Admit it … NBC’s Must See TV Thursday was one wet and wild ride. Since the slogan’s creation back in the fall of 1982 — when NBC’s Thursday night lineup consisted of Fame, Cheers, Taxi, and Hill Street Blues — the amount of superior programming to air on the Peacock’s big night has been mind-boggling. The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Night Court, L.A. Law, A Different World, Dear John, Wings, Seinfeld, Mad About You, Frasier, ER, Friends, Just Shoot Me, Will & Grace, Scrubs, The Office, 30 Rock…. Landing a spot in the lineup must have been the holy grail for an NBC series.
Today? Not so much. No, I’m not here to disparage NBC’s current crop of 30-minute sitcoms, and I do include 30 Rock and The Office in my weekly show selections, but how does a night of Community, Parks and Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock stack up against what amounts to an endless smorgasbord of potential combinations that I could throw at you right now?
In a word, it doesn’t so much. But is anyone doing it any better?
CBS has been hitting homeruns with the procedural for a while now. At the same time, The Eye has quietly thrown three hours of comedy into its weekly repertoire. While I’m not a fan of either, there’s no arguing that Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory are two of the most beloved shows of any genre on TV. Julia Louis-Dreyfus can’t stop being nominated for awards for The New Adventures of Old Christine, and Gary Unmarried supplies us with free DVDs for your enjoyment. While I’ve been disappointed in How I Met Your Mother this season, its success continues to grow, and Accidentally on Purpose … well Rules of Engagement, which replaces Accidentally on Purpose in March, is one of my favorite sitcoms on TV these days. You can’t not love David Puddy (Patrick Warburton) repurposed.
Over on ABC, meanwhile, a couple of brilliant moves have propelled the Alphabet into a pretty strong sitcom position. Picking up Scrubs last year and then (somewhat) successfully retooling it was ingenious — it saves on focus-grouping a pilot and spending money to build a fan base — while bringing Better Off Ted (a show I do not watch) back for a second chance has earned a lot of goodwill and admiration from the demographic of fans who are waiting impatiently for an Arrested Development movie.
And in one fell swoop the network also established a sitcom tent-pole on Wednesday nights. Cougar Town (don’t watch it) has surprised most everyone, and has catapulted Courteney Cox back to relevancy, while Modern Family is doing a great job taking the recently overexposed documentary style and making it work to its advantage, with characters so enjoyable that we just need to hear the real story behind whatever Phil (Ty Burrell) may have just said. And The Middle?… Probably the best new show of the season for me.
But then you have to ask yourself the following question: have we become indoctrinated with the idea that Thursday night is laughs night? Because I only got used to watching sitcoms on Monday night near the end of Everybody Loves Raymond’s run … Tuesday and Wednesday nights still feel like the middle of nowhere to me. Which really would reverse the question back on what I was looking to avoid in the first place — does NBC’s current Thursday night lineup stand up to its storied past?
Personally, I give ABC and CBS high marks for airing high quality programming, but neither has replaced NBC in my mind as the network that’s known for sitcoms. I’m still stuck on NBC falling short of its bar, as opposed to having the bar now reside at a different address.
How about for you? Is NBC still living up to its storied comedic past? Has ABC or CBS passed it by? Or maybe FOX has, with Animation Domination, ‘Til Death, and Brothers…. Let me know in the comments below.
Clacked by Aryeh S.
on Feb 15, 2010 @ 15:20 EST5EDT
I watch Community, The Office, and 30 Rock on NBC. I watch(ed) Better Off Ted and Modern Family on ABC–which now is just Modern Family. I still watch 2 1/2 Men and Big Bang Theory on CBS, but both shows have taken a dive in quality this year. I watch Family Guy and American Dad on Fox, but I may give up on both before the end of the season–they’re lousy. So NBC wins by default.
*POST AUTHOR*
I’m a Family Guy watcher, and a sometimes Hulu American Dad watcher, so I’m curious to ask someone in the same boat as me: why did The Cleveland Show not work for you? Because it sucked for me.
I could barely endure the first episode. Halfway through the second one, I gave up. I’ve seen a few minutes here and there of episodes since, and still could not stand it. I’m not sure I could pin down one reason. It seems cruder (!) than “Family Guy”. It seems like a third-generation carbon copy (evil baby/little kid, etc.). I don’t like any of the characters–Cleveland was one of my least favorite from FG, a character with really no personality at all. Even on “American Dad”, if I got annoyed with Stan, I still liked Roger, or the father-son relationship between Steve and Stan, or Hayley, or Patrick Stewart as his boss. Nothing stood out about “Cleveland”, and the inanity and grossness of it did not allow me to stick around to see if it improved.
*POST AUTHOR*
I didn’t even make it through the pilot, so didn’t realize that he used the same structure a third time. That copy-cat nature of American Dad turned me off in the beginning, but Roger is extremely funny.
I actually think NBC’s Thursday night lineup is the best block on television. Community, The Office, 30 Rock and P&P are all fantastic. P&P really hit its stride this season, and Community has improved so much since it’s pilot.
I do enjoy The Middle and Cougar Town, love(d?) Better Off Ted, and think Modern Family is the best new show of the season, but it still doesn’t match the awesomeness of NBC’s block.
Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother and Old Christine are all great, but I could do without Two and A Half Men and Gary Unmarried.
So no, I don’t think NBC has been replaced as the home of the sitcom. Quality wise, NBC is doing as well as ever.
*POST AUTHOR*
I think what raises the biggest question might be that, while the quality of a particular show is subjective (you like X and I don’t), the audience for NBC’s Thursday isn’t there the same way it once was. 30 Rock can win all the awards in the world, but it will never draw Cheers numbers. So can NBC still boast a continued string of success when their shows have gone from #1 on TV to niche audiences? And I don’t have an answer for that … it’s just the big question.
Better Off Ted is the best sitcom of the bunch on ABC but it got stuck behind the successful (your words – I don’t think the viewers, or lack thereof, agree) retooling of “Scrubs” which hasn’t really done any favors for either show. BOT should actually be on NBC paired with 30 Rock, because as it stands now that is the only sitcom I regularly watch on NBC.
*POST AUTHOR*
I see the success of the Scrubs reboot in the fact that ABC took a show that had reached its end and managed to concoct a new avenue for it to explore. It wasn’t a comment on the quality of the current program. :)
I think you’re practicing a bit of revisionist history here. To start, you’re talking about NBC as the home of the sitcom, but lead with a Thursday night lineup that was 2/3 drama. If you want to talk about when NBC finally went to that 8-10 two hour comedy block, it was never THE home of the sit-com. You’re leaving out all of the under-performing, weaker shows that were propped up by the successful shows. Think, The Single Guy, Veronica’s Closet, Kings, Stark Raving Mad, etc…
If you throw all of those in the mix, then the answer is a most definite yes. NBC has been replaced as the home of the sit-com, because, like it or not, Two and a Half Men and Big Bang Theory are the Seinfeld and Friends of network TV right now.
And you really lose me when you refer to the ABC reboot of Scrubs as ingenious. Really? If their goal was to pick up a show that would get less viewers than Hank, then yes, it was a stroke of genius. Otherwise, it’s been a trainwreck from jump street.
*POST AUTHOR*
That was a structural device – I went from the creation of Must See TV to the night for sitcoms it became, but I wasn’t equating the two. However, by 1984 NBC was airing The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, and Night Court from 8-10 … if that wasn’t the home of the sitcom at the time than some other network was airing pure gold. While there were plenty of duds in there overall, 1984-1995 was pretty much consistently great from 8-10, and in the next nine years the Friends/Seinfeld, Friends/Frasier, Friends/Will & Grace combo more than made up for any crap that got stuck at the other two slots, in my opinion.
Like I said above, my comment on the Scrubs move isn’t about the show that is, but the strategic move of taking a dead show with a built-in fanbase and simply redirecting it. I’d think that even with lower ad rates for commercials they’re so far making more money than if they’d developed the show from the beginning.
I really enjoy NBC’s Thursday night comedies, with the exception of Parks & Recreation. I love Amy Poehler, and I really tried to like this show, more than once, but it’s just not good. Still a big fan of the other 3 shows, though.
The Middle and especially Modern Family have won me over. I wish they would hurry up and get Scrubs in that Wednesday night line-up so it has a chance in the ratings.
*POST AUTHOR*
It does surprise me that ABC has spent the last 4 or 5 months without filling Hank’s slot with original programming. But Brett is better equipped than I to guess whether an 8PM repeat of Modern Family does more for the 8:30-10:00 originals than a new episode of Scrubs would … my guess is ABC is right to keep Scrubs away from their hits right now.
I would argue that NBC’s Thursday night line up is better than it has ever been. It just depends on what we are judging their success on. Also, it’s too early in the life span of Community, Parks and Recreation, Modern Family, and The Middle to compare them to Friends and Seinfeld and the freaking Cosby Show as well.
Ratings aren’t going to match up to those classic shows ever again. People just have so many ways they can experience this content: live broadcast, Hulu, DVDs, torrents, on demand, DVR, on many of the network’s websites,etc. Compare that to 1982. I think people can’t separate the nostalgia/loyalty they feel to those old shows with whats happening in the present day. (Also a question for the author of this post. How is A Different World superior to The Office?) Ratings of course matter to advertisers, but have they ever really mattered to us, the viewing audience? I would say only in the case of people asking themselves if the network going to cancel the show they like.
Which brings me to my next point. I don’t care that How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory are on CBS. I don’t care that Modern Family and The Middle are on ABC. I don’t care that The Office, 30 Rock, Community, and Parks and Recreation are on NBC. Those are just networks that give money to the people who run the shows to produce more episodes. The only time that these companies become interesting is when they are picking pilots for new shows or canceling older/failing shows. NBC is as much the home of sitcoms as Fox is the home of cops because they air a show called cops.
Its just slick business and marketing. I never cared for the majority of “must-see-tv” and I think its silly lumping all those shows together. Really the Cosby show was nothing like Friends and to cluster all these shows together is reductionist. If anything this current crop of sitcoms has more in common than there past counterparts, as they are certainly more sincere than those shows of the past.
The sitcom doesn’t have a home. Its a format, and a broad one at that. A few years ago it seemed like the situational comedy was going the way of the Dodo thanks to the glut of reality television and cheesy game shows. Then somehow this year a bunch of good sitcoms debuted (Modern Family, Community, The Middle), some young ones blossomed (Parks & Rec, The Big Bang Theory), and some older ones seem reinvigorated ( The Office, 30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother).
*POST AUTHOR*
I just wanted to clarify a few things that you commented on.
I’m not referring so much to the “success” of Thursday night programming as I am to the quality of each individual show. It’s obviously a subjective matter, but for instance I find Parks & Recreation to be worse than it was last season, and I have yet to ever laugh at Community. Using that as a basis, for myself that’s 50% of NBC’s comedy offerings that suck.
I’m also not comparing any of these current shows directly to Friends, Seinfeld, etc., but rather saying that they are not cut from the same clothe, certainly something that can be gleaned on day one. Seinfeld certainly refined its art form as it went, but I found The Seinfeld Chronicles to be just as high quality a sitcom as any random episode in the later seasons. When you’ve got it you’ve got it, and when you don’t, it’s obvious.
It’s interesting that you should mention ratings, because my guess is that Seinfeld’s 18-20 million viewers from 1993 on are equitable to the numbers that The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men are bringing in today, considering all of the factors that you mentioned. However, I’m not talking about ratings at all; again, this is just a subjective perspective on whether “A” is as high quality as “B.”
And I love The Office and did not like A Different World in the slightest. I don’t think I compared them, or The Office (or anything else for that matter) to anything else. In fact, I included The Office in my original list of mind-boggling superior programming. The only reason I also listed A Different World is because it falls into that category for the network, along with the other shows I mentioned above.
And I also didn’t cluster any of these shows together, except as far as they either all aired on the same night of the week, or — in two specific cases — in one continuous lineup. The point here was to show the legacy that NBC has, which includes both The Cosby Show and Friends. Which is not to say that they have anything more in common than both airing on NBC and both having been a part of Must See TV at one point or another.
But I am comparing the quality. Quality of the writing, the acting, the plots, the humor. We can certainly agree to disagree, but for me half the sitcoms on NBC today are missing all of those factors, and 30 Rock falls short in many ways. The Office is the only show I could imagine hitting the NBC sitcom hall of fame, and that’s just wrong for a network known for airing so many great ones. Thus the original question.