Best Emmy Comedy Series Lineups

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Sabin
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Re: Best Emmy Comedy Series Lineups

Post by Sabin »

mlrg wrote
Modern Family is a great example. Very strong initial seasons. Painful last seasons.
I've only seen a few scattered episodes from the first three seasons. They all sort of seemed like the same show to me. From what I've read, the series just suffered from a lack of character development over the years.

That said, I don't know many seasons that improve beyond their fifth or sixth, especially in the single-camera world. It seems as though multi-camera sitcoms were capable of such a feat on a regular basis. Single-cameras not so much. I think single-camera sitcoms might benefit from shorter seasons in general.

Parks and Recreation is a great example of a sitcom that started off with a terrible first season. It's such a bad first season, it's hard to recommend the show to people. Just a really good protagonist and a fun world. But season three is just wonderful. I also thought Superstore started off rocky but it's turned into a charming show.
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Re: Best Emmy Comedy Series Lineups

Post by mlrg »

Sabin wrote:
Reza wrote
Decided to watch Schitt's Creek after its sweep at the Emmys. Gave up after episode 3 of Season 1 as the jokes became repititous and the characters' constant whining began to get on my nerves. Does the show improve? Daniel Levy is funny though.
I've only seen some of season one. Not a fan. I hear subsequent seasons get much better. First seasons of sitcoms are always pretty tricky. The ones IMO that start off strongest suffer in the long run.
Modern Family is a great example. Very strong initial seasons. Painful last seasons.
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Re: Best Emmy Comedy Series Lineups

Post by Sabin »

Reza wrote
Decided to watch Schitt's Creek after its sweep at the Emmys. Gave up after episode 3 of Season 1 as the jokes became repititous and the characters' constant whining began to get on my nerves. Does the show improve? Daniel Levy is funny though.
I've only seen some of season one. Not a fan. I hear subsequent seasons get much better. First seasons of sitcoms are always pretty tricky. The ones IMO that start off strongest suffer in the long run.
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Re: Best Emmy Comedy Series Lineups

Post by Reza »

Decided to watch Schitt's Creek after its sweep at the Emmys. Gave up after episode 3 of Season 1 as the jokes became repititous and the characters' constant whining began to get on my nerves. Does the show improve? Daniel Levy is funny though.
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Re: Best Emmy Comedy Series Lineups

Post by Sabin »

dws1982 wrote
That's probably a little early to be the last gasp of the network comedy, but it definitely seems in retrospect to be more of an ending than a beginning--maybe a final peak. The Office was about to begin a slow decline (although it stayed perfectly watchable until Carrell left), and a lot of the network shows that were nominated in the years ahead--Family Guy(!!), How I Met Your Mother*, The Big Bang Theory, and Glee--while expected and understandable in real time, have mostly not aged well. (I never really got into 30 Rock, and this was mostly old-fashioned stubbornness on my part, because I think Tina Fey was very overexposed at the time, and I genuinely resented being constantly told how brilliant she was.)
I don't totally grasp your metrics. Are we talking about personal opinion, cultural zeitgeist, evergreen quality, or just what was nominated?
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Re: Best Emmy Comedy Series Lineups

Post by dws1982 »

Sabin wrote:It's interesting that you refer to 2006 and 2007 as the last gasp of network comedy. At the time, it didn't like it. It felt like an incredible renaissance.
That's probably a little early to be the last gasp of the network comedy, but it definitely seems in retrospect to be more of an ending than a beginning--maybe a final peak. The Office was about to begin a slow decline (although it stayed perfectly watchable until Carrell left), and a lot of the network shows that were nominated in the years ahead--Family Guy(!!), How I Met Your Mother*, The Big Bang Theory, and Glee--while expected and understandable in real time, have mostly not aged well. (I never really got into 30 Rock, and this was mostly old-fashioned stubbornness on my part, because I think Tina Fey was very overexposed at the time, and I genuinely resented being constantly told how brilliant she was.)

I guess another reason it might make sense to divide the category into different eras and look at the best lineups in different eras is because it's hard to compare a lineup that consists only of multi-camera sitcoms to even the most recent network nominee like The Good Place, which has a much more fluid visual style and is very heavily serialized. So maybe even the division is not so much between the network era and the cable/streaming era but between the era of the traditional, laugh-track multi-camera sitcom, and the era of the the non-laugh track single-camera comedy series (I hesitate to call something like The Good Place a sitcom), and then maybe a category for the transitional years where shows like The Office and 30 Rock were nominated alongside laugh-track shows.

I also think it's odd that the Emmys have put in a rule in the past couple of years that stipulated that the Directing in A Comedy Series award must include a multi-camera series, regardless of where it places in voting. This is why you have nominations for The Big Bang Theory and Will and Grace in that category (which were otherwise not nominated for anything big). I'm sure that there was a push from producers of multi-camera series to be included, but when you look at the history of that category over the past couple of decades you see that there had been less than ten multi-camera series nominated for that award, and the last one to win was actually Frasier way back in 1997.

For Drama Series, I tend to struggle to find a single lineup that I truly because I've watched a lot of those shows and there's usually a show in each lineup that I despise, but of the Network/Cable years, I could call 2011 a very solid one. If you want to get a good idea of what the big Drama Series of that time period were, it gives you that. It was season 4 of Mad Men (which won), season 1 of Boardwalk Empire (underrated show in my opinion), season 5 of Dexter (which I very much don't like, but it was popular), season 1 of Game of Thrones (not my favorite, but I like the early seasons far better than any of the ones that it won for), season 2 of The Good Wife (very rewatchable) and season 5 of Friday Night Lights (which should've won).

* - Just think, there's an alternate timeline where How I Met Your Dad got picked up, and Greta Gerwig is going into season eight of that show and never makes Lady Bird or Little Women.
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Re: Best Emmy Comedy Series Lineups

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dws1982 wrote
It probably sounds like post-conviction revisionism, but I never liked The Cosby Show, mostly because it advocated a worldview that I strongly disliked: that Cliff's/Claire's way-of-life was superior to all others, and that anything else was inferior. And of course now, knowing not just the truth about Cosby but the fact that he used the show as a hunting ground for victims and that many of the guest stars and day players were his victims, it's almost impossible to watch. So it would be tough to advocate for any lineup with that show in it, in my opinion. I wonder when that Rolling Stone piece was written?
2015.
dws1982 wrote
I really think you would probably have to divide it into eras, rather than pick a single best lineup, because each era was doing such different things.
Well, I'm certainly here for that.

It's interesting that you refer to 2006 and 2007 as the last gasp of network comedy. At the time, it didn't like it. It felt like an incredible renaissance.
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Re: Best Emmy Comedy Series Lineups

Post by dws1982 »

It probably sounds like post-conviction revisionism, but I never liked The Cosby Show, mostly because it advocated a worldview that I strongly disliked: that Cliff's/Claire's way-of-life was superior to all others, and that anything else was inferior. And of course now, knowing not just the truth about Cosby but the fact that he used the show as a hunting ground for victims and that many of the guest stars and day players were his victims, it's almost impossible to watch. So it would be tough to advocate for any lineup with that show in it, in my opinion. I wonder when that Rolling Stone piece was written?

One of those 70's lineups is impossible to argue against (and the point that they far outclass the mostly-forgotten drama nominees is a very good one). The 95-96 lineup sounds like a great pick, especially for that era of television, just as 2006 (or 2007) is a great pick for that era, which was kind of the last gasp of the network comedy.

I really think you would probably have to divide it into eras, rather than pick a single best lineup, because each era was doing such different things.

With Drama, I know you would have to divide that category into at least two different eras: the network era, and then the cable/streaming era. I'll have to think on the cable/streaming era, but in the network era, I would have to probably go with something like 1996: the second seasons of Chicago Hope and ER (which won), the sixth season of Law & Order, and the third seasons of NYPD Blue and The X-Files, all very good, of-their-era shows in some of their best seasons. Or, to go back a few years, 1991: the first two seasons of Northern Exposure, the fourth season of China Beach, the fifth season of LA Law, the third season of Quantum Leap, and the fourth season of thirtysomething. It's hard to think of TV shows that epitomize late-80's/early-90's TV better than those five shows, in my opinion. I don't love thirtysomething, but that mid-era of LA Law is compulsively watchable (so much of it feels dated, sure, but then Paul Winfield has a guest spot as an attorney in an episode dealing with a police shooting a black kid, and he has a monologue that doesn't feel fifteen minutes old), Quantum Leap is goofy fun, Northern Exposure is one of the few shows to take the Twin Peaks influence and do something unique with it rather than just try to imitate it, and the last season of China Beach is an all-time great, in my opinion, far ahead of its time, doing things with the narrative and with the timeline that lots of series wouldn't attempt for 10-20 more years. A lot of those episodes were burned off in the summer and were not technically Emmy-eligible in 91, but it is one of the best TV seasons ever.
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Re: Best Emmy Comedy Series Lineups

Post by Greg »

The best Comedy Series lineup ever would have to be one the years thatAll In The Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Mash, arguably the three best sitcoms ever, were nominated.
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Re: Best Emmy Comedy Series Lineups

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Rolling Stone called it for 1973 and 1987 and 1995-96:
Best Comedy, 1973
The Lineup: All in the Family (winner), M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Sanford and Son

To understand just how far ahead of their time the comedy crop of 1973 was, look no further than the wall-to-wall schlock in the Best Drama category: Cannon, Columbo, Hawaii Five-O, Kung Fu, Mannix, and your winner, the freaking Waltons. Against this array of mostly wide-tie-wearing private dicks or whatever stood the career-best work of talents like Norman Lear, James L. Brooks, Mary Tyler Moore, Alan Alda, and Redd Foxx — often addressing seismic social change in subtle or overt ways, always being really fucking funny. Comedy was serious art at a time when drama was basically a joke.
Best Comedy, 1987
The Lineup: Cheers, The Cosby Show, Family Ties, The Golden Girls (winner), Night Court

Okay, so Night Court, endearing as it was, is a bit of a qualitative outlier here, Richard Moll notwithstanding. But NBC's first Thursday night Must See TV–style lineup of The Cosby Show, Family Ties, and Cheers was 90 minutes of appointment viewing for a generation. And winner The Golden Girls is more than just a camp/cult phenomenon: Pound for pound, joke for joke, it holds up as well today as stone classics The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, or Fawlty Towers. Its progressivism, and the fact that it gave four women actors of a certain age carte blanche to kick ass for years, is icing on the cake.
Best Comedy, 1995-1996
The Lineup: Frasier (winner, 1995 & 1996), Friends, The Larry Sanders Show, Mad About You, Seinfeld

It was NBC's world; we just lived in it. Between comedy-boom standup-driven showcases Seinfeld and Mad About You, Cheers spin-off Frasier, and "Like Seinfeld, but with a younger, hotter cast" Friends, the network mastered all the ingredients that made for great Nineties comedy. Alone against the Peacock horde, for two years, stood Garry Shandling, Jeffrey Tambor, Rip Torn, and the prototype for the HBO mold-breakers and fake talk shows to come.
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Best Emmy Comedy Series Lineups

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Change of pace considering Oscar talk is never coming back, what was the all-time best lineup of nominees for the Emmy for Best Comedy Series? Not just by quality of show but quality of season. I'm going to cut myself off before 1995 because I just haven't seen that many series beforehand but I would imagine that 1973 (*All in the Family*, M*A*S*H*, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude, and Sandford and Sons), 1979 (*Taxi*, All in the Family, Barney Miller, M*A*S*H*, Mork & Mindy), or something else of that era might qualify.

Increasingly, I'm realizing that my sweet spot for viewership was truly when Arrested Development first launched through NBC's strongest recent series The Office, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, and Community. There are lots of gems in between those runs but those are the most meaningful runs of television for me where I truly felt connected to a zeitgeist. Unfortunately, those years coincided with The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men getting nominated four and three times. Maybe a perfect lineup isn't possible. Anyway, these are the ones I submit as most good.

Incidentally, I just realized that Bruce Fretts passed away this summer. I used to enjoy his Emmy predictions for Entertainment Weekly and how much he railed against 3rd Rock From the Sun.

MY CONTENDERS:
1995: Frasier (season 2), Friends (season 1), The Larry Sanders Show (season 3), Mad About You (season 3; not a very good show but season 3 and season 4 were ok), Seinfeld (season 6)
1996: Frasier (season 3), Friends (season 2), The Larry Sanders Show (season 4), Mad About You (season 4; not a very good show but season 3 and season 4 were ok), Seinfeld (season 7)
2004: Arrested Development (season 1), Curb Your Enthusiasm (season 4), Everybody Loves Raymond (season 8), Sex and the City (season 6), Will & Grace (season 6)
2006: The Office (season 2), Arrested Development (season 3), Curb Your Enthusiasm, Scrubs (season 5), Two and a Half Men (this is where it gets difficult... this show always keeps popping up)
2007: 30 Rock (season 1), Entourage (the tolerable Medellín season), The Office (season 3), Two and a Half Men (rrr), Ugly Betty


And now the roster expands and it just becomes more difficult. Everyone complains about the Oscars but this is goddamn ridiculous! If only they were paired down to five.

2018: Marvelous Ms. Maisel (season 1), Atlanta (season 2), Barry (season 1), Black-ish (season 4), Curb Your Enthusiasm (season 9), GLOW (season 1), Silicon Valley (season 5), Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (season 4)
2019: Fleabag (season 2), Barry (season 2), The Good Place (season 3), The Marvelous Ms. Maisel (season 2), Russian Doll (season 1), Schitt's Creek (season 5), Veep (season 7)



If I had to submit my PERSONAL FAVORITE of these, I would scratch my head and reconcile the goodness of Frasier and the fineness of Mad About You. Gun to my head and I would pick 1996 because season 3 of Frasier is totally good (Niles' separation was strong), Friends stopped becoming the quirky, kvetchy Seinfeld hang-out in Season 2 (which tbh I really enjoyed) and really became the show it was going to be for the next ten years, The Larry Sanders Show, Seinfeld's amazing and amazingly dark season 7, and possibly the best season of Mad About You that was going to emerge. Replace it with Newsradio and there it is. The best lineup ever.

If 2004 replaced Two and a Half Men or that average season of Will & Grace with Scrubs season 4, or Malcolm in the Middle, or the final season of Frasier, and that might be a contender. Or if 2006 replaced Two and a Half Men with My Name is Earl. Or if 2007 replaced Two and a Half Men or Entourage (admittedly, it's best season) with The Comeback. Then they might get my vote.

But I guess you could also make the case for 2019 just based on the sheer quality of the programming.
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