60 best sitcoms of all time

39. Dan Vs.

Here’s the one show on this list you likely have never heard of, and we can’t blame you for missing out, but man have you ever. Dan Vs. was an animated comedy that aired on The Hub, which is now Discovery Family. Sandwiched between Transformers and My Little Pony was a series with a genuinely unique concept: Dan goes around battling whatever inane or ridiculous thing has made him angry this week, with hilarious results.

The greatness of Dan Vs. was that these were almost all either legitimate or at least understandable grudges. Episodes included “Dan vs. The DMV,” “Dan vs. Traffic,” and “Dan vs. Stupidity,” for the reasons that you’d expect and empathize with. Only rarely did the show go away from everyday gripes — such as in “Dan vs. The Dinosaur,” in which a real life dinosaur rampages about — but even then it was still funny. That’s because Dan did everything we wished we could do and then some. One episode opens with him about to set off some nuclear missiles just to get back at some squirrels.

The voice cast was also first rate. Curtis Armstrong deserves a medal for his performance as Dan, because he had to spend most of his time yelling. Dave Foley (NewsRadio) and Paget Brewster (Criminal Minds) co-starred as Dan’s best friend Chris and Chris’s multi-talented wife Elise, who always got pulled into his schemes. Even the little things about this show worked: Every episode opened with some sort of main title gag, such as in “Dan vs. Stupidity,” when the series purposefully misspelled “Stupidity” a few times … while graduation music was playing. Dan Vs. was a constant win, except for in the one way that counted: commercial success. It’s the best sitcom most people never found.

Next: 38. Titus