60 best sitcoms of all time

32. 30 Rock

Projects starring Saturday Night Live alumni are a mixed bag; some of them are good and others fall flat. When Tina Fey got her own NBC series, we were all waiting to see which one 30 Rock would turn out to be. Fey transformed her experiences working on SNL into (what else?) this series about the laughs behind the scenes of a sketch comedy show, parodying NBC in the same amusing way that The Simpsons keeps taking potshots at FOX.

30 Rock was at least nominated for the Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series every year that it was on the air, winning TV comedy’s top trophy three times. In 2009, its 22 Emmy nominations were the most for a comedy series in one year in the history of the awards. Fey wrote what she knew — and with many people that she knew — and made that into a series funnier than many episodes of SNL. If you knew or wanted to know anything about the “behind the curtain” of the TV world, it was a constant source of entertainment.

Fey’s winning performance and that by Alec Baldwin as the larger than life executive Jack Donaghy drove the show for seven seasons, and we’ll always look back on it as a light-hearted look at the craziness of making television, sort of a bigger, more playful version of the next show on this list.

Next: 31. Murphy Brown