Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Sometime around Christmas, as the reality of the next four years set in, I took up a self-care regiment that I surmised would keep my soul from withering away. I would watch sitcoms—a lot of sitcoms. I’d binge all the sitcoms, marathoning 100-episode runs the way others treat a new 10-episode Netflix season. At first I did this just to drown out the political cacophony of the first 100 days. Now I realize these shows have done so much more. These sitcoms comfort me, they remind me of my values and keep them strong, and they’re keeping me sane.
I worked from home during the entire election cycle, meaning I kept my TV on MSNBC for a solid eight hours a day. I developed work crushes on so many anchors (shout out to Chris Hayes) as I swam through the sludge of news. I killed that habit on November 9th and, in the new year, I replaced talking heads with the sound of a laugh track. It’s been ridiculously therapeutic.
I started with The Bob Newhart Show and added The Golden Girls into the rotation while I banged away at my day job. I watched 322 sitcom episodes in January. This is when I started to realize the therapeutic nature of the laugh track. Haters hate on the laugh track, and—sometimes—rightfully so. If a show ain’t funny, then a laugh track just accentuates how painfully unfunny it is. If a show is funny, then you don’t notice the laugh track because you are also legit laughing. Both Bob Newhart and Golden Girls, along with most of the all-time great sitcoms, recorded a live audience’s genuine laughter; we assume all laughter is canned, but that illusion is broken as soon as someone offscreen coughs. Hearing that laughter while sitting alone in my apartment made me feel like I was a part of something, even if that something took place 30-40 years ago. News anchors and political pundits can also keep you company, but those guys are straight up Debbie Downers. After a day’s worth of stories about obstruction of justice, I’d rather be part of a chorus of laughers than on the receiving end of a political rant—even one I agree with. Try this: when the news gets too rough, put on an episode of The Golden Girls and watch it as though you’re there, surrounded by a hundred strangers unified by the comedic power of a Sophia zinger.
Past January, I continued to absorb niche sitcoms I love (NewsRadio) as well as historically significant ones I last watched a decade ago (The Mary Tyler Moore Show). I watched all of Frasier (264 episodes) in six weeks and all of Parks and Recreation (125 episodes) in one week. The “gotta watch’em all” mentality took over, as each episode brought me a step closer to adding another whole series to my intangible pop culture collection. Gamification is everywhere, so what not apply it to my Netflix and Hulu habits? Gamifying my commitment to sitcoms made me prioritize watching episodes over my nightly routine of obsessively checking Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr (a.k.a. “circling the drain”).
Watching these shows helped fortify my beliefs and morals in a time where they could easily be crushed under the weight of anger. I didn’t know that I’d find real wisdom in these 22-minute breaks from the world, but the lessons kept on coming. The Bob Newhart Show gave me a marriage to believe in, one that mirrors my own childless partnership between two snarky professionals. The WJM-TV news crew’s growth over seven seasons of Mary Tyler Moore reminded me that family isn’t determined by blood. And then Frasier, which is really a family sitcom dressed up in oversized and overpriced tan suits, made me think the importance of family—especially when you don’t have much in common with them.
NewsRadio proved to me what I already knew: multicam sitcoms are art. They’re the art form where writers, comedians, performers, and actors all come together to create something that’s absolutely original and defiant. NewsRadio, a workplace sitcom stacked with sketch comedy vets, was never a hit. The show kept one finger raised at its parent network for five seasons. I didn’t learn any heartwarming lessons from this show; I learned that comedy is a protest.
Parks and Rec showed me the best, albeit totally fictional, politician I know. Not all of it was easy to watch; the dumb-dumb-Richie-Rich-runs-for-office plotline in Season Four feels too prescient to be totally enjoyable today, and the final season’s depiction of a possible 2017 gave me alternate timeline envy. Still, Parks and Rec is about good people doing hard work to benefit ungrateful people. I strive to be as determined and selfless as those goofballs.
It’s also obvious that the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt theme song is even more of an anthem in 2017: “Unbreakable! They’re alive dammit! Females are strong as hell!”
The perfect show for right now, though, is The Golden Girls. It might be the only sitcom that could seriously form the basis of a new religion. The show’s hilarious, no doubt, but it also stands for something. The show was progressive on gay rights back in the ’80s, featured sex-positive characters, and addressed everything from ageism and sexism to immigration and homelessness. The Golden Girls showcased empathy as much as it did wicker furniture, and that’s what we need right now (empathy, although I’m not opposed to giving my living room a Blanche Devereaux makeover).
These sitcoms have strength and heart, and—the delightfully anarchic NewsRadio aside—they’re fundamentally empathetic. It’s reassuring to me that most of these shows were also popular. There was a time when a more unified America sat down, together, and watched Blanche accept her gay brother, cheered Mary Richards for standing up for her journalistic integrity, and teared up when six friends—a family—locked the door on a massive Manhattan apartment one last time. That’s not the case right now, as more people watched Taxi than Kimmy Schmidt, but these shows remind me that it can happen.
I’ve come out of my news bunker in the last few weeks. I’ve jumped back into podcasts and I’m even reading news coverage. Five months of sitcom therapy got my tolerance up. Now when the news feels like too much, which is basically every day, I go home and I do this: I get on my couch, I drop my phone out of arm’s reach, I stream Newhart on Hulu, and I give myself a break. I give myself a chance to mentally recuperate—and I laugh out loud along with strangers.
Where to watch The Golden Girls
