What is funny? "Funny" can describe straight-up ha-ha pleasure: watching Lucy Ricardo get drunk on Vitameatavegamin or Homer Simpson fall into Springfield Gorge, twice. But it can also mean something odd (I have a funny feeling about this) or disconcerting (My stomach feels funny) or suspicious (Are you up to something funny?).
In today's bumper crop of TV comedy, what funny is not is simple or monolithic. So picking our 21 favourite American comedies of the 21st century involved hard choices and tricky questions. What even counts as a comedy in an age of dramedy and comic drama and depressed cartoon horses? How do you account for changing times and mores, jokes that aged badly, stars' less-than-amusing offscreen offenses? Is there more to a great comedy than how many times it makes you laugh?
We have no absolute answers, only the arguments that resulted in this list, arranged in chronological order, which we hope prompt you to have the same arguments and more. Let the funny business begin. — JAMES PONIEWOZIK
Curb Your Enthusiasm
2000-present
Pretty … pretty … pretty good.
LARRY DAVID, CREATOR AND STAR: I've had the same expectations for the show as I have for everything else in my life — which is to say, zero. I kept hoping I'd get cancelled. It didn't work out.
I had the long layoff between Seasons 8 and 9, a five-year hiatus. I guess I realised that I have more fun doing the show than anything else that I do.
I take it year by year. We just finished filming Season 11. We wore masks during filming except when we were acting, and the crew wore masks all the time. In fact, most of the people, I didn't even know who they were. The last day of filming, I said: "OK, I don't know what any of you look like. Please take your masks off for a second so I can see you." Then I told them it was disappointing and to put them back on immediately.
TV Larry is me, but way more ballsy. Conflicts arise, as they invariably do in life, and he has a more direct way of handling them. My perception is that he's usually morally on the right side. I don't think a lot of people see it that way.
A lot of the conflicts from the show have come from my real life, but I assiduously avoid making enemies, and he seeks them out. Because of the show, some people, when they meet me, are very, very leery of the encounter. I try and put them at ease as best I can — a lot of times I'll just say, "Don't worry, I'm human."
But TV Larry doesn't care. He's living my dream. I'm totally envious of him, and that's why I love doing it so much. — as told to JEREMY EGNER
Chappelle's Show
2003-2006
The cool world.
Dave Chappelle's gloriously unfettered Comedy Central sketch series didn't come out of nowhere, even if it might seem like a miracle child with two decades' hindsight. In Living Colour and The Chris Rock Show had kicked off the reaction to The Cosby Show in the 1990s, making space for TV comedy that dealt unapologetically with race, without the buffers of pithy platitudes and sitcom predictability.
But as popular as those shows were, nothing hit with the gale force of Chappelle's Show, the self-described "No. 1 Source for Offensive Comedy." It was more transgressive and more wildly inventive, and when it clicked, it could make you laugh dangerously hard. Chappelle's sendups of Black entertainers like Lil Jon and Rick James were brilliant in their brutal simplicity. Bits like the Racial Draft, or a sketch in which Chappelle and Wayne Brady fought to host the show, exploited Chappelle's fascination with the overlap of Black identity and celebrity image building. In the famous Clayton Bigsby sketch, Chappelle played a blind Southern Black man who thought he was white, a confusion that had allowed him to become a celebrated white supremacist — the American dream in action.
Beyond the ingenuity of its code crashing and the pop of the scabrous one-liner it built to, the Bigsby sketch was notable for its machine-gun use of a word you can no longer get away with on TV. That may be a problem for many current viewers. And the sketches that indulge a fixation with women's breasts haven't aged well. But Chappelle was (and is) an instinctive and equal-opportunity offender; he was ready to play with any variety of cultural or racial cliché, as in the sharp sketches on haters and "keeping it real." Tying it all together is his ineffable, laid-back cool — the eternal wink of the satirist, in Chappelle's case edged with melancholy and pain. — MIKE HALE
Arrested Development
2003-2006; 2013-2019
For when you're feeling blue.
MITCHELL HURWITZ, CREATOR:Chance favors the well-prepared. Somebody said that. So there was a lot of planning. I'd done a lot of callbacks in shows, and by the time I got to Arrested Development, I was thinking, "I'm going to call forward. I'm going to put in jokes that won't be funny until you rewatch them."
But a lot of the stuff that I've gotten great credit for was just a total accident. One silly one is, I knew that I wanted to have Buster lose his hand, but I didn't name the matriarch character Lucille, because I knew it was a homonym of "loose seal."
Other things were the result of some fairly capricious showrunning. You've got seven or eight weeks before you start shooting, so you really do need to use that time efficiently. It wasn't cable; we were going to do 24 episodes that year and no hiatuses, and I used up the first 3 1/2 weeks in the writers' room trying to figure out what the larger crime was. And then we landed on: What if George Sr. was building model homes for Saddam Hussein?
I remember at that moment thinking: "Yes, that's it. We have the bones of Episode 24. Now let's just do 1 through 23." And by the way, we only had an order for 12 episodes.
To a certain extent, I think those things cost us an audience when it first aired because the density wasn't necessarily conducive to passive watching. But I do think all those jokes gave the show legs.
One of my favourite things was how poor David Cross had to put on this blue makeup, and he would talk about how difficult it was to get it off. He would say: "I want to show you something, just watch." And he'd take his pinkie, and he'd push it into his ear, and then he'd pull it out, and there'd be a tiny bit of blue on there. And it had been, like, a month.
To make matters worse, then we put him in sparkles.
And I'm telling you, if you were to hunt down David, I'll bet you there's a sparkle still secreted on his body somewhere from 2006. — as told to AUSTIN CONSIDINE
The Office
2005-2013
Your kid's favourite show.
JENNA FISCHER AND ANGELA KINSEY, STARS AND HOSTS OF THE 'OFFICE LADIES' PODCAST:
ANGELA KINSEY: What I like about my favourite shows I grew up with is their sense of comfort, and I think The Office has that. You can put the show on and it's your friends, and they're all at work together.
JENNA FISCHER: Our bench is so deep, and we're all stuck in one room and the camera is rolling. So while the focus is the dialogue, there are seven people performing in the background.
KINSEY: The cameras were moving all the time, so we had to be performing at all times. We were always in each other's shot, so it was a group effort every day, and it really bonded us. Jenna and I had this very full friendship over a partition, because otherwise reception was an island.
FISCHER: I worked as a receptionist for many years, and it was hilarious to me how much people disregard the receptionist.
KINSEY: One of my favourite memories is, we had some people come to set, and then Jenna went to reception and they had left their trash and taken the prop pens. We're about to start a scene and I look over, and Jenna's picking up some used water bottle and a tissue. So it was like a normal workplace having these kinds of moments.
FISCHER: We did the show before there was really social media, and now it's being shared in memes and GIFs in all these places we could have never imagined. It really hit me when I would be approached by a parent and their 13-year-old, and they were both equally excited to talk about the show.
KINSEY: I was touring middle schools for our children, and I walked into a classroom and the sixth graders lost their composure. A crowd of students started following me. I called Jenna and said, "We are crushing it at middle schools." Streaming opened it up to this whole younger generation, and I love that I was part of something that's bringing parents together with their teenagers. That was the moment where I was like, oh, something's happening. — as told to JEREMY EGNER
The Comeback
2005-2014
It put cringe to good use.
Comedy, as Steve Martin once said, is not pretty. Comedy-making, The Comeback says, is even uglier. Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) knows this better than anyone, having been a hot young sitcom star; the centre of a reality show filming her TV revival playing a sassy aunt (named Aunt Sassy); and finally, the lead of an HBO dramedy — "That's a comedy without the laughs," she explains — based on her and written by the bullying, misogynistic writer of her previous show.
It adds to the layers of meta that this TV roast was co created by Kudrow (with Michael Patrick King of Sex and the City), previously of the sitcom institution Friends. Kudrow's talent carries the audience over the hot coals of this satire. She captures Valerie's nervous energy and hard-earned wariness, holding your gaze as the camera presses in too close for comfort.
Broadly, the two brilliant seasons fall into the 2000s genre of cringe comedy — series, like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office (especially the British version), whose laughs relied on discomfort. But this was a sophisticated variation on the theme, inviting you to question why exactly Valerie is the butt of the joke.
Maybe, The Comeback gradually suggests, the things that mark Valerie Cherish as ridiculous — her thirst, her indomitable desire to please — are products of a warped industry: a system that fawns over young actresses as perishable new goods, then denigrates them as desperate if they refuse to disappear. Ask not for whom The Comeback cringes, Hollywood; it cringes for thee. — JAMES PONIEWOZIK
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
2005-present
Growth is overrated.
ROB McELHENNEY, CREATOR AND STAR:We try really hard. We never take an episode off. We start every writers' room the same way, which is us banging our heads up against a whiteboard, trying to figure out how to do something we haven't done before. That's why we've been able to do what we've been able to do for the last 15 years.
And the good news is that so much of the fabric of the show is based on satirising Western culture, and the culture continues to bestow us gifts.
There's nothing freewheeling about the writing part of the process, because we wind up tackling such potentially offensive and dangerous cultural subject matter. We have to be really careful about how we approach it. It doesn't mean that we censor ourselves. But we do have to make sure that we stick the landing as best we can and present a show that is both funny and what we believe is socially and ethically responsible. And to do so, we have to engage in really lengthy conversation.
Now, have we always stuck the landing? No, because as we're all finding as we continue to progress and evolve, we have certain blind spots. But it never comes from a place of malice. A huge part of the comedy is that you want to take risks. You want to jump out into the abyss and see what happens.
You're going to make mistakes, but then we hopefully learn from those mistakes and then we fix them.
Here's the dirty secret: It's a lot easier to please larger groups of people with drama. Everybody can agree on the things that make us cry. But none of us can agree on what makes us laugh. So when you're trying to make somebody laugh, it becomes niche. There's this lack of respect that comes with comedy because it just seems like we're a bunch of clowns.
I guess I don't quite get that. I mean, besides Annie Hall, can you think of a comedy that won best picture? We all would rather be miserable than laugh? — as told to AUSTIN CONSIDINE
30 Rock
2006-2013
Good God, Lemon!
30 Rock is its loopy, brilliant self for seven consistent seasons. Seven network seasons of "nerds" and "blerghs" and rural jurors, of bad Valentines Days and pronouncing "ham" with two syllables. Of Leap Day Williams, of EGOTs, of never going with hippies to a second location. Of sitting in peace to eat a sandwich and wanting to go to there, and high-fiving a million angels. Liz Lemon is the Mary Richards of the 2000s, and in addition to moxie, she's got night cheese. It even has a good finale.
The best part of 30 Rock, though, is its pace. A lot of single-camera comedies of its era used a more naturalistic mockumentary format, and those that didn't tended toward a more wistful rhythm. But 30 Rock never goes more than a few seconds without a punchline, and its humour comes in every conceivable format. And while it has a few go-tos — food and ego, mostly — it will find the joke in just about anything.
Show business comedies can slide toward bitterness. But while 30 Rock had plenty to ridicule — about NBC in particular; media conglomerates in general; and about the entertainment, microwave and wig industries broadly speaking — its zany bounce never veers into outright misanthropy. After Liz and her eventual husband, Criss, decide to have a baby together, she's thrilled, and she quietly cheers to herself, "Life is happening!"
It's a tiny moment of spectacular happiness, an example of the show's occasional but substantial anchor of recognisable reality, enough to ensure that even when things get much, much kookier — for example, Kenneth is an immortal being — the story doesn't drift out to sea. — MARGARET LYONS
Party Down
2009-2010
Are we having fun yet?
For a show whose pillars include disappointment, despair, bodily fluids and the need for approval, this Starz cater-waiter comedy manages to be spry and surprising, with an intimate poignancy. The characters feel stuck, and the show is more or less a procedural about thankless work, but somehow Party Down is never repetitive. Instead, each episode reveals more about our main characters through the friction between the way they see themselves — an actor, a writer, a comedian, a future owner of a Soup 'R Crackers franchise — and the way the party hosts and guests see them: as has-beens, failures, nobodies in pink bow ties.
Every time I have tried to rewatch one episode of Party Down, I have instead rewatched every episode of Party Down." And each time through, I become more convinced that the Season 2 episode Steve Guttenberg's Birthday is one of the best half-hours of television in living memory. An impromptu reading of a terrible script gives everyone a chance to do something a little different — for Henry (Adam Scott) to show off his real acting chops, for Casey (Lizzy Caplan) to see him in a new light, for Roman (Martin Starr) to add emotions into his inert "hard sci-fi" writing. There are so many layers of phoniness and performance in the world of Party Down, and suddenly, at the absolute most contrived moment of all, we see who Henry really is. It's the kind of jolt any drama would kill for and few comedies would even think to attempt. — MARGARET LYONS
Parks and Recreation
2009-2015
Treat Yo Self.
Parks and Recreation was an underdog show when it aired, a bubble show with significant cast and tonal changes over its run. But years after its finale, it's a cornerstone of contemporary comedy because it helped define the Mike Schur style of earnest goofiness, part of an Obama-era sincerity that pushed back against Bush-era cynicism. Also, who doesn't love a waffle?
The best work advice I ever got was that it matters a lot less what you're doing and a lot more who you're doing it with, and that is a defining precept of Parks. It doesn't really matter what the episode is about, whether it's filling the pit, leading a scouting troop, battling intestinal illness, broadcasting a fundraiser, compiling a time capsule, running for office, extracting a tooth or mourning the death of an iconic mini-horse. As long as you're with Leslie Knope and Co., it's going to be a good time.
Many comedies from the same era had an appetite for cringe and discomfort, or for misanthropic leads; they sought primarily to express disappointment and alienation. In contrast, Parks loves love — perhaps too much! — and wants us all, except for residents of Eagleton, to be happy and well sugared. It's proof that there's artistry in pleasure, too, that companionship and joy are not vices, and that it's worth loving and liking the people you spend time with. — MARGARET LYONS
Community
2009-2015
Six seasons and a philosophy.
DAN HARMON, CREATOR:My intention was never, "This is going to be a sitcom that breaks convention." But at the end of Season 1, we were anticipating cancellation so we took a bow — that's where we got the paintball episode, and the chicken fingers episode. Then we got a second season, so it was all downhill from there.
As crazy and meta as we got with Community, it continued to work as long as the relationships between the characters were believable and understandable. The one where we really nailed the combination was the bottle episode where they're in self-imposed lockdown until they figure out who took Annie's pen. It's a very absurd situation, and Abed is saying, "This is a traditionally absurd situation that you'll see in TV shows." But there is a compelling resolution to it that's about rationality's taking a back seat to the thing that really makes the world go around, which is our trust in each other.
The Dungeons & Dragons episode, justifiably they're stripping it from the streaming archives because it's got a joke about blackface in it. It's gone, and it's fine that it's gone. It also is probably the best episode of Community.
It was a great triumph for Chevy Chase, and the writers writing for Chevy. It was the peak of what that relationship could stand, where you have a justifiably weary silver-screen legend who's a soloist, who's now working exhausting hours under hot lights and being asked to be a team player. And you have the writers dealing with the actor's alienation by putting that back on the page and saying to him: "This is who you are. This is also who this character can be."
Chevy's character is the villain in that episode, but he's also the reason everything happens, and in the end, he prevents a suicide.
The one thing I would like you to walk away with when you're watching Community is permission to be a human, because everything human is better than everything inhuman. That's the one ideological position Community" has. — as told to JEREMY EGNER
Louie
2010-2015
The artifice of the real.
Art, even when it's autobiographical, isn't autobiography. It happens in the gap between the artist's real, possibly unsavoury life and the version of it he offers onscreen; its value, if it has any, depends on that distance.
Louis C.K. is a comedian who used his celebrity to exploit and abuse women; Louie is a dark, formally inventive and often savagely funny TV show about a comedian whose many torments include his complicated, fearful, obsessive, sometimes violent feelings about women.
Those two realities are certainly related, in ways we might not enjoy thinking about. But neither cancels the other out, and Louie — as vivid and true an evocation we have of a certain strand of early 21st-century Manhattan life — easily deserves its place on this list. — MIKE HALE
Bob's Burgers
2011-present
Family matters.
A sitcom has one job: To create a set of believably peculiar, intimately entwined characters and then stay true to them. The Fox animated charmer Bob's Burgers has done that job flawlessly, as well as any show since The Simpsons, for most of its 11 seasons and counting. (The first was a little shaky.)
The Belchers, proprietors of the unassuming burger joint of the title, could be a clan out of a Capra movie — annoying but endearing, in constant motion but (almost) never losing sight of one another. Visiting them might be a little trying, but you could sit around all day happily listening to stories about them.
That's because creator Loren Bouchard and his fellow writers have nurtured a cast of oddballs — residents of an unnamed, Jersey-like shore town — who are both indelibly individual and instantly recognisable, a feat so rare that it seems newly serendipitous every time you watch. At the centre are the Belcher children: Louise (rebellious, sardonic, covertly insecure), Gene (overly dramatic, surprisingly well-adjusted) and Tina (anxious, awkward, but tough), who are impeccably voiced by Kristen Schaal, Eugene Mirman and Dan Mintz. Around them is a whole world, from their doughy, flop-sweating dad, Bob (H. Jon Benjamin), and tart mom, Linda (John Roberts), to their dangerously wacky Aunt Gayle (Megan Mullally) and Bob's friend Teddy (Larry Murphy), a garrulous and touchy handyman who may be the show's most original creation.
Long before the pandemic and our national slide into acrimony, Bob's Burgers was the kind of comfort show that people now hunger for: a family comedy whose frantic misadventures are ingeniously and happily resolved, like living Rube Goldberg contraptions. But it's much more than that. In its ability to capture the constantly overlapping annoyance, embarrassment, anxiety and joy among parents and children, this eccentric cartoon nails the modern family. — MIKE HALE
Key and Peele
Comedy Central, 2012-2015
It wore its influences hilariously.
KEEGAN-MICHAEL KEY, CO-CREATOR AND STAR:I'd say we were on the second half of the second season when we started hitting our stride and finding our voice a little bit. We found the right balance in the sketches, taking everyday scenarios that everybody goes through all the time and adding a strange, sometimes almost macabre sensibility.
The first sketch where I felt like we really, really had it was Continental Breakfast. It starts in a place that most people have experienced and we gradually ramp it up until it becomes an homage to The Shining. Monty Python were influenced by Russian philosophers and German existentialism; Jordan and I trafficked in horror movies and sci-fi.
We benefited from what one of our direct predecessors, David Chappelle, was doing. There was that lovely dose of silliness and goofiness in his work that also had a tinge of the sociopolitical. We were willing to do that as well, and we did it quite often. But the most important thing to us was always that it was funny first.
Ferguson and Trayvon Martin — seeing footage of these racial travesties taking place on a more regular basis — affected a lot of the work that we did. How can we take subjects that aren't funny and make them funny? For us, it was about putting it through the prism of my and Jordan's experience. You still follow the classic formula — premise + escalation = sketch — but the ingredients we put into it came from the way we saw the world.
Every now and again I'll bump into somebody on the street or at the airport, and they'll tell me how much something we did meant to them. It's an honor to hear that your work has been helpful in some way. I'm just glad that people enjoyed it. — as told to REGGIE UGWU
Girls
2012-2017
A voice of a generation.
LENA DUNHAM, CREATOR AND STAR:I had my first meeting with HBO when I was 23, and I wrapped the show when I was 30, so it encompassed my 20s. I think I was ready to tell a story about what that period of time looked like. I was obsessed with my friends and with trying to understand the simultaneous feelings of intense emotionality and numbness, ambition and stuckness that were experienced by these very specific women in New York. I was influenced by everyone from Claudia Weill to Tina Fey to Elaine May to Waiting to Exhale. I wanted to do all that and something new.
What was crazy at the time was that I was doing things like going out, having a bad date, coming into work at 5am with red wine still sloshing in my stomach, writing that as a scene and shooting it five days later. That is how immediate the feedback was.
I think a larger sense of purpose came once I felt the response, the anger and the vitriol that was directed toward me. It was like: "OK, I'm doing something that hits a nerve. Why does it hit a nerve? Maybe part of my mission on earth is to explore what this nerve is." I started to push back, to try to create some new dialogue around what it means for women to be likable, what it means for women to be imperfect, what it means to try to represent women and female friendship and female ambition accurately in narrative.
I think if you had asked me then what the show was about, I would have said, "It's about that complicated place between college and the rest of your life." Or, "It's about your 20s and how confusing they are." But I think it's a lot about female anger, about female rage and pain and how hard that is to express. It's about the gap between how we see ourselves and how other people see us. It's about female love and woman-on-woman crime and how those two things mix and mingle. It's about privilege in the cold, hard light of day.
It's about a lot of things. But it's probably not about the things I thought it was about when I first started making it. — as told to REGGIE UGWU
Nathan for You
2013-2017
It knew how to close the deal.
A Starbucks clone called "Dumb Starbucks." A Hollywood souvenir shop that makes customers believe they've been cast as movie extras. "Poo"-flavoured frozen yogurt. Like the business schemes that Nathan Fielder executed, Nathan for You is an odd creation that you might not think needed to exist. But the world is better off for having it (as opposed to the yogurt).
The Comedy Central series, in which the comic-turned-consultant pitches businesses on cockeyed promotional ideas, is tough to categorise — part Ali G, part Shark Tank, but more than simply a reality or prank show. The episodes get you in the door with a hook, in the manner of Fielder's often deceptive sales schemes, but then they sell you something bigger: mini sagas of entrepreneurial obsession that probe people's deeper wants.
That applies, above all, to the host. Fielder gives a room-temperature deadpan performance as a lonely hustler who has overweening confidence but limited social skills. As the "Dumb Starbucks" scheme gains national news attention, he narrates, "My business was not only a bona fide success, but for the first time in my life, it felt like people actually wanted to be around me."
Over time, the series increasingly strays from its extreme-makeover format into noncommercial experiments. In the finale, Finding Frances, Fielder reconnects with an elderly actor (whom he hired for the souvenir-shop episode) and tries to reunite him with an old flame. Their twisty quest becomes an unsettling but sweet rumination on regret, self-deception and love — which, in the end, is everyone's business. — JAMES PONIEWOZIK
Broad City
2014-2019
You're only young and sweaty once.
ABBI JACOBSON, CO-CREATOR AND STAR:We were always intending to capture what it felt like, at least for me, to be in your 20s in New York, which is this sort of romanticised hustle that's both beautiful and [expletive] simultaneously. It's real sweaty.
When we started doing Broad City it was a web series, and we had such small goals in mind; I don't think we ever were planning for this TV show to be a thing. But once we did get the pilot, and looking back at the web series, it was all just based on trying to create this feeling of: "This is really true to who we are and who we hang out with." It wasn't as if we thought, "This is missing — we need to fill it." It was just like, "We have fun doing this, and we think people might relate."
I would say 90 per cent of the show was shot on location, so as the series progressed and more people knew about the show, it became more difficult for us to shoot quickly without people knowing what we were doing. And there's something about comedy — more than drama, I think — that lends itself to people coming up to you like they know you. I spent enough time with Amy Poehler, who produced the show with us, to see it happen to her. With TV, these people are in your home — you do feel like you know them. I think I felt that way about Amy before I worked with her.
The biggest thing — it's hilarious every time — is that people will say my name in such a way that it feels like we know each other already. Like: "Abbi. Oh, my God." In a way that's so intimate. Then I think that I should know this person, as if we went to high school or camp together.
And then I go through a process of: "Heyyyyy. Oh my goodness! Wait … Do we know each other?"
And they're like, "No!"
I guess that might be more about my fear that I won't remember people's names — I don't think Amy necessarily has the same thing of feeling like, "Wait, do I know you?" That's just me still not knowing how this works. — as told to AUSTIN CONSIDINE
BoJack Horseman
2014-200
So much more than just horsin' around.
What if the best advice about how to lead a life of dignity and purpose came from a cartoon baboon with one line on a show about a washed-up sitcom star who is a horse? Well, no need to wonder: It happened.
"It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day — that's the hard part. But it does get easier." He's talking about jogging, technically, but …
BoJack Horseman crams more jokes and details into its backgrounds than other shows bother having as narrative foreground. Every banner has some kind of gag ("Congrats Diane and Mr. Peanut Butter / Peanut Butter Is One Word Don't Write One Word"); the news ticker sprinkles in surprising pathos ("I wanted to write novels, you know"); every piece of art riffs on an actual work but adds a BoJackian animal twist (Vincent Van Gogh's self portrait has horns, because he's Vincent Van Goat). So many puns, so many sight gags, so many minuscule animal behaviours that you can only catch on fifth viewing.
And that would all be enough for a good show. But BoJack is an all-timer because it is terrifyingly perceptive about human failure and self-recrimination, about the difference between depression and sadness, between explaining and excusing despicable behaviour. Even as BoJack excavates the least flattering dark corners of the psyche, the show never loses its appetite for the silly and absurd. The show's willingness to experiment with form became one of its signature treats: a transformative drug sequence, an entire episode that's just a monologue, a dreamy fish-out-of-water story that is, rather, a horse-in-water one.
BoJack debuted in 2014, at the tail end of the antihero boom, a genre the show pokes fun at but also embodies. Ultimately, though, its sense of whimsy and adventurousness make it a horse of a different color. — MARGARET LYONS
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
2015-2019
It took apart romantic clichés and sounded great doing it.
Several TV series in the 2000s tried to crack the serial-musical format. Glee and Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist went the jukebox route; HBO's Flight of the Conchords drew on its musical duo's back catalogue. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, like its Ivy League-grad protagonist, Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom), was an overachiever. Over four seasons on The CW, Bloom, Jack Dolgen and Adam Schlesinger (who died in 2020) cranked out over a hundred original numbers, from parodies to emotional showstoppers.
The quality matched the quantity. The series was both a romantic comedy and a critique of romantic comedy conventions, with a vaudeville verve but deep specificity of place and character. It began with Rebecca's moving from Manhattan to West Covina, California, to pursue a crush, the kind of deranged move that Hollywood swoons over.
Over the seasons, she fell into love triangles and off the deep end, confronting her borderline personality disorder and the extent to which her desires were shaped by family pressures and pop-culture fantasies. Raunchy and brassily feminist, the show also built out a broad cast of characters, from Rebecca's bisexual boss (Pete Gardner), who came out with the Huey Lewis-style swinger "Gettin' Bi," to her undermining mother (played at hurricane force by Tovah Feldshuh).
Even without the music, this series would have been an accomplishment. Just as Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did but backward and in heels, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend did everything great rom-coms do but deconstructed, singing and occasionally in tap shoes. — JAMES PONIEWOZIK
Atlanta
2016-present
It finds the absurdity in the rap game. U mad?
Faithful readers will remember that we listed FX's Atlanta as one of the best dramas of recent years in 2019, because it is: Donald Glover's creation is dedicated to the serious realities of its characters, building lives on the margins of the Atlanta rap scene.
But it's also hilarious down to its bones. The Season 2 episode Barbershop, in which rapper Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) gets dragged around town by his fast-talking barber on a picaresque goose chase, wearing a woeful half-haircut, is a masterpiece of existential slapstick.
Absurdity is everywhere in this show: It hides in the bathroom with a contraband reptile in Alligator Man; it opens the eerie Teddy Perkins as Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) buys a Confederate-flag "SOUTHERN MADE" trucker hat and edits it to read "U MAD"; it pops out of the faux commercials on the fictional Black American Network in B.A.N.; it appears as a Black Justin Bieber at a charity basketball game in Nobody Beats the Biebs.
Each episode unfolds like a stealth mission. You don't know where it's going when it begins; it just pulls up, points to the passenger door and tells you to get in and trust it. The destination might be the club, or a disconcertingly meticulous German holiday festival, or a New Year's Eve party at Drake's house. The humour hits you unawares like the invisible sports car in an inspired Season 1 sight (or out-of-sight) gag.
None of this makes the themes — authenticity, paying bills, being ambitious and Black in America — any less substantial. But to capture the comedy and drama of existence, sometimes you need a show that can do both. — JAMES PONIEWOZIK
Better Things
2016-present
It knows that laughing and crying are not opposites.
In the Season 2 Better Things episode Eulogy, the actress and single mother Sam Fox (Pamela Adlon) feels unappreciated by her three daughters. So she holds a mock funeral for herself: She doesn't want to wait until she's actually dead for her kids to say nice things about her. The idea upsets her youngest daughter, Duke (Olivia Edward), so Sam reassures her: "You're dead, too. We both died!" Duke brightens up. Problem solved!
Like many of the impressionistic stories in Better Things, this could be an old-school sitcom premise. Sam gets sick and needs the kids to help around the house! Max (Mikey Madison) moves back home from college! But Adlon — who also created the series, writes and directs — commits to the naturalism of every scenario. The mock funeral plays out with dark humour, but there's also tenderness and confession and a point: that mothers are socialised to play down their own worth and achievements.
Sam is not the silent type, and the fractious love among women — including Sam's grande-dame mother (Celia Imrie) — is the show's core. The fights on Better Things are some of the realest on TV, which is to say that they're vicious and hilarious. In No Limit, Sam resolves an argument between Duke and Frankie (Hannah Alligood) by giving them one minute to say the worst things they can to each other. Tiny Duke unleashes a TV-MA torrent of cursing that leaves you stunned, then laughing yourself breathless.
That's what Better Things does. It feels everything intensely, and it knows that when you're dealing with family, seemingly opposite feelings are always connected. Love expresses itself through hostility; happy moments are laced with preemptive nostalgia.
Better Things feels everything so thoroughly, in fact, that it would be fair to ask whether it's a comedy or a drama. The answer, I guess, depends on which one you believe life is. Probably it's both. But in the end, you like to look back and remember the parts where you laughed. — JAMES PONIEWOZIK
PEN15
2019-present
We've all been there.
We've all swapped stories about the mortifying things that happened to us as teenagers. Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle took that propensity for retrospective self-torture and turned it into a TV series, then doubled down by casting themselves as geeky middle-school best friends, playing out scenes of mean-girl humiliation and fumbling sexuality with teenage actors. A lot of shows have worked the vein of coming-of-age nostalgia, but none have done it with the peculiar, disarming intensity of Hulu's PEN15.
The show (created by Erskine, Konkle and Sam Zvibleman) is a high-wire act and not every idea stays airborne, but most of them have so far. The recreation of circa-2000 suburban life, in school hallways and cluttered bedrooms, is meticulous. But what sets PEN15 apart (the off-colour title is inspired by a schoolyard prank) is the success of its central gimmick. Erskine and Konkle's adult presence implicates us in their characters' rages and crushes and horribly bad decisions; it amplifies the mortification of bad haircuts and ill-advised hookups, the numb terror of family discord and the joy of unquestioning friendship.
The pubescent Maya's and Anna's obsessions with sex are made clear in abundantly raunchy and discomfiting detail, which helps to forestall the airbrushed sentimentality that so many coming-of-age shows — even ones that pride themselves on being real — fall prey to. And here again, the casting works. Knowing that the protagonists are played by adults doesn't make it any harder to sympathise with them, but it cuts against the mawkish sympathy we might be inclined to feel for children. In reclaiming their own childhoods, Erskine and Konkle let us take a fond and really embarrassing look back at ourselves. — MIKE HALE
THE TOUGHEST OMISSIONS
Review
2014-2017
What does it feel like to eat 30 pancakes? To get divorced? To get hit by lightning? Forrest MacNeil (Andy Daly) knows because it's his job. Forrest is a professional life reviewer; he hosts a TV show in which viewers challenge him to undergo experiences and rate them on a five-star scale.
The premise sounds as if it could maybe sustain a running bit on a sketch-comedy show, and indeed, many of Forrest's escapades are killer set pieces. (Tasked by a viewer to review drug addiction, the uptight host goes on a madcap cocaine bender: "I give it a million stars!")
But what distinguishes Review, based on an Australian series, is how it, like Forrest, commits to the assignment, asking: What kind of person would turn himself into a crash-test dummy for a bored TV mob?
For Forrest, reviewing life ultimately becomes a means to avoid living it. The result is both funny and profound to see play out. Just don't try this at home.
Would swap out: Curb Your Enthusiasm. Plenty of great moments in this kvetchy stalwart's two decades. But as a whole? I'll take quality over quantity. — JAMES PONIEWOZIK, chief television critic
The Boondocks
2005-2014
Aaron McGruder adapted his comic strip about a Black family living in a white suburb into this animated series, and for three seasons it was a beautiful blend of raucous cultural and racial satire and wistful coming-of-age comedy. (McGruder was not involved with the diminished fourth season.)
In its look, sound and rhythms, it's still the most evocative American example of the fertile crossover of hip-hop and anime. And its voice cast was splendid, led by John Witherspoon as Robert Freeman, the one-time civil rights activist turned ornery grandfather, and the amazing dual performance of Regina King as the Freeman brothers: 8-year-old Riley, the sweetly charming aspiring gangster, and 10-year-old Huey, the brooding intellectual whose dreams give equal place to kung fu and the Black Panthers. — MIKE HALE, television critic
Would swap out: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Musical melodrama is the lowest form of comedy.
Jackass
2000-2003
I thought about Pushing Daisies, Scrubs, High Maintenance, Barry, Ugly Betty, American Vandal, One Mississippi, Malcolm in the Middle, Better Off Ted and At Home With Amy Sedaris.
But if we're thinking about comedy in the traditional sense that involves, you know, laughing, there is no question about our most glaring omission. It's Jackass. No show from the past 21 years makes me laugh more — I'll take joyous body mortification over awkward cringing any day.
Would swap out: Either The Office or Arrested Development. Both shows are masterpieces … sometimes. But they lost their ways, and thus despite their incredibly high highs, their achievements are eroded by the vastness and nature of their low lows. — MARGARET LYONS, television critic
Veep
2012-2019
When I talked with Rob McElhenney for this feature, I asked him whether a show ought to be ha-ha funny to be included in a list of best comedies; his (indignant, hilarious) answer was largely unprintable.
I agree. Among my personal criteria for judging comedies, one trumps all others: The best make me laugh, and Veep made me straight-up guffaw every episode. It is crass. It is absurd. Its characters are irredeemable. Washington being the dumpster fire it is, those qualities made Veep only more relevant over time. What more can I say that its 17 Emmys don't?
Would swap out: Parks and Recreation. Sorry, Parks and Rec — despite your many, many charms, you were just too precious for me in later seasons. I haven't met a sitcom yet that didn't lose its mojo after "will they/won't they" became "happily ever after." And when I find myself "awwing" more than laughing, that's when I cut bait. — AUSTIN CONSIDINE, assistant television editor
Rick and Morty
2013-present
Perhaps no other show brings me more pure TV joy than Rick and Morty, and certainly no other ongoing one. (Though What We Do in the Shadows, another painful omission, comes pretty close.) The episodes are hysterical and frequently dizzying — last season's floridly vulgar, endlessly recursive Never Ricking Morty actually made my head hurt a little. But every time the teeming riot of Ricks and references threatens to become altogether too much — too meta, too frenetic, too crass, too mean to Jerry — the credible family dynamics provide enough emotional ballast to keep the Story Train on the tracks.
Would swap out: Bob's Burgers. I'm not trying to set up some animated Highlander battle; I'd happily have many cartoons on the list. But for me, Bob's tops out somewhere around "perfectly OK" — good for a few chuckles but generally skippable. It's one of my least popular TV opinions, but I stand by it. — JEREMY EGNER, television editor
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: James Poniewozik, Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons, Jeremy Egner, Austin Considine and Reggie Ugwu
© 2021 THE NEW YORK TIMES