60 best sitcoms of all time

35. Everybody Loves Raymond

Okay, so not everybody loved Raymond. But it did turn Ray Romano from successful stand-up comic into one of the bigger names in TV comedy. He wasn’t the only one: Of the show’s 15 Emmy Awards, it earned ten of them in acting categories. After all, this show gave us Patricia Heaton before The Middle and Brad Garrett before Til Death, to say nothing of the scene-stealing of Doris Roberts and the late Peter Boyle. With its working class, family-centric comedy starring a comic, Raymond was a bit of a spiritual sequel to Home Improvement.

If you have any doubts that Raymond hit on universally funny things, you should look at the record number of international adaptations the show has. It’s got more of them than anything short of a reality TV talent show. There have been Russian, Polish, Egyptian, Dutch, Israeli, Indian, Czech and British adaptations. (There’s even a documentary about the Russian version called Exporting Raymond that’s worth a watch.) The show may not have been novel, but it knew what it wanted to be and it did it very well — and audiences responded to that.

There’s always going to be a place on television for the traditional family sitcom, as there should be. We all come home at the end of the day wanting to laugh, and there’s something to be said for a show that you can watch with your family that’s also then about family. That’s a comfortable and instantly accessible space, and Raymond was an example of how to excel at that most common of sitcom formats.

Next: 34. Wings