The memory of Roxy LaToure lives on. RIP.

Caesar's Hour: Mel Brooks, Mel Tolkin, Larry Gelbart, Gary Belkin, Carl Reiner, Selma Diamond, Neil Simon, Aaron Ruben.

Live audience shows had almost died out by 1970. Mary Tyler Moore started a live show in 1970, followed soon after by All in the Family and Sanford and Son, and then The Odd Couple switched from single camera with a laugh track to multicamera with an audience. And for the next 20 years, nearly all hit sitcoms were live audience. So, the next hit could turn the whole thing around again.

F Troop, then. I'm just giving examples.

The Bill Cosby Show aired on NBC 1969-71 with no laughter. It finished No. 11 in 1969-70. MASH didn't debut until 1972.

Through the 2010s, NBC turned out single camera after single camera, and managed to surrender the most dominant position any network ever had on a given night.

"It will take a show I might actually like and enjoy and turn it immediately into something I simply can’t watch."

This is where your argument just fails. There's no physical allergy to listening to mixed laughter. If there's a TV episode that's a 10 out of 10, addition of laughter doesn't drop it to 0 out of 10. At least not if you intended to laugh in the first place. People laughed at silent films, black & white films, no film (aka, radio). A laugh track doesn't disqualify something from being funny.

There's an All in the Family episode where Mike is unloading a bag of groceries and commenting on the products. He pulls out some kind of cleaner and says, "Look at this label, 'New and Improved.' Everything we buy today is new and improved. What were we using yesterday - old and lousy?" And this is what we've seen in recent years - an effort to disqualify older shows from consideration because these new shows have discovered some secret formula. It's marketing, not art or even criticism, and people who just can't watch Seinfeld or Cheers or MASH or Andy Griffith or Lucy have just fallen for a sales pitch.

The "track" is the recording of the laughter. That takes in everything from a pure audience reaction to 100% mechanical laughter, and every mix in between.

No one told pavlov's dogs to get ready for dinner. They just rang a bell. The same thing happens in single camera shows, for instance with an exaggerated reaction shot. Or with music or some other cue.

Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton.

Character actor Phil Leeds in any sitcom.

Daffy Duck is the king: loose cannon with Bugs Bunny, straight man with Porky Pig.

Barney Fife of Andy Griffith Show is the same dynamic: loose cannon with Andy, straight man with Gomer.

The Families Ties two-parter where the uber-aware Keatons realize that for the last fifteen years they've been living in a restricted neighborhood full of violent segregationists.

"And/As" is often an acknowledgement that the person had a following independent of the show.

One of the odder And/As's was on the sitcom "It's a Living", where the fourth credit was "And Ann Jillian as Cassie" and the seventh and last was "And Barrie Youngfellow as Jan."

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f6X6zvrNkwY

About the only "filler" for me would be seasons churned out after the show's quality has declined, but while a portion of the audience has remained due to loyalty. The show has nothing left to say, but can still earn for someone.

An episode can be analogous to a chapter in a novel, or it can be analogous to a short story complete in itself. So a season can be analogous to a full novel, or a collection of short stories. Either sort of book can be padded with material that's only tangentially related to the designated subject.

The Britcom "Colin's Sandwich", with the late Mel Smith. Just 12 episodes.

Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Beany & Cecil, Underdog, Linus the Lionhearted

I think it's pretty much universally accepted that Penny, Bernadette, and Amy were more normal, functional, and attractive than Leonard, Howard, and Sheldon, respectively, while Raj and then Stuart are presented as classic losers. A claim of misogyny can't be sustained when the premise of the show is that all of the male characters are inadequate.

Most disappointing might be BBC America.

Big Bang Theory, S3E22-S4E4 (six episodes): how everyone met, Amy introduced, every one a gem.

US: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

UK: Colin's Sandwich

I enjoyed the finale, but other than that I think it went into pretty steep decline in the course of Season 6.

All in the Family spun off Maude, which spun off Good Times.

All in the Family spun off the Jeffersons, which spun off Checking In.

It's a pretty interesting show: in most military sitcoms, the army is the enemy, and the protagonists are the operators who are trying to get around the army's rules and have a little fun. Hogan's different - there are no episodes where the group is trying to get around Klink because there's a party in Hamelburg. They're commandos with a mission every week, and the comedy has to arise from the mission. This is a long way around of saying that it's actually a distant James Bond clone, closer in concept to the Man from UNCLE than it is to McHale's Navy or the early years of MASH.

Co-created by Albert Ruddy, who went on to produce The Godfather.

RIP. Recommend the very funny episode, "LeBeau and the Little Old Lady."