The Simpsons
FOX 1989- Present
There is no other choice. Some Comic
Book Guy types would hold the animated comedy’s second, third, and now fourth (!) decades against it, but we’re not having that. There’s more good material in those later seasons than you’d think. Plus, the series’ first 10 years cover so much ground in subject, style, and sheer density of humor, the rest barely matters. As both a family comedy and a social satire, the show has given us a meme for nearly every situation imaginable (Homer backing into the bushes; “Old Man Yells at Cloud”). In its early days, The Simpsons was condemned by conservatives as an atrocity that would destroy Western civilization. Instead, no show will be a better artifact of what that civilization was like on either side of the millennial divide.