History of the Sitcom

This is an excellent and thorough examination of many of the most popular sit-coms and how the medium - unique in its widespread influence - interacts with society. The episodes are watchable and light, due to the presentation consisting of quickly interspersed clips of the sitcoms themselves, news clips showing life outside the TV, and interviews with people who have devoted their entire lives to the industry (sometimes from childhood).

I appreciate how it looks at the whole history within each episode, focusing on a particular facet of society (family, work, sex, race, etc.). The viewer is able to join actors, writers, producers, and critics of the shows we've all grown up with and hear stories explaining how the paths of shows were forged and how current entertainment is related to the very different earliest shows of 70 years ago.

People who don't like the diversity being explored in society today - and therefore within up-to-date popular culture - might not appreciate the value of this. This documentary series is acknowledging the ways our world has changed, not politicizing (unlike many of the reviews listed here). It's a valuable contribution to the history of popular culture.

I thought this was supposed to be the history of sitcom. Instead it is a sloppy, quick run through some popular and lesser known sitcoms. It's basically a short interview, less than a minute, then footage from the show. The retrospective on the show are brief and poorly explained.

Each episode starts in the 50s and ends in present day. Each episode also complains about minorities, women, and homosexuals not being on TV or if they were it was shown in a very stereotypical form. I do agree with this idea, literally every episode devolves into this. They should have make one episode in the shunning of aforementioned groups. I would guess 60-70% of this series is complaints about how minorities were treated.

It's amazing that they had such an enormous body of work to comment on and they come up with this. Its not the worst documentary I have seen but given the production value and money behind the documentary It's amazing they go for such boring low hanging fruit.

If you are looking for any kind.

How do you do a show on the history of sitcoms and omit the longest running sitcom in TV history!?! It is part of pop culture and a family sitcom yet it was completely omitted from the first episode. I'm just boggled and I really don't think that I missed it because I even rounded when it came time for the 19 8990s era especially when they talk about fox launching their network and they missed so many great fox shows and they only showed married with children. This series just lost so much credibility with me because I just don't know how one makes this mistake. Especially when Homer is like the anti-Dad, but they're such a family unit wild.

With a series like this they could have done a marvelous job talking about society, the business, the actors, the networks, etc. Instead they do a half-based job on everything. Why do it?

This series follows the formula that most History Channel docs follow: Snippet, actor/critic comment, repeat, commercial. It's nice to see some of the old shows represented, as well as the grown up actors comment. We watched these shows because they were funny, that's it. Never gave two sh#ts if the actors were white or black. Those were the good times!!!!