Welcome to a new Sitcom Tuesday! This week, I’m continuing my rerun series celebrating the 25th anniversary of the 2000-2001 season, counting down my picks for its ten best sitcoms. Up for consideration is every comedy that I’ve ever covered from that particular TV year, both on Sitcom Tuesdays and Wildcard Wednesdays. In addition to directly comparing each show’s 2000-2001 output, my ranking is also factoring in how each season fares in the trajectory of their own individual series, along with how each show’s ultimate, overall (and average) quality measures up to the others. That is, I’m mostly looking at what was produced in 2000-2001, but I’m not ignoring the broader intra-series and inter-series implications of such a list.
With all that reiterated, here’s what I’ve featured so far:
#10. BECKER (Season Three)
#9. FRASIER (Season Eight)
#8. CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (Season One)
#7. THE KING OF QUEENS (Season Three)
#6. WILL & GRACE (Season Three)
#5. TITUS (Season Two)
For this post — #4 on the list — I have selected Season Seven of FRIENDS, which I first wrote about here: https://jacksonupperco.com/2018/08/21/the-ten-best-friends-episodes-of-season-seven/
If you had asked me to make this 2000-2001 list last year without reviewing each series, I would not have included Friends in my Top 5. This is due to Friends’ own intra-series trajectory, where Season Eight is often regarded as a “comeback” following a few years of diminishing returns. Why? As a show predicated on its characters’ emotional growth tracked via relationships, the plotting eventually had to slow-walk forward movement. This truly became a problem about two-thirds of the way through Five and didn’t improve until the end of Seven, when Eight was allowed to reignite its core Ross/Rachel rom-com engine while finally progressing secondary couple Monica/Chandler into a new chapter: marriage. But while Seven has always, like Six, frustrated fans as a year of broadening characterizations amidst stalled narrative development, I have gone against the grain in voicing my opinion that Seven is no worse than Six — it does no more damage to the leads, or more crucially, to the quality of the show in its episodic form. Indeed, what impressed me about revisiting this collection is the consistent strength of its samples — a tribute both to the show’s ruthless prioritization of comedy, but also to its six comedically distinct, well-defined characters who, simply, keep scripts elevated as situation comedy even when the writing is not at its best. That is, I have now decided that the seventh- or eighth-best season of Friends is still better than, for example, the second-best season of Will & Grace. And although I’d say, overall, Frasier is a better sitcom — with more seasons as either the best (or second-best) comedy on air — there are a few years in the early 2000s where Frasier is just down bad, both in terms of its own intra-series quality and even in a direct head-to-head comparison. Enough for Friends to seem a relatively more successful enterprise. I would also say that its high placement on this list is due to the competition at large. For instance, it probably would sit outside the Top 5 in 1999-2000 because other shows that fell in 2000-2001 — a little, like Will & Grace, or a lot, like Frasier — would best it. Easily. So, in that regard, this is indeed a snapshot of this particular season’s climate — and still a surprising one, with Friends’ basic quality defending it against a variety of peers… and in spite of its own personal standards.
Notable Episodes: “The One Where They All Turn Thirty,” and “The One With Monica And Chandler’s Wedding” (I & II)
Come back next week for a special post in the countdown! And stay tuned for a new Wildcard!