Best US Sitcom of the 1970s

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?