The highest-rated sitcoms on Rotten Tomatoes: twenty-five critic favourites

Larry can command a studio and still spend the evening interpreting a minor response as evidence that he is losing importance. Garry Shandling's hesitations let the genial public manner and the private calculation remain uncomfortably close.

The move between the talk show and its backstage life is essential. A smooth exchange has required preparation, accommodation and somebody absorbing a difficult demand. Hank needs recognition of his own; Artie's ability to make the show happen is another form of power.

The celebrity appearances work best when familiarity becomes leverage rather than a detachable joke. A guest brings a reputation the production needs and an ego it must manage.

This is my strongest recommendation here for anyone interested in performance as labour. It can be cold and painfully awkward. The attraction is how precisely the programme identifies a need for affection inside conduct that makes affection difficult to give.

Watch a guest's public courtesy and then the attention Larry gives it backstage. The same successful appearance can be understood as good work by the production and inadequate recognition by the host. The series does not need the guest to become an obvious villain. Its more uncomfortable subject is the amount of appreciation a person can feel entitled to receive.

Andy and Lance want to find something significant. The programme's affection depends on showing that their time together is already significant, without making the ambition itself foolish.

The fields give the comedy a different duration from a workplace panic. A conversation can wander, stop and reveal a concern neither man initially intended to discuss. Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones allow pride and mild competition inside the apparent ease.

The people around them prevent the hobby from being a complete explanation of their lives. Being knowledgeable in one small world does not make a man equally perceptive about a partner or a friend.

The pace will seem uneventful if you need a quick succession of punchlines. Give it enough uninterrupted time to establish what a pause is doing. The best moments make satisfaction look smaller than a public triumph and much more durable.

Tim and Daisy's initial arrangement is practical: they need somewhere to live. The shared flat then becomes a place where an uncertain adult life can be rehearsed with other people.

The cinematic references matter when they alter that rehearsal. An ordinary disappointment briefly acquires the cutting, sound or physical urgency of a genre the characters understand. Edgar Wright makes the fantasy feel like an activity, not only a quotation.

The surrounding household supplies resistance and warmth. Without those relationships, the formal invention would be a collection of clever demonstrations.

Some references will be less immediate to viewers who did not encounter the same films and games. The emotional route remains clear: being knowledgeable about imaginary worlds does not settle where you belong in the actual one. Choose it for visual play with a particular need for company beneath it.

Abbi and Ilana are good at making an ordinary errand feel worth a story. The city keeps offering practical resistance: distance, money, work and the difficulty of getting a modest task done without acquiring three new problems.

The performances give the friendship more than a comforting function. Ilana's apparent freedom can become pressure on Abbi, while Abbi's desire to appear reasonable does not prevent an extravagant decision. They enable each other's pleasure and occasionally each other's evasion.

“Stolen Phone” is a useful early example of an errand expanding through their different appetites. The ingenuity is in the route, not merely the outcome.

The comedy is sexually frank, coarse and sometimes deliberately irritating. Choose it if you want women whose foolishness is allowed to generate the action, rather than waiting to provide sensible reactions to somebody else's adventure.

Janine wants to help, but enthusiasm is not identical to understanding what a classroom or a colleague needs. Quinta Brunson makes that distinction comic without turning commitment itself into the joke.

The experienced teachers are important because they possess practical knowledge that a new idea may overlook. Barbara's resistance can have reasons; it need not be the obstacle that a younger person's determination simply defeats.

The camera gives a declared intention another account through a reaction or an inconvenient result. The workplace has tasks beyond keeping the ensemble entertained, and shortages make improvisation necessary.

The reassuring tone can sometimes make individual dedication seem too adequate an answer to institutional failure. The programme is strongest when it lets generosity require adjustment, preparation or admitting that somebody else already knows more. Choose it for warmth with actual work underneath.

The girls can make a small prospect enormous before the adults have finished describing a larger danger. Lisa McGee does not make one scale cancel the other. An embarrassing evening remains embarrassing even when a checkpoint or a news report changes the route home.

The speed comes from competing interpretations. Everyone believes the group has agreed to the same plan, while each person is already pursuing a different emotional outcome.

Family scenes keep adding knowledge the teenagers do not possess and comic habits the adults cannot stop practising. Sister Michael's refusal to provide the expected response gives the whole arrangement another rhythm.

Subtitles may help with unfamiliar speech and pace. The particularity is the pleasure: a social world can be funny without translating every joke into a lesson about its political circumstances.

The central romance brings people into the same room; the conversations reveal how much prior history has entered with them. A casual remark can open a grievance, a private joke or an event nobody will explain to a newcomer.

That selective knowledge is a major part of the pleasure. The audience gradually becomes familiar enough to recognise that a pause has a history, without needing every history resolved.

The movement between Barry and Billericay gives practical weight to travel, hosting and the work of making somebody feel included. Smithy and Nessa provide forceful comic identities, but the surrounding family habits matter just as much.

The later sentiment and repeated phrases may feel overly reassuring. At its strongest, the affection comes through specific acts of accommodation, with enough awkwardness left to make the company recognisable.

Eleanor initially wants to avoid exposure. That practical motive gradually brings her into contact with obligations she cannot manage merely by appearing convincing.

The serial construction gives the comedy unusual freedom to change its conditions. Watch in order and avoid explanations of the major reversals; they alter the meaning of relationships as well as the mechanics of the setting.

There are passages in which a philosophical explanation arrives more insistently than the scene needs. The actors keep the better material active by giving an idea an immediate social problem: someone wants forgiveness, help or another chance.

Choose it when you want a sustained story as well as an ensemble. Its most persuasive optimism is that improvement takes practice with other people, including the people who are least convenient for your existing habits.

Chidi's difficulty choosing is comic because consideration has a social cost before it becomes a philosophical virtue. Someone else must wait while he attempts to eliminate the possibility of doing wrong. The series can then ask whether a perfect account of conduct is becoming another obstacle to acting. The relationship gives an idea resistance.

Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play thirteen-year-old versions of themselves among young performers. The conspicuous casting is not merely a sight gag. It lets adult comic precision inhabit the emotional proportions of middle school.

A minor invitation, rumour or altered friendship can change the whole available social world. The series gives those events time instead of placing a reassuring adult perspective above every scene.

The best passages also let the two friends hurt each other. Belonging to a pair does not protect someone from jealousy, competition or the wish to be admitted elsewhere.

This is an adult comedy with sexual material and very painful embarrassment, rather than a programme recommended to children because its leads are schoolgirls. Choose it for memory that refuses to make either the pleasures or the humiliations small.

The training-room scenes make Brent's predicament clear. A work occasion gives him a captive audience, and he keeps attempting to convert that practical authority into evidence of personal appeal.

The comedy depends on the other faces. Someone has to decide whether laughing would be an accommodation, a defence or an endorsement. A camera glance can reveal the difference without a speech.

Tim's apparent ability to see through the performance is not a complete escape. Recognising a confined life does not automatically supply the courage to alter it.

The discomfort is concentrated and sometimes cruel. Choose the 2001 British series for a short form in which a manager's wish to be loved keeps colliding with other people's need to finish a day. The American adaptation is a different entry point.

This is the American version with Samantha and Jay, not the 2019 British series also included below. A proposed bed-and-breakfast gives the supernatural household practical work to obstruct and occasionally support.

Samantha's ability to see the ghosts creates an unequal domestic burden. She can be responding to demands that Jay cannot independently hear, while the couple still have a property and a shared project to manage.

The ghosts' histories give them incompatible accounts of status, privacy and what an ordinary day should permit. Their needs become funniest when a grand claim encounters a modest present-day limitation.

The American adaptation develops different comic temperaments and relationships from the British original. The one-point difference in the saved percentages cannot decide between them. Choose by the relationships and rhythm, beginning with the correct start year.

Jay needs more than the role of a husband watching a conversation he cannot hear. His work, friendships and wish to use the property give the ghosts' demands another measure. A supernatural concern can seem urgent to Samantha while interrupting a perfectly ordinary obligation he is trying to fulfil. The household is richer when both accounts remain available.

The housemates have extraordinary powers and a familiar domestic inability to distribute work fairly. Guillermo's labour makes their importance possible while their habits make acknowledging the dependence inconvenient.

The documentary form gives a declaration of ancient authority somewhere to fail. A look, interruption or practical question can expose how much of the grandeur is a presentation for an audience.

The ensemble keeps appetite varied: sexual, social, administrative and simply the wish to receive more attention than the person beside you. That variety is why the premise can sustain more than one joke about old beings misunderstanding new devices.

The sex and violence are frequent and broad. Choose it for elaborate vanity brought down to household scale, while noticing who is required to maintain the conditions in which the vampires can remain ridiculous.

Colin Robinson makes the implied cost of attention literal. The others want to be heard through magnificence; he can control a room through procedural detail and exhausting dullness. Those are different vanities with the same practical victim: somebody required to stay in the conversation. The fantasy identifies an ordinary social imposition without needing to make it benign.

Kimmy's new life in New York is not a blank beginning. The years taken from her have left habits and gaps that a cheerful declaration cannot instantly repair.

Ellie Kemper's energy gives the series its forward motion, while Titus's theatrical appetites keep the optimism from becoming the only possible response to a problem. Their shared home creates a practical need to negotiate rather than simply encourage.

The joke density is impressive, but not every target is well chosen. Some racial and cultural caricatures deserve criticism beyond the fact that the world is deliberately cartoonish.

The stronger passages allow the brightness to meet anger and delayed understanding. Choose it if the exuberant style appeals, while recognising that the central premise involves captivity and abuse. Recovery is more interesting here when it is allowed to interrupt the comic momentum.

Titus can turn a routine disappointment into a performance large enough to inhabit. The extravagance gives the friendship something to answer: encouragement, patience and the occasional refusal to accept his preferred account. A very fast joke can therefore move a relationship, not merely decorate it. The speed becomes less useful when another punchline postpones that response indefinitely.

Mark and Jeremy give the audience privileged access to their accounts of themselves. The privilege is not flattering. A reasonable sentence delivered aloud may be accompanied by a private justification that exposes its immediate purpose.

The point-of-view camera makes the other person's response unusually direct. You cannot always retreat to the safety of watching the encounter from a sympathetic distance.

Their mutual contempt is also a dependence. Each supplies evidence that the other is the real obstacle to a better life, which allows the shared arrangement to continue.

Choose it for severe embarrassment and the precision with which an excuse develops. The brutality is not a minor ingredient. A reader who prefers warmth is not misunderstanding its high score by declining to spend an evening inside these two minds.

The voice-over can also make approval unstable. A viewer may briefly agree with Mark's account, then discover the interest it has omitted before the public encounter is over. The camera supplies no neutral distance from which to congratulate ourselves. We have followed the defence closely enough to see how an intelligible fear becomes another person's bad evening.

The British version gives Alison a roomful of people whose expectations were formed under incompatible conditions. They can have lost physical power without losing the assumption that somebody should attend to them.

Mike's partial exclusion from that conversation gives the living relationship another strain. The ghosts are company, but company can be labour, especially when it does not recognise a convenient time to stop talking.

The programme gradually supplies histories that alter familiar behaviour. The best revelations complicate a person rather than merely awarding a sad explanation that excuses every demand.

Choose the 2019 series if you want this original ensemble and its more concentrated run. Its warmth works because vanity, boredom and genuine loneliness remain in contact. The house is never only a pleasant collection of stories.

Alison's labour includes determining which interruption deserves a response now. A ghost can possess a long history and still be making a selfish immediate demand. The series works when a revelation changes how that demand is understood without making the present permanently subordinate to the past. Sympathy must coexist with somebody trying to get through a day.

The retrospective narration gives an ordinary school or household event a second account. Young Chris has to manage the immediate embarrassment; the adult voice can identify a pattern he did not yet have the means to explain.

The family comedy is especially effective where money changes the meaning of a small request. Julius's attention to cost can be funny without making the shortage imaginary, while Rochelle's authority creates its own contests over dignity and independence.

The broad stereotypes can occasionally outrun the more particular observation. The series is stronger when a specific social rule creates a disadvantage, rather than treating misfortune as an endlessly renewable identity.

Choose it for a narrated coming-of-age comedy in which survival often means adjusting to a situation that has not become fair simply because the protagonist has learned its rules.

The child and adult accounts need a gap. Tyler James Williams can register the immediate calculation about what is safe to say, while the narration later gives it an expansive comic form. If the voice explains every reaction, the child loses that work. The strongest balance lets hindsight sharpen the cost without pretending it was available at the time.

Edina and Patsy make consumption sound like the necessary maintenance of a professional identity. The clothes, parties and terminology defend a claim to continuing relevance.

Saffy's position exposes the practical cost. An adult's refusal of convention can become a demand that a child perform more of the conventional responsibility.

The expansive acting makes the monstrous appetite enjoyable, which is also the satire's problem. Some body-based jokes repeat the contempt the programme might otherwise be exposing.

Choose it for performance that treats a social image as something urgently, expensively maintained. The sharpest moments arrive when the vocabulary stops protecting the women from a much simpler fear: being excluded, ageing or finding that the desired audience has already looked elsewhere.

Patsy's agreement is an instrument. She can confirm Edina's account of a necessary indulgence because the account also protects her own freedom from ordinary obligation. Joanna Lumley's assurance gives the bargain glamour. The comedy sharpens when their apparent independence is revealed as a demand on the people expected to tidy up afterward.

The camera gives Kerry and Kurtan an audience for distinctions outsiders may initially regard as insignificant. A feud, local role or perceived slight becomes an opportunity to explain who matters and who has failed to show proper respect.

Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper keep the social proportions precise. The absence of money and opportunity does not make the cousins uniformly admirable; it gives their appetites fewer places to go.

The countryside is therefore not automatically a refuge. Other people's familiarity can restrict privacy as effectively as it provides company.

Choose it for mockumentary observation that makes boredom active rather than merely slow. The stronger jokes reveal how a person can turn limited prospects into an elaborate account of why the immediate indignity is somebody else's fault.

Jake's skill does not remove his wish to be admired. Holt's controlled manner makes that wish harder to satisfy, which gives an ordinary exchange a comic contest over what the captain is actually thinking.

The ensemble broadens the available kinds of ambition. Preparation, rivalry and affection can all contribute to the same team result without becoming identical motives.

The police setting deserves examination alongside the warmth. A group of appealing individuals can make an institution feel reassuring in ways the series does not always test adequately.

Choose it for timing, especially the value Andre Braugher can give a very small departure from composure. The best group scenes make competence one part of a relationship rather than a permanent exemption from vanity.

Holt's investment in the recurring heists reveals ambition that his official composure usually withholds. The reversal is funny because the reserve has been played seriously, not because it was always an empty disguise. A character can possess discipline and still want an absurd victory. Braugher makes that addition feel like information about a person.

The hormone monsters turn impulses into personalities that interrupt, bargain and offer terrible advice. Animation can give an internal pressure the same practical presence as a classmate or parent.

That makes the form useful for embarrassment and shame. A person has to negotiate a feeling that seems to speak more confidently than he or she can, while everyone around them may be equally uncertain.

The explicitness is fundamental. This is adult animation with sustained sexual material, not a puberty guide to recommend casually on the strength of a critic percentage.

The jokes can be repetitive and aggressively grotesque. The interesting question is whether making an anxiety visible creates recognition or merely another occasion to prolong humiliation. Its best passages allow awkwardness an emotional consequence beyond the next escalation.

Jess's arrival gives the men a new person to react to, but the series becomes more involving as the ensemble outgrows a simple contrast between an eccentric woman and the men around her.

Nick's evasions and Schmidt's conspicuous self-management supply different forms of insecurity. A domestic argument can become a struggle over how a person wishes to be described.

The performers' responsiveness matters more than the original premise. A remark changes weight through a delayed reaction, a repetition or someone refusing to let the speaker retreat to the easier version of what he meant.

The romantic machinery is uneven, and the heightened behaviour can become tiring. Choose it for the pleasure of an ensemble developing its own rhythm, with affection that does not permanently remove the characters' capacity to inconvenience one another.

Schmidt's account of competence is physical as well as verbal: clothes, household arrangements and an emphatic gesture can announce that he has mastered adult life. Max Greenfield lets a small refusal threaten the whole presentation. The other residents are useful when they do more than find him excessive. They can need his effort and object to its terms.

The alien household gives ordinary customs the appearance of an irrational experiment. A practical encounter can expose a social rule people usually follow without explaining it.

The Wall provides a different scale: miniature humans have to construct a society inside an environment they did not choose. The continuing story makes organisation, status and coercion immediate rather than merely abstract targets of a joke.

The contrast is the strongest reason to investigate the programme. The household can reset an absurdity, while the smaller world lets consequences accumulate.

The humour is coarse and violent, and not every satirical inversion reaches beyond an easy target. Choose it if the shifts between disposable invention and a developing social story appeal to you. A high percentage does not make the balance equally satisfying in every episode.

The brothers' expertise gives them an impressive language for describing life, and plenty of means to disguise what they want. A restaurant, performance or guest can become evidence in a private competition over standing.

The farce works through information and space. A person enters with an incomplete account; someone else has reasons not to correct it; a polished sentence creates another practical difficulty.

Martin's presence supplies more than a regular correction of pretension. He has pride and preferences that can also make negotiation difficult.

Choose the original 1993 series for an unusually precise ensemble. The long romantic arcs have weaker stretches, but the best episodes make sophistication the thing that enlarges a misunderstanding, rather than the resource that conveniently solves it.

Dave enters a station where formal responsibility and practical influence are not neatly aligned. A person may control a microphone, a budget or the room's attention without wanting the same thing from the day.

Phil Hartman's Bill makes professional assurance a comic object in its own right. A confident delivery can make a questionable interpretation temporarily sound like the natural order.

The studio staging lets group reactions carry an argument. Somebody else's joke, refusal or interruption can undermine a manager before he has finished the reasonable explanation.

Choose it for an ensemble whose speed depends on clearly differentiated vanities. The workplace is more than a backdrop for unrelated wisecracks: there is a product to deliver, and the people delivering it keep competing over which performance should count as the important one.

Bill's broadcast voice lets confidence survive beyond what the situation warrants. The station gives that manner a real professional use, so Dave cannot simply remove it from the room as foolishness. A manager needs the person causing the difficulty. The best ensemble scenes keep a task to complete underneath the competition to define how important each contribution is.

A grievance rarely remains private for long. Other members of the Gang can elaborate it, compete for control of it and identify an opportunity to benefit, until a bad impulse has acquired the shape of a collective project.

That process is the show's strongest satirical mechanism. The characters can borrow the language of fairness without becoming interested in anyone else's claims.

The cruelty and offensive material are central, and the long run creates repetition as well as invention. Refusing a sentimental correction does not automatically make every provocation sharp.

Choose it when you want excuses exposed through action. The saved 94% is broad critical approval in a particular record, not a promise that the programme will be more pleasant company than a lower-rated comedy. Pleasant company is often precisely what it refuses to supply.