Welcome back to The Sitcomologist’s rankings of the 50 best sitcom episodes of the 2010s. This article ranks episodes 30-21. Continue through to read the breakdowns that follow.
30. Joe Pera Reads You The Church Announcements — Joe Pera Talks With You
S1E6, 2018, Adult Swim
Do you remember the first time you heard your favorite song? The way it energized you? The way you just wanted to listen to it over and over again until the words felt meaningless and your existence ceased to be anything but a warm cocoon of rhythm and melody? The way you wanted to romp around your modest living room with an overweight dog and the pizza delivery guy while calling every radio station in the area and asking them to play the song for you on repeat?
OK, maybe that last part only applies to Joe Pera. Pera’s delightfully bizarre Adult Swim show “Joe Pera Talks With You” is one of the hardest shows in the world to describe. On length alone, it probably shouldn’t qualify as a sitcom. But I put it on here for two reasons: One, this episode is funny as hell and two, I was Joe Pera once.
Between probably seventh grade and my first year or two of college, Baba O’Riley was my favorite song. Every time I heard it, I reacted the way Pera does. Giddy. Excited. Gleeful in my lameness. I once left a comment on a Sporcle game that said Baba O’Riley sounds better backwards than 95 percent of songs sound forwards.
So does my love of this episode reflect some sort of nostalgia? Probably. But this is also some of the best, most heartfelt comedy you’ll find. Set aside the dancing and the cluelessness for a second too. Because while that makes up the bulk of the episode and the bulk of the comedy, the ending is really brilliant too.
In the episode’s final moments, Joe mentions how he doesn’t understand the logic of the violin solo at the end of Baba O’Riley. He says it feels like The Who wrote a perfect song and didn’t know how to end it, so they just slapped a violin on the end and hoped no one would ask why. Then the episode ends with Joe trying and failing to make a three-point turn in the snow for about 90 seconds.
It’s like Joe Pera made a perfect episode of television and didn’t know how to end it, so he slapped an Austin Powers joke on the end and hoped no one would notice.
29. Lemons — Black-ish
S3E12, 2017, ABC
There’s only one show that possibly could’ve produced an episode like Lemons, and it’s the show that did.
After the midpoint of Black-ish’s third season, the show unleashed its most topical (and one of its most polarizing) episodes ever. Set in the days and weeks following the 2016 election, Lemons follows each member of the Johnson family and chronicles how they reacted to the news of the upcoming Trump presidency.
It’s almost impossible to tell the story of the 2010s in America without mentioning the 2016 election, the single most memorable and historically relevant historical event of our time. I’m not here to comment on that outcome though. I just want to talk about this episode as a brilliant display of writing and character building.
Every character reacts in his or her own way. Bow overcompensates with guilt. Junior loses his innocence and nearly becomes radicalized. Zoey tries to do her part in the smallest ways she can. And Dre? He withdraws. He tries to live his life the same way he had before until he can no longer contain his beliefs. He finally unleashes a 90-second speech about the America he knows and loves, releasing the tension of the episode and making writer/director Kenya Barris’ point crystal clear.
Of all the episodes on this countdown, this one has the second-lowest IMDB rating. I understand why. It’s impossible to make a sitcom episode about modern politics and not alienate somebody. So if this episode isn’t for you, that’s fine.
But if you’re willing to meditate on a half dozen different perspectives and reactions to a moment history will be studying for the next century, this might be the most affecting and effective sitcom episode you can explore.
28. The Pants Alternative — The Big Bang Theory
S3E18, 2010, CBS
Get over yourselves.
There’s no doubt that The Big Bang Theory experienced a major dropoff in quality toward its later seasons. The show was a victim of its own popular and the backlash was a product of its own overexposure. But it’s easy to forget that back in 2010, when the show was just a massive hit instead of the biggest show on television, The Big Bang Theory entered a rare sphere alongside shows like Everybody Loves Raymond and How I Met Your Mother to be classified as the best four-cam sitcoms of this century.
I look at an episode like The Pants Alternative and plainly can’t understand how someone can blanket dislike this entire series. The most valid criticism of The Big Bang Theory is the show wrote references instead of punchlines. A lot of the laugh lines throughout the show come when a character says something geeky instead of when a funny thing happens. But I don’t think that’s often the case in this episode.
Instead, we get varying set pieces of characters trying to help Sheldon overcome his stage fright. Leonard’s exercise in psychiatry gets flipped back on him. Raj’s attempt at leading Sheldon through Indian meditation leads to a bizarre and creative journey through Sheldonopolis and its reaction to a Godzilla attack. And Penny’s choice to medicate Sheldon with alcohol leads to a drunken, offensive and discomforting speech loaded with corny jokes, academic criticisms and a song that Jim Parsons will probably never be able to un-memorize.
As I said earlier, get over yourselves. It’s fine to dislike The Big Bang Theory. It’s not a perfect show. There are probably more bad episodes than good ones. But don’t ignore the creative highs that made the show the ratings behemoth and popularity lightning rod it was. At its peak, The Big Bang Theory truly was an all-time great.
Related Reading: How An Entire Decade Of Iconic Sitcoms Ended In One Spectacular Spring
27. Solo — pen15
S1E4, 2019, Hulu
Weirdly, this is going to be one of two entries on this list that discusses Richard Karn. You’ve been warned.
Solo, the fourth episode of the wonderfully inexplicable Hulu show pen15, takes weirdness and awkwardness to their furthest extremes. In an attempt to impress her traveling musician father (played awesomely by Karn), high school freshman Maya (played by grown adult woman Maya) improvises a timpani solo in her school jazz band production. It doesn’t go well. Then she vomits.
That’s the climax of the episode. For a show built around two adult women playing teenage versions of themselves alongside a cast made up entirely of real-life teenagers, it’s hard to out-bizarre yourself. But this episode utilizes its weirdness so well. On top of that relatable kid-trying-to-impress-her-dad storyline, we also get Anna just absolutely rocking the teenage expression of overconfidence about something you’re mediocre at. And Karn! Karn’s cameo appearance fits the tone of the show so well, and the joke at the end about being in a Steely Dan cover band is such a great joke at the expense of lame middle-aged dads everywhere.
I have no idea how pen15 will continue one-upping itself in the weirdness department. It’s a show built around awkwardness, and that awkwardness pervades. Its first season was stellar. I can’t wait to see it grow. And if there’s more unprovoked vomiting, I won’t mind.
26. 9 Days — Brooklyn Nine-Nine
S3E12, 2016, FOX
I probably should’ve picked a Halloween episode. Or maybe The Box. Or the episode with the Backstreet Boys cold open. Any of those would’ve been logical choices. But I picked an episode about goiters.
Related Reading: The Decade SNL’s Not-Ready-For-Primetime Players Went Primetime
Andy Samberg was my teenage idol. To this day, I still probably have 90 percent of the SNL Digital Shorts he made with his Lonely Island co-conspirators memorized. Which is why I was so excited when Brooklyn Nine-Nine came out, and why I’m often a little disappointed by the character of Jake Peralta.
Jake is hilarious. It’s a great character. But the character lacks some of the zany unpredictability that I adored so much about Samberg on SNL.
Then there’s an episode like 9 Days. Jake and Captain Holt are quarantined with the mumps. It’s some of the finest physical comedy (and yet another example of sick comedy) from the decade. Simon and Balthazar are two of my favorite characters in the show, and they’re facial deformities that only exist for half an episode.
There’s a heart to 9 Days that’s easy to overlook; Jake trying to protect Captain Holt from loneliness by giving him an impossible case to try to solve is sweet. But there’s no sense in fixating on the sweetness when our two main characters are writhing in pain because they poked each others’ goiters. Or because they’re freezing and on fire at the same time.
In order to love an episode like 9 Days, you have to submit to the silly side of comedy. Eschew the high drama of an episode like The Box or the relationship payoff of HalloVeen in favor of slapstick and farce.
That’s a choice I’ll make every time.
25. Beach House — Girls
S3E7, 2014, HBO
It’s easy to forget now, almost a decade later, but Girls is probably the most controversial and zeitgeist-defining show of the front half of the 2010s. No show spawned more thinkpieces about gender, race, class, sexuality and privilege than Lena Dunham’s masterpiece. But what that controversy obscured is that Girls was actually a well-made and deeply funny show about flawed and difficult characters coexisting while trying to become real-life adults.
The best example of this came in the stellar third-season episode Beach House. The quickest way to summarize this episode is that Marnie tries to control everyone and no one listens. What results is a mish-mash of flirtation, dance montages and catharsis in the form of a screaming match that resets the whole show.
Shoshanna’s moment of growth is the most personally gratifying in this episode, and Elijah’s return reinvigorates a season that had kind of floated. I mean that in the best way. The best episodes of Girls make you feel like a listless wanderer, because that’s who the characters usually are.
But there’s something about the pacing and fun of this episode that stands out above the rest. Like so many other great shows, Girls kind of slogged to a finish. The conflicts took too long to resolve. Most fans hated the finale (I didn’t). Even at its best, Girls wasn’t a show for everyone, as evidenced by the aforementioned thinkpieces.
But one of the hallmarks of a great show is being able to pull off a phenomenal road trip episode. Beach House might be the top road trip episode of the decade, and it cements Girls as a thoughtful and challenging piece of sitcom history.
24. Steve Guttenberg’s Birthday — Party Down
S2E5, 2010, STARZ
Of all the shows on this countdown, Party Down is the one that I have the hardest time believing. It doesn’t feel possible that any episodes of Party Down aired in the 2010s. Especially not with the decades that Adam Scott, Lizzy Caplan, Jane Lynch, Megan Mullally, Martin Starr, Ken Marino and Ryan Hansen have had since.
Yet this decade did include Party Down’s spectacular second season. And with respect to the hilarious Draft Day, orgy and community theater episodes, there’s no Season 2 standout quite like Steve Guttenberg’s Birthday.
The cast and creators of Party Down recently reunited for a panel discussion at Vulture Fest, and in that discussion someone mentioned something really cool about Steve Guttenberg’s Birthday: Most of Party Down consisted of characters talking about what they wanted to be. This episode was the first time we actually got to see the characters do what they love.
Adam Scott and Lizzy Caplan give their most compelling performances of the series, Martin Starr reaches peak levels of Martin Starr-ness and Ken Marino plays frantically manic as only he can. That’s not to mention Guttenberg’s over-the-top niceness and encouragement that invades the episode with equal parts positivity and smarminess.
Party Down feels like the spiritual tissue that connects Arrested Development and The Office (UK) to the auteur era of sitcoms that followed. With an episode like Steve Guttenberg’s Birthday, we see that link plainly. The understated and sullen comedy mixes well with the singular vision of the writers to make a bleak but uplifting comedy that mixes its sadness with hope just well enough to make you think your characters have a chance to achieve their dreams.
Then Steve Guttenberg sleeps with their dates.
23. Charlie Work — It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia
S10E4, 2015, FXX
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia was one of the hardest shows on the list to pick a best episode from. Because it’s a show that, at this point late in its run, tends to max out with two extremely memorable episodes per season obscured between about 10 clunkers.
Since Reynolds vs. Reynolds: The Cereal Defense is a season finale and I’ve quoted CharDee MacDennis: The Game of Games too many times for it to actually mean anything anymore, the standout episode I’m picking is Season 10’s Charlie Work.
Charlie Work is one of the few episodes making this list as much because of technical achievements as comedic ones. The second-act long shot is a work of art, especially when you read about the camera tricks the director and crew had to pull off to make it seem like the sets were actually laid out like the bar and to make the on-set alley and on-location alley look the same.
But long shot aside, Charlie Work is a fascinating document to the power of It’s Always Sunny. In some ways, this is a side-character episode, focusing purely on Charlie’s perspective of a plan-gone-awry and what his value is to keeping Paddy’s running. It’s also just a tightly written episode with great jokes.
The TV episode Charlie Work actually reminds me the most of is a season 3 episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer called The Zeppo. That episode is told from Xander’s point of view, so we get to see all the main characters the way he sees them, and without his comic relief in the mix we see all the other characters become distilled parodies of themselves.
Without Charlie in the gang, the other members of the gang lose their minds. Dennis becomes Matthew McConaghuey for some reason. Frank starts flushing his clothes down the toilet. Mac becomes a jealous id monster. And Dee, well, she’s pretty much the same.
The payoff of Dennis taking credit for Charlie’s stool prank against Dee resets the series. We’ve gotten a glimpse into Charlie’s value. Then the show reinserts Charlie as the underling of the gang. It’s sympathy at its finest, done in the style of a show that refuses to let its characters learn lessons.
22. A Limp Alibi — American Vandal
S1E2, 2017, Netflix
We deserved 100 seasons of American Vandal. It was crude. It was juvenile. It was a show about high school boys for people with the sense of humor of your average high school boy. And it was perfect out the gate.
The second episode of the series, A Limp Alibi, dismantles every trope from the true crime genre with ease. What should be a silly half-hour about kids lying about how much sex they had at camp turns into a masterclass of parody. Our characters recreate a crime in excruciating detail. They try to surveil voicemails from phones to get closer to the truth. They narrate conflicting accounts against each other to layer the conflict, even if the conflicting accounts are about pranking an unsuspecting neighbor.
There was a ping-pong quality to American Vandal that few other shows this decade had. Other shows lampooned the true crime genre (Party Monster!), but none did so with so much love and care to actually weave a coherent and compelling mystery.
I personally think American Vandal’s second season was funnier. That probably has to do with the slapstick inherent to a season about poop. But there’s something fascinating about the first season and the narrative it weaves. From the beginning, this was a show that knew where it was going and what its tone was.
There’s a reason this is the earliest episode of any show on this list in a show’s chronology. Few shows came out with their identity as defined as American Vandal. It’s just a shame we didn’t get to see that identity morph and grow over a few extra seasons.
21. Episode 3 — Derry Girls
S1E3, 2018, Channel 4/Netflix
Of all the shows I’m writing about in this project, I’m pretty sure Derry Girls was the last one I watched. It’s such a small, little, foreign show that it slipped through the cracks. But I’m thankful to the friends of mine who pushed me to watch it because man, is this show hilarious.
I bill it as Freaks and Geeks for Northern Ireland in the 1990s, but that’s probably unfair to Derry Girls. It’s more frenetic than Freaks and Geeks ever was, and has a Seinfeldian emphasis on making sure its characters lose in humiliating ways. Take Episode 3, when our leads are trying to skip school but accidentally end up witnessing what some of them believe to be a miracle in the form of a statue of Mother Mary weeping.
The decade’s second-hottest Hot Priest gets involved and Erin is enamored of him. But Erin also knows she didn’t witness a miracle. Instead, she saw a dog peeing above the statue and urine leaking down its face. Thinking the priest is going to leave the profession and run away with her, Erin confesses and she and her friends get to be on the front page of the newspaper as liars who tried to defraud the Catholic Church.
Derry Girls is a character show. What happens is almost never important. Schemes get hatched and schemes get foiled. But the reactions make the show. Watching how Clare, Orla and Michelle react to what they believe they’ve seen is textbook character development and the injection of Father Peter into the show gives the episode an added dimension of cringe-worthy discomfort.
All I’m going to say is do whatever you can to get past the accents. Because Derry Girls is worth watching, even if you have to do it with subtitles on.
The Sitcomologist 
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