This is on the over-the-air network Rewind TV.

There is a lot of sociology to the effect that people who live in large areas that are diverse overall still live insular lives. In other words, the cities are diverse, but the neighborhoods are not. That's Friends.

Again, they're idiots. They're not supposed to be role models. Just the opposite, in fact.

It's an important point, because it goes to why the cast couldn't "diversify." The writers just didn't have the guts to make the lesbian couple a pair of idiots, which would make them funny. When Ross dated a Chinese girl and then a black girl, the writers wouldn't let them be stupid, so they couldn't be funny, and they couldn't stay around the show.

"You're drastically downplaying the similarities to Living Single, but even if it was just the basic concept, that still makes it derivative, by definition."

One of the issues with this argument is that nothing much of Living Single was original, either. The free floating cast of peers had been long established by Seinfeld and even shows like The Golden Girls. The long-running romances come from Cheers and multiple clones. One show can't be said to copy another if they both just trace back to common ancestors.

I first became aware of Dennis in a short arc of Hill Street Blues episodes where he played the shady cop Sal Benedetto. He made such an impression that he came back as Det. Buntz, which led to his own show and then the co-lead in NYPD Blue.

The 60s: Hitchcock, Twilight Zone, rural comedies, Westerns, Perry Mason, Peter Gunn, Dragnet, Star Trek, fantasy comedies, Man from Uncle, Get Smart, Batman, Mister Ed. They'll be around forever.

I've often thought that they could have syndicated it as two different shows.

We have enough copycats of Cheers now to know that the successful ones can run pretty much indefinitely. Friends shook things up by shifting attention to Monica and Chandler, and by doing stunt casting. The Big Bang Theory just married the guys off and turned into a domestic sitcom. I think that Cheers could have just married Sam and Diane off and had Diane raise kids at home while Sam bounced back and forth between home and work. Same basic formula as worked for a lot of popular shows, including Mary Tyler Moore, Home Improvement, and Frasier.

I'm not embarrassed about things I like. I'd enjoy, though, an evening of critics' unfavorites consisting of: 7:00 Baywatch 8:00 Beverly Hillbillies 8:30 Big Bang Theory 9:00 The Love Boat 10:00 Charlie's Angels

Can't beat Rocky & Bullwinkle

Cheers, over Frasier and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Marie Barone, Everybody Loves Raymond

The Odd Couple (Randall/Klugman version) began as a single camera show with a laugh track. They aired an episode without the laugh track, and Randall/Klugman came on at the end and asked the audience to mail in their opinions. That mail ran against the laugh track. They decided to make a change, but as Mary Tyler Moore and All in the Family were proving very popular with live audiences, The Odd Couple went that way instead of single camera/no laughs. This was being worked out in 1971, and MASH debuted in the fall of 1972.

You might want to look into a show called Hennesey (1959-62), starring Jackie Cooper (who later directed 13 episodes of MASH):

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/03/arts/television-is-canned-laughter-a-joke.html

The Adam West Batman (1966-68) was nominated for Emmys in the comedy categories.

Florence briefly left The Jeffersons, then came back after her spinoff failed.

Same re Joanie and Chachi from Happy Days.

Big Bang Theory. Modern Family had a great start, but ran out of gas relatively fast for me. Big Bang had about five very funny years, got somewhat lost in the relationships for a few years, then surprisingly reinvented as a domestic comedy the last three years or so. The way it was going, Big Bang probably could have run for another 10 years if they had wanted to keep going.

Soap - Season 1 Seinfeld - Season 4