I found this interesting reading - though I always find polls interesting even if I don't agree with them (I wonder who would still put My Hero as the top show of 00/01?)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1501357.stm
I love all the specific categories they go into.
Chef! as the worst sitcom ever? I mean OK, it is not a classic, but I actually quite enjoyed the first series and when you look back at it, the bullying nature of Gareth Blackstock towards the junior chef lampooned temperamental chefs a few years ahead of Gordon Ramsay forging a lucrative career by behaving this way in front of the TV cameras.
Looking at the list of nominees for best comedy series of 2000/01, it would appear that wasn't a particularly good 12 months for mainstream comedy.
The trouble with 'worst' comedy is the worst ones don't get recomissioned and aren't remembered. Worst really means worst of those ones that were popular enough to get a few series and because you didn't enjoy them you remember each time a new series started.
It is funnier watching Chef! now having seen Mr Ramsay
I guess we're to believe 40% of respondents think Mash was the greatest American sit-com, while 2.5% think Seinfeld. Who the hell did they servey? The RSL?
Don't know why they would class League of Gentlemen as a sitcom. More of a filmed series than a studio based sitcom in front of an audience.
And over the decades there have been some truly terrible sitcoms that were a million times worse than Chef, which wasn't all that bad. More recently, The Persuasionists? We are Klang?
Don't open up that can of worms https://www.comedy.co.uk/forums/thread/22045/
I don't think the top ten would've changed since then. Apart from The Office there have been no major all time great sitcoms. Shows how poor sitcom was if My Hero was the best of that year!
The Office and/or G&M heralded a new style in sitcom and gave sitcom a new lease of life but also took us away from what the sitcom was. By the end of the decade the vogue for new styles was bringing in some of the worst sitcoms ever made.
The real trouble is as I see it, the clueless TV commissioners think differently now, they are post G&M execs, and want trendy, clever, edgy sitcoms, or just sitcoms made exclusively by the new wave of comedians and do not trust any writer new or known who wants to go back to the old pre watershed classic style sitcom.
OFAH was and still is hilarious, it wasn't edgy, it wasn't crude, it wasn't risky, just funny. TV has simply lost the plot! (And it's the clueless new execs' fault.)
George & Mildred?
But agree with you there. We have been bereft of a funny family sitcom for the last decade.
I don't have the answer unfortunately but in my opinion resurrecting oldies is not it (having just read article about possibly a new BlackAdder).