TMC
07-17-2021, 08:36 PM
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/blogs/tv-news/nbc-must-see-tv-filler-225830929.html
Like the rest of you, we've been binge-watching a lot of Friends on Netflix lately. (Poor Julie. She never had a chance against Rachel, did she?) And that takes us back to the mid-1990s: an era before DVRs and on-demand viewing, when we as a nation loved Friends, Seinfeld, and ER so much that we would sit through anything — literally, anything — that NBC chose to plop down between those shows.
NBC knew this, of course, and took full advantage, using those Thursday (https://www.salon.com/2011/04/15/nbc_thursday_night/) 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. timeslots to air some of the most forgettable sitcoms (https://www.portablepress.com/blog/2014/07/must-see-tv-quiz/) ever to draw 15 million viewers a week. The Single Guy? Caroline in the City? Suddenly Susan? You may not have liked them, but you damn sure watched them.
But maybe we're being unfair. Maybe some of these in-between shows really were hidden gems, deserving of a second look. (Probably not. But maybe!) So we've gone back and re-examined the 11 "other" (http://www.tvhell.net/terms.html) sitcoms that aired Thursday nights (https://www.vulture.com/2013/03/remember-all-of-the-other-nbc-thursday-comedies.html) on NBC from the fall of 1994, when Friends premiered, to the spring of 1998, when Seinfeld went off the air.
And then we ranked them — on a sliding scale, of course.
[Note: Mad About You aired at 8:00 p.m. before Friends during the 1994-95 season, but since it never aired between Friends/Seinfeld/ER, we're not counting it. And actually, if you've caught it recently in syndication on FXX, it's not bad! A little dated, of course, but pleasant enough. #TeamBuchman.]
Like the rest of you, we've been binge-watching a lot of Friends on Netflix lately. (Poor Julie. She never had a chance against Rachel, did she?) And that takes us back to the mid-1990s: an era before DVRs and on-demand viewing, when we as a nation loved Friends, Seinfeld, and ER so much that we would sit through anything — literally, anything — that NBC chose to plop down between those shows.
NBC knew this, of course, and took full advantage, using those Thursday (https://www.salon.com/2011/04/15/nbc_thursday_night/) 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. timeslots to air some of the most forgettable sitcoms (https://www.portablepress.com/blog/2014/07/must-see-tv-quiz/) ever to draw 15 million viewers a week. The Single Guy? Caroline in the City? Suddenly Susan? You may not have liked them, but you damn sure watched them.
But maybe we're being unfair. Maybe some of these in-between shows really were hidden gems, deserving of a second look. (Probably not. But maybe!) So we've gone back and re-examined the 11 "other" (http://www.tvhell.net/terms.html) sitcoms that aired Thursday nights (https://www.vulture.com/2013/03/remember-all-of-the-other-nbc-thursday-comedies.html) on NBC from the fall of 1994, when Friends premiered, to the spring of 1998, when Seinfeld went off the air.
And then we ranked them — on a sliding scale, of course.
[Note: Mad About You aired at 8:00 p.m. before Friends during the 1994-95 season, but since it never aired between Friends/Seinfeld/ER, we're not counting it. And actually, if you've caught it recently in syndication on FXX, it's not bad! A little dated, of course, but pleasant enough. #TeamBuchman.]