an actual non animated show. Weird! I think my saturdays were filled with Sid and Marty Krofft things instead.

I saw a season of M*A*S*H on DVD a decade ago and didn't get it either.

the dreams episode with the amputated arms scared me as a child and still gives me nightmares

first five seasons of MASH are gen pretty funny and occasionally brilliant. I did like Harry Morgan more than McLean Stevenson.

Sanford and Son is unlikely to be shown on UK TV, I'd have thought, as it's based on Steptoe and Son.

All in the Family was based on 'Til Death Do Us Part and I saw that a couple of times.

man, apparently there have been three American remakes of Fawlty Towers

Sanford and Son is unlikely to be shown on UK TV, I'd have thought, as it's based on Steptoe and Son

The first season of Sanford and Son (actually a half-season) predominately used actual scripts from Steptoe and Son!

XP One of which starred Bea Arthur!

And one of which made Manuel Italian because making fun of a Spanish-speaker wouldn't play over here.

MTM all the way

guessing i had a babysitter who watched 'all in the family' on a night i got sick or something because while i have never seen it, the very idea of it (or god forbid the theme song) makes me want to die of depression

I love Bob Newhart and I feel kind of sad whenever I watch an episode of one of his sitcoms because I know that he's probably going to die quite soon.

I've not seen that much of All in the Family but whenever I've tried to watch it I can't get past the fact that it just seems like an inferior version of Till Death Us Do Part/In Sickness and in Health which is one of my favourite sitcoms; maybe All in the Family would make more sense to me if I were American?

Voted MTM

Wasn't alive in the seventies

i think i did an ilx poll years ago pitting steptoe and son vs. sanford and son and it didn't really work because there wasn't anybody who had actually seen both shows

i watched an episode of till death us do part on youtube once and damn, that was some dark stuff

Was Three's Company shown in the UK? Because that was based on Man About the House

http://i.imgur.com/Erp0tbX.jpg

That'd be a pretty good clickbait headline at the bottom of some spam ad.

^ That was the other big backlash of the mid '70s: crime shows like Police Woman and Kojak were forced to tone down their violence, which was getting pretty gritty. I guess M*A*S*H was subject to that too.

"Well, first, we're going to replace all of the children with chickens..."

I just realized that it's possible I've never seen a single minute of either MTM or The Bob Newhart Show. I guess they were never syndicated to the extent of some of the rest of this stuff?

Bob Newhart Show had the best drum sound of any '70s TV theme.

And holy hell, TV music arrangers really leaned heavily on the harmon-muted trumpet + flute thing back then.

was sanford the only one of these shows on nbc? what were the other nbc sitcoms of the early-mid 70s?

I just realized that it's possible I've never seen a single minute of either MTM or The Bob Newhart Show. I guess they were never syndicated to the extent of some of the rest of this stuff?

― Buckles On My Goulashes (Old Lunch), Wednesday, March 9, 2016 10:01 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i watched a fair amount of both on Nick At Nite in the '90s but i don't remember them being syndicated as much as MASH etc.

Apropos of nothing, "Hi Bob" was a great drinking game when I was in college, early 80s.
1. The Bob Newhart show was in reruns on WTBS in the afternoon during most bars' happy hour.
2. Whenever anyone says "Bob," drink.
3. Whenever anyone says "Hi Bob," drain your glass.

was sanford the only one of these shows on nbc? what were the other nbc sitcoms of the early-mid 70s?

CHICO AND THE MAN.

http://i.imgur.com/zYL9Sra.jpg

I must've read this book 10000 times, backward and forwards, until it finally fell apart on me about ten years ago.

I wasn't really watching "Chico and the Man" when I was two, much less knowing what network it was on.

thank you for lending a helping hand

I was very much alive during the 70s and even had a television during a small part of that decade. (I was very poor when I first lived away from home.) My impression of all these sitcoms at the time was [shrug] they're ok I guess, if you like that sort of thing. I was pretty disengaged from mass market entertainment.

haha now i want to watch some of these episodes

Other notable guest stars included:
Cesar Romero as Chico's absentee father
Tony Orlando as Chico's look-alike, the ex-fiance of a hostile woman he wants to date
José Feliciano, who wrote the theme song, as Chico's womanizing famous-singer cousin Pepe Fernando
Sammy Davis Jr. as himself
Herbie Faye appeared as Bernie in the 1975 episode "Louie's Retirement"
Shelley Winters (reuniting with Albertson, with whom she'd costarred in The Poseidon Adventure) as the owner of the local bakery, Shirley Schrift (her real name)
Rodolfo Hoyos, Jr., three guest-starring roles, including Hector Ramirez in "The Third Letter" (1977)
Jim Backus as Ed's friend who uses him as a beard, pretending to be playing cards with him when cheating on his wife (Audra Lindley)
Silent-film actress Carmel Myers as a former star who has fallen on hard times, brings in her car for repairs, and stays in the garage while looking for work
George Takei as Ed's supposed long-lost son from his time in Japan during World War II
Cesare Danova as Aunt Connie's Spanish aristocrat boyfriend, the Count de Catalan, in the second episode in which she appeared
Comedian Joey Bishop as an inept robber
Bernie Kopell as a plastic surgeon
Rose Marie as a CB radio enthusiast with whom a lonely Ed connects on New Year's Eve
Penny Marshall, as a waitress
Football star Rosey Grier as himself, Della's date for a charity benefit dance
Larry Hovis as a customer in the second episode of the first season
Jim Jordan (of radio's Fibber McGee and Molly) as a mechanic who used to be a big businessman, until he was victimized by his own company's retirement-age mandate

xxp
I think you mean "Thank you for being a friend."

MASH was somewhat compromised from the start -- nearly all the docs in the novel (and Hawkeye in the film i think?) are married, including Our Heroes, so they're serial adulterers; none of that for Alan Alda. And Larry Gelbart's sensibility is wisecracking NY liberal as opposed to Altman's anarchic stoned pranksterism. (Gelbart pointedly less sexist, after the first 3-4 seasons anyway.)

And since it was filmed one-camera style, half on the Fox ranch in Malibu i think, it had that goddamn laugh track.

For whatever reason NBC had very limited success with sitcoms in the decades before their famous mid '80s Thursday night lineup. In the 1960s their only hits were Hazel, I Dream of Jeannie and Get Smart. Sanford and Son and Chico and the Man were their only remotely successful ones from the 1970s until Diff'rent Strokes at the very end of the decade. NBC came close to going out of business around 1981-1982; all of their shows, new and old, were unsuccessful at that point.

thats basically why Letterman got a late night show, and they mostly left him alone

TMI: My mother went into labor with me while watching the latest Sanford & Son.

Hope it wasn't one of the Grady episodes

George: You know, my mother used to walk around on our apartment just in her bra and panties. She didn't look anything like you, she was really disgusting, really bad body. If you could imagine uglier and fatter version of Shirley Booth. Remember Shirley Booth from Hazel. Really embarrassing, cause you know I had only mother in the whole neighborhood who was worse looking than Hazel. Imagine the taunts I would hear.

Woman: Like what?

George: Like a "Hey your mother is uglier than Hazel. Hazel really putsyour mother to shame"

yeah, didnt watch that much either

Strange that I have no attachment to any of these, despite most of them being in heavy rerun circulation during my prime TV watching years. I wonder if there was something distinctly adult--for lack of a better word--about them that made them impenetrable to me; I distinctly remember lunging for the channel changer whenever an All in the Family or M*A*S*H rerun was about to come on. I don't know if Bewitched, Gilligan's Island, The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy are necessarily *better* shows than the most beloved 70s stuff, but they certainly strike me as being far more kid-friendly and accessible. I do have some mildly fond memories of watching Happy Days, which I think fits in more with the older shows than any of its contemporaries.

For what its worth, I don't recall ever having seen an episode of The Bob Newhart Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Odd Couple or Sanford and Son, and Maude I only ever saw an episode or two of rather recently.

I really loved AitF when i was ten.

Wow yall are old. I have never seen a single minute of any of these shows.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/91/The_Ghost_Busters_%28TV_series%29_cast_photo.jpg

― F♯ A♯ (∞), 10. maaliskuuta 2016 0:41 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

didn't know Neil Young was in a sitcom!

xpost

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), 10. maaliskuuta 2016 0:46 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Me neither, but who are the two guys with hats?

Wow yall are old. I have never seen a single minute of any of these shows.

Not even Happy Days? I was born in 1979, so I'm too young to have seen any of these in the original run, and some of them were never shown in Finland, but even I haven't managed to avoid seeing bits of Happy Days reruns.

And since it was filmed one-camera style, half on the Fox ranch in Malibu i think, it had that goddamn laugh track.

It's one of those 'use other facts', but when M*A*S*H was shown on BBC2 (the 'upmarket' BBC channel at the time) they removed the laughter track entirely (I guess because canned laughter was considered too vulgar for the British middle classes)

Couldn't believe it ever had a laugh track tbh! Is M*A*S*H is the only long running US sitcom the BBC has ever shown from start of series to end of series? I can't think of any others.

The BBC didn't show a lot of US sitcoms, I suppose M*A*S*H was worthy enough for the Board of Governors.

How could I forget Kotter? That show was the bomb. Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, John Travolta.

I was born in 1971 and have seen everything listed. But since everything was still in constant syndication I couldn't tell you whether I watched a given show in 1975 or in 1980. And I'm not sure how much it matters.

Bewitched/I Dream of Jeannie felt more late 60s than 70s; they went well with Gidget/Flying Nun. Lucy and Honeymooners felt 50s-ish, just as Mork and Cheers definitely felt like 80s shows. But WKRP and Taxi had a 70s vibe and should imo be considered with the 70s shows regardless of what year they were made.

Evening shows were palatable to both adults and children circa 1978 - Burnett, Muppets, PM Magazine. One misses

I see "Soap" ran from 1977 to 1981, so misses out too.

Tough call between Sanford & Son and Jeffersons. Went S&S.

Couldn't believe it ever had a laugh track tbh! Is M*A*S*H is the only long running US sitcom the BBC has ever shown from start of series to end of series? I can't think of any others.

― A Fifth Beatle Dies (Tom D.), Thursday, March 10, 2016 11:41 AM (6 hours ago)

sgt bilko/phil silvers show is pretty popular in the uk, isn't it? it's oddly ignored and forgotten here.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Dunno why but I was perusing a list of all the TV shows that were around in 1981, and god what a dismal bunch. 2 or 3 of the shows listed above were still around though, plus Three's Company.

One cool thing I noticed was that Andy Kaufman's guest spot on Fridays was the same weekend Charles Rocket said "fuck" on SNL.

voted jeffersons

Love "The Jeffersons" for the Marla Gibbs-Helmsley repartee, unusual for being devoid of sexual tension.

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

Really...zero for Laverne & Shirley? I loved the first few seasons but it did get sloppy and weary once they moved.

And thank you for bringing up PM Nagazine! Flood of memories....

Sparky Marcus was a fave anytime he made an appearance in a sitcom.

As far as I'm aware, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, Maude were never been shown on British television

Strange, someone could have given a go at showing a re-make of Steptoe and Son