Welcome back to The Sitcomologist’s rankings of the 50 best sitcom episodes of the 2010s. This article ranks episodes 10-1. Congratulations on making it all the way to the end! You did it!
10. The Good Twin — GLOW
S2E8, 2018, Netflix
Here’s my hypocritical pick: I made a big stink at the top about not flooding this list with dramas that include comedy instead of true comedies. Yet here, at the edge of the top 10, I’m including GLOW. Like Orange Is The New Black and Transparent and any of the other half-comedies I’ve discluded, GLOW is a character drama disguised as a comedy thanks to sprinkling a handful of jokes every few scenes.
But the difference (and the justification for my hypocrisy) is the Season 2 episode The Good Twin. Because if this show wasn’t a comedy, it sure as hell wouldn’t have made an episode as campy and intentionally bad as this.
The Good Twin is GLOW’s version of 30 Rock showing an entire episode of TGS or of The Dick Van Dyke Show producing a real-life Alan Brady Show. We see an excruciatingly realistic and painfully corny recreation of what this version of GLOW would’ve looked like on cable in the 80s, complete with cheesy transitions, grainy footage, bizarre film allusions, a music video with a message and storylines that would feel demeaning if they weren’t so absolutely absurd.
The Good Twin probably isn’t the best episode of GLOW. I’m partial to Season 2’s Mother of All Matches and Season 3’s Freaky Tuesday, personally. But the place where The Good Twin differentiates itself is where it leans into its comedic identity. While those other episodes have laugh moments, The Good Twin is built for laughs. It’s played straight, of course. Think of this episode as the Airplane! episode in GLOW’s repertoire. Because the straightness of the performances makes the cheesy 80s ambiance even better.
Of all the hybrid comedy-dramas of this decade, GLOW is probably my favorite. Mainly because of the way it weaves its comedy back into the foreground. Also, it proves my theory that wrestling characters are way more entertaining than actual wrestling.
9. Cooperative Calligraphy — Community
S2E8, 2010, NBC
If you’ll think back to seven months ago when you started reading this too-long countdown, you’ll recall that the first sentence of the post was “I love sitcoms.” So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to you that one sitcom I love is Community, a show practically built around loving sitcoms. But also hating them. It’s complicated.
Throughout Community’s storied run, it did a lot of things well. It did the best homages on network television, whether to gangster movies, spaghetti westerns, Star Wars or stop-motion Christmas specials. It played concept episodes as well as any show, devoting entire half-hours to conspiracy theories, Ken Burns documentaries and hating Glee. It played an entire B-plot in the background of an episode. It crossed over with a show on another network for the hell of it. It had a three-season long punchline about Beetlejuice. It produced Remedial Chaos Theory, perhaps the most innovative and unique network sitcom episode of the era.
But the thing Community was truly best at was poking holes in the sitcom tropes and conventions we all know and love. Which is why I picked Cooperative Calligraphy as my Community entry on this countdown. That’s right. We’re talking about bottle episodes.
Some of the best TV episodes ever are bottle episodes. Friends has The One Where No One’s Ready. Seinfeld has The Chinese Restaurant. Fawlty Towers and Frasier and Veep have all gone to the well before. It’s a sitcom tradition as old as sitcoms going over budget and needing to make bottle episodes to save money.
Surprisingly, Abed hates them. The TV character who loves television more than any who came before or after them hates bottle episodes. As he puts it, they’re wall-to-wall facial expressions and nuance, a nightmare for a character like Abed who has trouble reading nuance. But for a viewer, they’re a delight.
Just like later in Community’s second season when the show deconstructs clip shows, Cooperative Calligraphy deconstructs the concept of a bottle episode with ease. What begins as a simple debate about who stole Annie’s pen devolves into a gigantic metaphor about trust, understanding and collective denial. And at the end, we see the nuance Abed can’t: This episode was never about a pen; it was about getting every member of the study group onto the same team to unify the central characters of the show.
Of course, Cooperative Calligraphy is more than a metaphor. It has great jokes that have legs throughout the next couple seasons (Well, well, well…Harvey Keitel) and awesome physical gags that make for big laugh breaks in the moment (Pulling stuff out of Pierce’s leg casts). There’s also a superb amount of character development involved in each character’s reaction to being accused of theft and reluctance to being searched.
Community’s Mount Rushmore of best episodes is a hard one to pick. There’s so much high-quality, deconstructive magic to this show that narrowing down bests doesn’t seem fair. But Cooperative Calligraphy is the whole package. It does everything Community does well, and packages it in one room. Can’t ask for more.
8. ronny/lily — Barry
S2E5, 2019, HBO
I heard a Joss Whedon quote one time where he said the reason his written and directed episodes of his shows turn out more ambitious and creative than those from his staff is because he knows he won’t fire himself. If anyone else on the staff suggested an episode with no dialogue or a Broadway musical episode, they would’ve been laughed at. But he can’t tell himself no.
Bill Hader proved that theory to be applicable to more than just Whedon in 2019 with the phenomenal Barry episode ronny/lily. Directed by Hader and written by Hader and co-creator Alec Berg, ronny/lily is a non-stop, twisting, baffling laugh riot that turns a hit gone wrong into a validation of Barry’s Stockholm Syndrome-esque connection to Fuches.
The laugh moments are iconic visuals. Ronny breaking out his nunchucks. Lily scaling a tree to get on top of a roof. Fuches gluing his hands to the steering wheel. Lily biting Fuches. Ronny roundhouse kicking in the grocery store. Ronny killing Loach on contact. Fuches’ devilish grin.
ronny/lily feels more like a greatest hits album than a TV episode. This many quality jokes and sight gags could’ve made up an eight-episode season of television. But Hader and Berg densely packaged this material into one of the most frantic and surprising TV episodes of the decade.
That density is the magical thing about Barry. Most shows with seasons as short as Barry’s would’ve taken four or five seasons to cover the ground Barry has in two. Loach’s reveal in What?!, the preceding episode, would’ve been a season finale in almost any other show. The same can be said about Fuches’ discovery at the end of The Truth Has a Ring To It, the episode following ronny/lily.
Barry’s breakneck pace allows it to anchor its comedy to the viewer, shocking them with reveals and jokes at the same time. It’s one of the cleverer aspects of this show. While other comedies have gone anthology style or tried to mine jokes out of the smallest, slowest minutiae in life, Barry continues to think big.
Most other shows couldn’t pull this off. But that’s Hader’s vision. Because hey, he knows he can’t fire himself.
Related Reading: The Decade SNL’s Not-Ready-For-Primetime Players Went Primetime
7. In The Woods (Parts 1 and 2) — Louie
S4E11-12, 2014, FX
First, a disclaimer: Louis C.K. is not a good person. There’s no condoning his alleged actions or their alleged repeated natures. His apologies for said alleged actions have not been sufficient and his choice to continue performing without ever addressing the allegations on stage feels like a bad PR choice. Plus his new material kind of stinks. Which is a shame, because when this guy was at his most creative, he made some of the most excellent comedy I’ve ever seen.
This is why it would be disingenuous to write this list without mentioning Louie. This is the show that launched the auteur era of sitcoms. Everything from Master of None and Girls to Fleabag and Atlanta owes at least some debt to Louie’s style. Andy Samberg once joked at the Emmys that Louie isn’t comedy, it’s jazz. And there’s some truth to that, spiritually. The show feels different than every show that came before it and feels like a grandparent to the more progressive, more inclusive versions of Louie that came afterwards.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Louie’s fourth season, the season of television that changed my perceptions about what TV can be more than any other.
In her stellar book “I Like To Watch,” the New Yorker’s TV critic Emily Nussbaum argues that Louie’s fourth season represents a departure from the show’s earlier high quality because it starts depicting Louie as more of a sympathetic character. On some level, I understand that criticism. Episodes like Pamela and So Did The Fat Lady, while phenomenally moving, cast a different shadow on Louie than standouts from previous seasons like So Old or Daddy’s Girlfriend.
That said, I appreciate Louie’s fourth season for so much more than its lead character’s framing. The six-part Elevator saga was one of the most surreal and ambitious uses of television as a medium that I’ve ever seen, interweaving four unrelated plots to tell one slice-of-life narrative filled with flashbacks and asides. The three-part episode Pamela functions as a 90-minute coda that wraps up the Elevator saga and gives the show a connective narrative thread it had never used or needed before.
And then there’s In The Woods. A two-part episode that I often playfully refer to as the 19th episode of Freaks and Geeks, In The Woods is a detached, sad and distant reflection on Louie’s childhood. It touches on themes of divorce, isolation, the quest to find a place you belong and the adolescent fear of disappointing someone who believes in you all the while telling an oftentimes terrifying story about falling into a bad situation and not knowing how to get out of it.
Jeremy Renner guest stars as a small-time Massachusetts drug dealer and plays his dirtbag role with a charm and elegance you’d expect from an A-list actor slumming it on basic cable. The jokes in this episode aren’t as obvious as they would be in an early-season Louie episode (like in Season 1’s similar flashback episode, God), but they’re there. It’s a subtler form of comedy, one built not around a character farting, but around the relatability of a middle schooler asking his science teacher about farts.
In the end, maybe there’s a part of my conscience that is comfortable including this episode because it barely features Louis C.K. the actor in it at all. Of course, he wrote and directed the episode. And he might’ve edited it too. It’s his show with his name in the title. There’s no ignoring the skeevy feeling you get praising a person you wish you weren’t praising.
I just can’t ignore that In The Woods is a phenomenal hour of television. It communicates the uncomfortable truths of growing up as well as any TV episode this century and it does so gently and with care. When young Louie confesses his misdeeds to his teacher, a little part of the viewer dies along with young Louie’s innocence.
I’ll stop gushing about this episode. Maybe I shouldn’t have gushed about it in the first place. But it exists. There’s no denying that.
6. There Is Not Currently A Problem — You’re The Worst
S2E7, 2015, FXX
If you’re looking for an answer to the question: “Which episode on this list has Nick seen the most times?,” here it is.
I’ve made it no secret that You’re The Worst is my favorite TV show of all-time. Gretchen Cutler is my favorite TV character ever. The third-season premiere Try Real Hard is one of my two favorite TV episodes ever, along with Freaks and Geeks’ Chokin’ and Tokin. It’s hard for me to evaluate this show objectively because it’s so personally symbolic of my journey through early adulthood.
That said, I don’t think I’m being overly biased when I say that There Is Not Currently A Problem belongs in the Mount Olympus of this era’s sitcom episodes. Co-written by creator Stephen Falk, this episode delicately handles Gretchen’s emotional breakdown and spiral into depression, watching her discomfort turn into manic energy that turns into misplaced rage that turns into a resigned acceptance of the truth of her life.
Mining comedy out of such a downward spiral is hard. But Aya Cash’s performance is one of the best I’ve ever seen. Her heckles monologue midway through the second act is so incisive that it only could’ve been written by the man who created these characters. Her tear-soaked admission to Lindsay is so innocent and youthful in its fear of losing Jimmy. And her nonchalant confession to Jimmy in the episode’s final moments set up the next two episodes, also written by Falk, that serves as the most important and compelling trilogy in the show’s run.
There’s a beautiful symmetry to the way You’re The Worst episodes tend to end. In We Were Having Such A Nice Day, the penultimate episode of the series, Gretchen thinks she has made strides in her relationship with her mother and is comfortable in her future with Jimmy. Then she steps barefoot in the broken glass she forgot to clean up, showing her own immaturity and symbolizing her fears and self-doubts manifested.
There Is Not Currently A Problem ends similarly. Jimmy states out loud that he thinks he can fix Gretchen’s depression. (A depression that once caused her to wear a Hoobastank t-shirt for three weeks straight, for what it’s worth.) He knows he can fix her because he caught a mouse. And if he could catch a mouse, he could do anything.
As he says that, he sees a baby mouse crawling across the floor of his garage. He thought he’d solved a problem. But in reality, he’d only just noticed the problem. There was so much more to the problem than he could’ve imagined.
I’ve written too much about this episode and I haven’t mentioned any of the jokes. Like Jimmy’s ignorance to the fact that he’s been quoting The Lion King all day. Or Jimmy’s attraction to female rock stars from the 1960s. Or Lindsay and Vernon addressing Dorothy as “the rando.” Or the startling specificity to Gretchen’s takedown of a writer’s pompousness, likely written by a disillusioned writer.
For such a heavy episode, There Is Not Currently A Problem still has four or five true laugh-out-loud moments. Not exhale-through-your-nose moments. Guffaws. That’s an unbelievable achievement from an unbelievable show.
5. The Marry Prankster — Happy Endings
S3E12, 2013, ABC
“I’m not as dumb as I am.”
With those seven words, Happy Endings transformed from merely the best network sitcom of the first half of the 2010s into how history should remember it: one of the greatest single-camera network sitcoms ever made.
Watching any episode from the third season of Happy Endings is my equivalent of listening to one of Mozart’s symphonies. You can tell every note is exactly where it’s supposed to be. I, a peasant, can’t question perfection. And an episode like The Marry Prankster is precisely that. Perfect.
Happy Endings was a mach-speed joke delivery service. This episode breezes by so quickly that you don’t register how tonally bizarre it is for a show to use supporting the Iraq War as a punchline for an impulsive character or how specific it is to lift your climax from a Val Kilmer movie from 1985. (Side note: Val Kilmer is Dave’s spirit animal. We learn this three episodes earlier in Ordinary Extraordinary Love. I have no idea if this reference is a coincidence or a callback, but I’m assuming callback.)
There are too many jokes packed into this Jackie Clarke and Gil Ozeri written episode for me to give a highlight reel. But let’s try: Alex’s confident whisper in the cold open. Max not being able to remember his own name. The implied effort it would’ve taken to mix stripper glitter into Brad’s lotions and creams. The even more implied effort it would’ve taken to rig an exploding waffle in a public restaurant. Brad’s rhyming names song. Pete screaming on the toilet. Diaper fork. Gagging. One last reference to Penny’s giant head. And so, so many more.
By the time The Marry Prankster aired, ABC had already decided to burn off Happy Endings episodes. I was a freshman in college at the time, living in the dorms. Whatever night Happy Endings was on that week, whether it was Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday, I would try to gather as many people onto my crappy futon to watch with me. I knew I couldn’t save the show. But I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to go down trying.
And I don’t think we’ve gotten a show like Happy Endings since. Detroiters captured a lot of the silliness. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt captured the delivery speed. But as sitcoms have gotten more and more plot oriented, I think we’ve lost the tradition of young people just hanging out. It’s well-worn territory. In a lot of ways, it’s hubris to think you can reinvent the formula that Friends and How I Met Your Mother and countless other shows from the 1990s and 2000s perfected.
But Happy Endings did reinvent that formula. And joke for joke, it did so by probably being the funniest show of the decade. Mainly because there were so many jokes. But still. Maybe I’m dumb for proselytizing so hard for a silly show about silly people who made terrible decisions but always did so with a smile on their faces.
Honestly though, I don’t think so. As Alex Kerkovich would say: I’m not as dumb as I am.
Related Reading: I Bet It’s All Gonna Work Out (My Favorite Sitcom Joke Of The Decade)
4. Testimony — Veep
S4E9, 2015, HBO
If you’re going to make mean-spirited comedy, you have to do it right. There aren’t many shows, movies or comedians who can make a career out of punching down without alienating their audiences. Then there’s Veep, a show that reveled in its awfulness and seemed to thrive by one-upping how often it would punch down.
Veep at its core is about the quest for power. Not power itself. Just the all-consuming drive that some people have for seizing power. Along that quest, we see a lot of awful people saying awful things to slightly-less-awful people. And in a Shakespearian fashion, these awful actions usually have consequences. But those consequences don’t detract from the quest for power.
This is why Testimony, the peak episode from Veep’s peak season, is so strong. Format wise, it’s brilliant. Setting an entire episode inside a congressional hearing in a lot of ways neuters the show of its strengths. Characters are forced to remain calm and civil. Thoughts need to be measured. And no one can say any private thoughts. Everything has to be prim and proper.
This tension and dramatic irony create a soaring high point for the show. We watch as career politicians and political strategists showcase their charms and public personas even though we, the viewers, so intimately know how fake and smarmy these facades are. Selina’s almost-pretentious annoyance. Ben’s reservedness. Jonah’s desperation. Dan’s smarm. Amy’s rigidity. Every character choice fits perfectly, and the performative nature of the episode allows these actors to thrive.
Of course, the highlight moment of the episode is the minute-long list of Dan’s nicknames for Jonah, a.k.a. “The Jonad Files.” A scene like this feels like a comedy writer’s dream. Just an opportunity to rattle off a never-stopping parade of insults ranging from brutal to crass to simplistic. I’m partial to “The Cloud Botherer,” which has to be one of the funniest lines in the history of the show. But what about The Pointless Giant? Or The 60-foot Virgin? It all works.
I’m usually not a fan of mean-spirited comedy. I’ll indulge in a roast every once in a while, but my taste tends to skew positive. Maybe that’s why Veep is such an outlier of a show for me. I get the feeling that a lot of people used Veep as an outlet to see and hear things they’d never dare say in their own lives. It’s cathartic, in a way. We’re real people. We can never be this cruel. But Selina and Dan and Amy and Mike and Ben? They can be the cruelest people in the world, as we can be the voyeurs watching along in wish-fulfillment.
Veep has gotten enough praise throughout the years. I can’t shine any light on something new about Veep the way I can about some of the under-praised shows on this list. But let me just say the praise was almost always deserved. And even when it wasn’t, the reputation the show had built justified the unearned praise. It was just that good.
Related Reading: How A Decade Of Iconic Sitcoms Ended In One Spectacular Spring
3. B.A.N. — Atlanta
S1E7, 2016, FX
I’ve used the phrase “auter era” a lot in this list, so now might be a good time to explain why I think this style of television has been so successful.
One of the reasons I fell in love with sitcoms is because of how collaborative they are. Especially old-school, four-camera sitcoms. When you have a team of 15 writers collaborating with a rotating team of directors, an ensemble cast, a crew of set designers and lighting staff and sound personnel and all the other jobs that make up the production team, plus the necessity of pleasing a live audience, the product ends up being very broad and appealing. As much as they often didn’t, shows like Friends and Seinfeld and Cheers and The Cosby Show and M*A*S*H* and Mary Tyler Moore tried to appeal to everyone.
There’s no longer a necessity for that. In the era of streaming and premium cable and basic cable and networks all fighting with YouTube and social media and video games and virtual reality and all the stuff I’m not cool enough to know about yet for eyeballs, making a show for mass consumption no longer makes sense. So gone are the days of creative collaboration for the sake of a broad product. In are targeted shows made by one or a few creatives with the goal of being something that a few people will love instead of something that everyone will like.
I don’t think there’s a better example of this type of show than Atlanta. Donald Glover’s masterpiece is unabashedly his. Either Glover or long-time collaborator Hiro Murai has had a hand in writing or directing all but three episodes of the show so far, and this singular vision has resulted in one of the most ambitious, creative, challenging and satisfying sitcoms ever made.
It’s no coincidence, in my mind, that the most stimulating episode of Atlanta, then, is the only episode Glover wrote and directed himself. Midway through the first season, Glover made B.A.N. The episode is stylized as an episode of a cable-access talk show called Montague, on which Paper Boi is a guest. Throughout the episode, Paper Boi and the other guest — a white, female activist — talk about issues of sexism, homophobia and transphobia in hip hop, as well as an exploration into the life of a “trans-racial” teenage boy who identifies as a white man in his 30s.
Throughout the episode, we also get a parade of interstitial fake commercials for cars, cereals, self-help gurus and cigarellos, painstakingly recreated by Glover to continuously trick the viewer into not knowing the line between show and advertisement.
With a lot of other shows on this list, I’ve recapped them by listing off jokes from the episode. But for some reason, I don’t think that would do B.A.N. any service. B.A.N. is so much more conceptual than most other great sitcom episodes. The way Paper Boi shows incredulity and the hyper-specificity of the targeted commercials are only funny because of how singular the comedy is.
Donald Glover made a show for himself and knew it would find the right audience. It has. Episodes like Value, The Club, Helen, Woods, FUBU and of course Teddy Perkins, Atlanta has stood out because of how it feels like it could’ve only been made by the people making it. That’s one of the highest compliments I can give a show. And, well, it’s quite a transition into the next pick on the countdown.
2. Episode #2.04 — Fleabag
S2E4, 2019, BBC One/Amazon
There are only two TV moments of this decade that made me re-evaluate my stale opinions of what sitcoms could be.
The first was in the first half of the Season 2 Louie episode Bummer/Blueberries. Watching Louie get chased down the New York City streets by a deranged stranger for 90 seconds before watching that man get decapitated by oncoming traffic and then seeing Louie go straight from there to a first date with a woman opened my eyes to how brutal and surreal great TV can be.
The second? That would be the fourth episode of Fleabag’s unfathomably perfect second season. Particularly, seeing Andrew Scott’s (Hot) Priest notice Fleabag’s glances into the camera shook me. When I say I actually gasped the first time I saw this happen, I mean a full-on, high-volume gasp. In that moment, the show created a pit in my stomach that I don’t think I’d experienced since the night before I left my parents’ house to move into my college dorm.
There’s something so affectingly beautiful about Fleabag. Explaining subtlety usually ruins the subtlety. But Fleabag (the show) used the camera as a way to show Fleabag (the character’s) discomfort or unease with the situations surrounding her. She always felt distant, alienated by the other people around her. So having a character notice her tics is a way of communicating intimacy and connection unlike any other.
In that moment, Fleabag changed the way I thought about television. I was already well into conceptualizing this list when I started watching Fleabag. But I had to rethink my conceptualization because of the character dynamic between Fleabag and Priest in this episode.
So much of television is about suspension of reality. The best TV shows make the viewer forget their real-life troubles and submit to the reality they’re consuming. Fleabag didn’t bother with that. It’s the first 3-D TV show in a lot of ways because of how the audience was a necessary character.
Of course, this tone and expressivity was cultivated when Fleabag was a stage show, and a lot of that experience is a carry over from Phoebe Waller-Bridge performing this character for a live audience. Still, there’s a difference between engaging with a live audience and engaging with a TV audience. Theatergoers expect to be engaged with. That’s a product of the medium. It’s not discomforting for someone on stage to see you or perform at you.
But in Fleabag, there’s an uncanny valley to being performed at. The show almost feels voyeuristic. When we see Fleabag make bad decisions and rationalize them to our faces, it’s almost as if we (the audience) are functioning as Fleabag’s conscience. And every time she makes a choice that we know she shouldn’t, we feel the pang of self-conscious doubt that Fleabag is supposed to.
This dynamic comes to a beautiful crescendo toward the end of S2E4. In a scene that has launched thousands of Tumblr threads and shipping memes, we see Priest and Fleabag give in to their desires. Starting with Fleabag’s heart-wrenching monologue inside the confessional booth and ending with Priest’s cracked nerve at the sight of what can only be described as divine intervention, the final scenes of this episode are perfect.
As was the case with Atlanta (and Louie, Barry, Master of None, Broad City, Derry Girls, Party Down, Girls, pen15, Episodes and Crashing), the singular vision of Fleabag takes this show from basic to revolutionary. Phoebe Waller-Bridge has written every episode and Harry Bradbeer directed every episode after the pilot. The smallness of the creative team made for a minimalist but perfect vision that was executed the way it was intended to be executed. No interference. No notes. Nothing lost in translation between creative teams. It was a show made by Phoebe Waller-Bridge for the world.
And for the three hours of Fleabag’s transcendent second season, she made us all kneel.
1. Janet(s) — The Good Place
S3E10, 2018, NBC
Remember that time D’Arcy Carden didn’t win an Emmy for turning in the greatest acting performance in sitcom history? Yeah, me too.
The list of network sitcom TV episodes that have reached the creative, visual and comedic heights reached in The Good Place’s third-season episode Janet(s) is very short. At the center was Carden’s career-defining performance as six separate characters. But not just any six characters. In addition to playing her own character and a new character created for this episode, we also see her play four characters we’ve come to know and love for three years, expertly mimicking and exploiting their tics and mannerisms for comedic and dramatic gold.
Making this list has been an exercise in self-doubt and exhaustion. I don’t know if I believe that you can compare what made episodes of The Big Bang Theory great to what made episodes of Atlanta great. They’re different shows with different goals. But from the second I embarked on this project, I knew Janet(s) would be contending for the top spot.
Why? It’s a perfect distillation of everything I love about sitcoms. That’s why. The jokes are memorably hilarious in so many different ways. There are big dumb Jason Mendoza jokes. There are meta-textual jokes in the form of Stephen Merchant’s casting as a David Brent type. There are subtle, fast-talking jokes from Eleanor and there are gut-busting silly jokes from middle managers who have to regulate every weird sex act done by every human on Earth.
There’s also heart. I’ve long said that good sitcoms have funny characters but great sitcoms have characters you’d want to hang out with. The payoff between Chidi and Eleanor at the end of Janet(s) is a tear-jerking mess and a cheer-in-your-seat moment comparable to Rachel getting off the plane or Jim finally asking Pam on a date. For years, Eleanor had balanced Chidi through his panic attacks and meltdowns. Now it was Chidi’s turn (as Janet) to stabilize Eleanor (as everyone else).
There’s also innovation. Few TV episodes ever have taken the creative risks of Janet(s). Not only is there the gimmick-casting of using D’Arcy Carden to play almost every character in the episode. It’s also one episode in the long line of The Good Place episodes that completely blows up everything that has happened so far in the show and resets the narrative with the realization that the scoring system to get into the Good Place might be rigged and that no one on Earth has any chance of getting in despite the intervention of the Soul Squad.
Combine those qualities with the most important one, The Good Place’s uplifting philosophy that people are capable of getting better, and you get an unassailable half-hour of television unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. From Carden’s performance to the writing and directing to the special effects to the set design of Janet’s void and every other factor I’ve never even thought to consider, Janet(s) is a perfect TV moment.
In a decade that seemed to revitalizes and forever change what a sitcom could be, Janet(s) capitalized on the old format and used the new rules to make a half-hour that will be held up against the all-time greats until the sitcom format dies. And when I give sitcoms my Viking funeral in their final moments, I’ll be referencing Janet(s).
The void is crumbling. The world is ending. We’re all falling into crisis mode. But we’ll make it through. Because we have sitcoms.
Thanks for reading this.
The Sitcomologist 
5 thoughts on “The 50 Best Sitcom Episodes of the 2010s: 10-1”