The show is silly, but fun, and of course it spawned a bunch of catchphrases, mostly courtesy of Travolta’s Vinnie Barbarino. Primarily, we spend time with four of the students, all of them broadly drawn, but delightful, caricatures.
The series centered on a teacher returning to his high-school alma mater to teach the “Sweathogs,” a group of remedial students, of which he once was one.
In the last season, Gabe Kaplan and Marcia Strassman didn’t really want to work together, and Marcia won that battle, forcing Kaplan to make sporadic appearances, even though he was the titular Kotter being welcomed back. It helped skyrocket John Travolta to fame. There are a lot of interesting facts about Welcome Back, Kotter. Stars: Gabe Kaplan, Marcia Strassman, John Sylvester White, Robert Hegyes, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, Ron Palillo, John Travolta The show is certainly dated in many ways, but without it, there would be no Flintstones, Roseanne, Home Improvement, or Shameless.- Robert Ham Throw in some fine supporting work by Art Carney and Joyce Randolph as next door neighbors Ed and Trixie Norton, and the perfect formula was built for scripts that mixed acidic banter, slapstick, and lots of mugging. A typical episode involved Ralph’s efforts to make a quick buck, and winding up right back where he started from.
Unlike so much of the fare on TV at the time, the show concerned a working class couple, Ralph and Alice Kramden (played by Gleason and the wonderful Audrey Meadows), struggling to get by and get along. Stars: Jackie Gleason, Audrey Meadows, Art Carney, Joyce Randolph, Pert KeltonĪlthough The Honeymooners only ran for 39 episodes in the mid-’50s, this offshoot of The Jackie Gleason Show has had a considerable impact on the world of situation comedies for six decades now. You know-like one big, happy, dysfunctional family. You can rest assured that many of our favorites didn’t either, which means we can tweet out our angry, but respectful, responses. We apologize in advance that one (or more) of your favorites did not make the cut. So, with a focus on quality over nostalgia-no matter how much it hurt-the Paste editors and writers have chosen the 100 best sitcoms of all time (first voting in 2016 and updating the list in 2022). Some of our favorites managed to weave the high-brow with the low-brow many of them seemed unconcerned with either brow, as long they made us happy. The sitcom did that, and though it has evolved and morphed into the stuff of dreams, it always had those high-brow, cinematic qualities in its fiber.
And Peak TV did not invent good storytelling in episodic form. Families and relationships (and the dysfunctional and/or loving ties that bind them), workplace drama, compelling historical settings and characters who made even the mundane seem worthy of our attention-these things are at the core of good storytelling. We have arrived at a glorious point in history, where watching an excellent TV show might finally be intellectually on par with reading a great book, and even the most prestigious of shows are all the descendants, in some way or another, of the good ol’ sitcom. Putting together a list like this is always equal parts painful and enjoyable for editors and writers, but I can’t think of a better time to look back on the greatest sitcoms of all time. We laughed, we cried, we raged against the dying of the light which sought to snuff out our personal favorite shows.