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By David Young · May 27, 2024
The magic of comedy is one that’s been around since ancient times. While the gags have changed with the times, though, something that hasn’t changed is how comedy is constructed. Often, it all starts with the circumstance someone finds themselves in. In modern media, that includes your favorite anecdotal stand-up routines, satirical stories, and of course, situational comedy shows, or sitcoms.
Sitcoms, as they’re called more commonly, have become a staple of television—and they bring joy by showing the same people encountering episode after episode of conflicts that force them to respond. Though you may cringe or balk at the response, sitcoms still get you to laugh.
Whether it’s with rapid-fire jokes or a series of embarrassing setups, the situations that develop have great potential to go wrong. And, for the sake of laughter, they generally do. Let’s get into our 24 favorite sitcoms.
Screenplay by: Greg Daniels, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, Paul Lieberstein, B.J. Novak, Mindy Kaling, Michael Schur, Gene Stupnitsky, and Lee Eisenberg
In this cringe-comedy mockumentary inspired by the original UK version, a paper company’s 9-to-5 office life is regularly brought into chaos thanks to the boss’s buffoonery and his complicit staff. His skills in sales don’t mean branch manager Michael Scott (Steve Carell) handles people well, and often, it’s quite the opposite—making for moment after moment of quotable, bingeable humor.
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Screenplay by: David Crane and Marta Kauffman
Over 10 seasons, a group of six people in New York City explore their love lives and burgeoning careers starting in their mid-20s. Each friend has some personal hang-ups that get them into trouble—all while we watch them grow alongside each other over the years.
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Screenplay by: Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge stars as the titular character, and she pits this sex addict against her own most formidable source of trouble: herself. In two poignant seasons, this modern take on the social sitcom delivers a narrative arc that pushes Fleabag into the most compromising positions—often not even the fun ones.
Download the script!Read More: 30 Fleabag Quotes That Prove Phoebe Waller-Bridge is the GOAT
Screenplay by: David Richardson
Malcolm (Frankie Muniz), a kid genius, comes from a comically maladjusted family—one where personality clashes often cause outlandish conflict. With that in the way, it’s no wonder that this family has a lot of issues to iron out before Malcolm can escape to college.
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Screenplay by: Glen Charles, Les Charles, and James Burrows
Like a fly on the wall in this cozy bar, the audience for Cheers watches as a social phenomenon unfolds: Strangers can even become friends or lovers when they’re in a place like The Bull and Finch Pub as often as these characters are. With great writing for characters and jokes alike, Cheers sat exemplary as a sitcom for anyone wanting to participate in that social bond a bar brings.
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Screenplay by: Rob Edwards
Sent to live with his uncle’s family after getting in a fight in Philly, Will (Will Smith) is a perfect fish out of water in the world of L.A.’s wealthy and well-to-do. As expected, part of the comedy lies in bringing his habits and hard-learned lessons, just as strange to his uncle as Bel-Air is to Will.
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Screenplay by: David X. Cohen and Matt Groening
Making an outlandish cartoon sitcom set in the Year 3,000 provides a lot of leeway. From the usual satire of early Matt Groening work to the absurdity of the situations that come, Futurama sees moronic protagonist Fry (Billy West) into several deep-space capers where the punchline is just wild enough to work.
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Screenplay by: Michael Schur, Josh Siegal, and Dylan Morgan
Another sitcom that emphasizes the oddness of its setting, The Good Place sees change happen over time to a place that presumably wouldn’t change at all: heaven. With the absurd being accepted as ho-hum in this reimagined afterlife, it acts as another great fish-out-of-water comedy, regularly driven forward by its less episodic core narrative.
Download the script!Read More: Writing for Television: Tips From “The Good Place”
Screenplay by: Justin Spitzer, Jack Kukoda, and Jeny Batten
An ensemble sitcom set in a department store, Superstore capitalizes on the wide range of hilarious characters in this workplace. Meanwhile, real-life situations get exaggerated to showcase the devious comedy that lies in everyday work in the world of retail.
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Screenplay by: Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
Another much-loved mockumentary, this show chronicles a group of vampires attempting to secretly live as citizens of Staten Island. Their bloodthirsty instincts become quite the hurdle to blending in with the crowd — and the hijinks that follow typically come from trying to correct the group’s missteps against the well-established rules of day-to-day unlife.
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Screenplay: Bill Lawrence
Hailed by doctors as the show that most accurately depicts the minutiae of medical work life, the narrator of Scrubs (Zach Braff)—when not daydreaming—describes the ups and downs of his and this career in the field, all while he and his friends attempt to navigate personal lives.
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Screenplay by: Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt, and Bill Wrubel
This fish-out-of-water comedy takes place in the world of sports, with American football coach Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) taking a job as a football coach across the pond. The catch is, over there, the game they’re playing is soccer — and Ted’s well out of his depth there.
Download the script!Read More: 25 Emmy-Nominated Scripts Every Writer Should Start Reading Today
Screenplay by: Larry David
A bit of a misanthrope, this comically irritable version of Larry David finds himself in an improvised series filled with everyday social situations dripping in cringe comedy—where his attitude toward a small problem often makes mountains out of mole hills, much to his horror.
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Screenplay by: Carter Bays and Craig Thomas
This frame story chronicles the inopportune and often hilariously upsetting events that led up to Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) meeting his future wife and the mother of his children. Told almost entirely in flashbacks, this sitcom’s structure marries the idea of dramatic serial arcs and episodic hilarity in a very unique way for nine seasons.
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Screenplay by: Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher
This narrated series details Devi’s (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) struggles as she pursues popularity, belonging, romance, and all the other things a high-schooler wants. From sometimes fighting her parents’ Indian traditions to unwittingly starting a love triangle, she has a lot to figure out in the most confusing years of her life.
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Screenplay by: Greg Daniels and Michael Schur
Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) is the pivotal figure of this mockumentary by the creators of The Office, and when it comes to her work in the city government, she has passion to spare. This series follows her high-intensity pursuit of public service alongside friends and coworkers whose personal problems often get in the way of progress.
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Screenplay by: Will Forte
When life gives you a virus that wipes out most human life on Earth, you make lemonade. Or, at least, you try. Phil Miller (Will Forte) finds himself trying harder and harder to squeeze those lemons when his fellow survivors don’t live life on his terms. This modern black comedy uses an utterly unforgettable protagonist whose selfishness gets in the way of everyone’s survival.
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Screenplay by: Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day
The owners of a failing Philadelphia watering hole don’t care about anyone but themselves, meaning that the situations they concoct for horrifyingly hilarious, harebrained schemes leave everyone else worse off. That’s not to say they get off scot-free, of course—but these characters—each terrible in their way—do seem to survive a disaster like human cockroaches.
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Screenplay by: Dan Harmon
When a pathological lawyer—uh, liar—named Jeff (Joel Mchale) is forced to receive the college education he claimed he had for years, he finds himself starting a bond with his fellow misfits in a Spanish study group he initially created for his selfish gain. Jeff’s relentless need to win and “be right” puts him in more quandaries than he’d ever admit aloud.
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Screenplay by: John Pollack
A clear nod to the back-end environment of Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock parodies the behind-the-scenes world of a sketch comedy show through the eyes of head writer Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), as the utter wildness of her coworkers threatens her sanity and the show itself.
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Screenplay by: Mitchell Hurwitz
Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) acts as the straight man and the “get out of jail card”—literally—for his wealthy family whose business practices were comically ill-informed to the point of criminal negligence. When Michael steps in and must protect his family, he instead gets pulled into the whirlpool of Bluth family chaos, dragging his son (Michael Cera) down with him.
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Screenplay by: Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld
In the once-proclaimed “show about nothing” created by Larry David, a group of friends in New York City offer each other nothing but bad advice and ill-conceived notions of how romance, friendship, and social norms work for the rest of us, much to the chagrin of the rest of us.
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Screenplay by: Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd
This ensemble mockumentary sitcom follows the narratives of multiple households connected by family ties. When seeing each separate household as part of the whole family or as one unit of its own, the chaos that ensues for each often works to effortlessly paint and exaggerate the frustrations of any modern family.
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Screenplay by: Mike Judge and Greg Daniels
Living a humble suburban life in Arlen, Texas, Hank Hill (Mike Judge) was named by The Economist one of the wisest people on television. His wide-eyed shock at the quirky antics of his neighbors and family, paired with the characters’ deadpan deliveries, commonly express the nuance of show creator Mike Judge’s comic genius.
Download the script!—
As you will notice, comedy comes in various tones and shades, with some darker than others. From the bright coziness of Cheers to the utter depravity of It’s Always Sunny, sitcoms have run the gamut of audiences for some time and will continue to do so.
While the multi-cam sitcoms were a product of a previous age, its influence is felt in tons of stories told even today. Sitcoms have survived and adapted—and by reading through these excellent examples of the genre, you can begin to see how!
Read More: 3 Things You Can Do to Make Your Good Comedy Script Better
