Welcome to a new Sitcom Tuesday! Two And A Half Men coverage will officially commence next week, but in the meantime, I’m excited to set the figurative table by resurrecting a relevant entry from this blog’s decade-long run. As usual, I’ll provide a link to a piece that I first published many seasons back, before offering a bit of updated commentary.

So, let’s revisit… The Five Best CYBILL Episodes of Season One: https://jacksonupperco.com/2023/03/07/the-five-best-cybill-episodes-of-season-one/

As we prepare to discuss Two And A Half Men, it feels right to rerun an entry from the only other series covered here so far that Chuck Lorre actually helped create. Cybill. First, some background… Lorre’s sitcom career began in the 1980s inauspiciously, but he notably cut his teeth on My Two Dads — with which Two And A Half Men shares some conceptual ideas — and Roseanne, where his ability to handle a difficult star allowed him to then branch out and create his own shows, initially in the latter’s similar blue-collar ethos: the short-lived Frannie’s Turn, and the breakout Grace Under Fire, where he also endured a so-called “diva.” Unfortunately, he was also plagued by such tensions on Cybill, which found him shedding his working-class origins for a sexy, Hollywood vibe — something he now knew well but was also inspired by its star, in the same way Grace and Roseanne used autobiographical elements of their leads. Then, after getting kicked off Cybill in early Season Two, he started teaming up with other writers to co-create sitcoms — like Dottie Dartland for the “opposites attract” husband-and-wife show Dharma & Greg, which was solid, and Lee Aronsohn (another Grace and Cybill survivor) for Two And A Half Men. This effort, Men, proved to be his biggest hit yet — the first time a series in which Chuck Lorre had some kind of developmental involvement was ever the most-watched sitcom on the air, where it reigned from 2005-2006 (Season Three) to 2009-2010 (Season Seven), making it the most visible, albeit not the most critically lauded, situation comedy in the latter half of the 2010s. This not only renders it valuable in a study of that era, but it’s also important for Chuck Lorre, as this is the triumph that enabled him to become a multi-cam titan with other, finer endeavors, like The Big Bang Theory and Mom, which are both significantly different from Men (because they have different scribes and premises) but still exist in association to it and its success. Additionally, I think Men is the series on which Lorre’s comedy reputation hinges, for better and largely (in the eyes of most sitcom connoisseurs) for worse… but we’ll table this discussion for next week. In the meantime, I invite you to revisit some early Chuck Lorre with the first season of the otherwise mediocre Cybill! 

Come back next week for the start of Two And A Half Men! And stay tuned for a new Wildcard!