60 best sitcoms of all time

53. Family Matters

Rare is the spin-off series that winds up becoming better than the show it was spun off from. One such case is Family Matters, which was a spin-off of Perfect Strangers. Once you got over the fact that Al Powell from the Die Hard movie was in a sitcom (that’d be series star Reginald VelJohnson), this was a genuinely funny show for a number of years.

VelJohnson and Jo Marie Payton gave great performances as Carl and Harriette Winslow, with the latter reprising her role from Perfect Strangers. As sitcom couples go, they were one of the best to watch out of all those that arose during this time. And while Family Matters did not necessarily do anything to reinvent the sitcom wheel, it was TV’s equivalent of comfort food. To this day you can sit down and watch it with your family and everyone’s going to get something out of it. There’s a lot to be said for shows that bring people together when we spend so much time focused on what keeps us apart.

Family Matters loses points for how it eventually de-morphed from an ensemble cast to a program in which Jaleel White’s Urkel was the star and everyone else sort of orbited around him. There was far too much Urkel by the end. Plus Myra wasn’t that great either, and it got a bit weird seeing Judyann Elder replace Jo Marie Payton as Harriette midway through Season 9. Thus, while we can’t say the show was one of the true best of all time, it deserves to be counted here, as it was one of the best shows that came out of the sitcom boom of the 1990s.

Next: 52. The Inbetweeners