Top 10 best TV comedies of all time

A great comedy show is something that seeps into your brain and soaks into your bones and runs through your veins, until you are simply not the same person that you were before it entered your life. When you strike up a relationship with a great comedy, you can't go through an ordinary day without being reminded of yet another perfect quote, or annoying your friends by saying it out loud. The best comedies make life worthwhile. But what's the point of being a fan of TV shows, if you don't rank them? So here is the utterly definitive and unarguable list of the Top 10 Best Television Comedies of All Time. Those who disagree with my selections are both entitled to their opinions, and wrong.

10. The Office

The dawn of Ricky Gervais'quest for world domination was groundbreaking at the time, and remains striking for its singular commitment to its oft-painful mockumentary premise. Gervais' David Brent is a monster spawned from his own lack of self-awareness, the agony of every stultifying office job made flesh. The teeth-grinding agony of Brent's attempts to impress subordinates and superiors alike, and the bleak sadness of characters fighting against their own dashed expectations, would be crushing if it weren't so funny.

9. The Micallef Program/Programme/Pogram

"It's good … for an Australian show" is so often the lament for local comedies. Not here, in what remains the best work by Australia's greatest comic talent. A sketch show anchored by Micallef's preening, insecure, incompetent host, it eschewed impersonation or catchphrases in favour of weirdness, wordplay and deconstruction of the very idea of television itself.

Shaun Micallef, Australia's greatest comic talent.

8. Blackadder

A sitcom about British history, with each season following the exploits of a different generation of one selfish, avaricious and progressively lower-born family? How terribly twee. But somehow, after the hit-and-miss first season, Blackadder grew into a thing of inordinate beauty, a marvellously smart-and-silly concoction that produced some of the most memorable one-liners of all time, on the back of Richard Curtis and Ben Elton's smirkingly witty scripts and Rowan Atkinson's towering performance as the title characters. And it climaxed with the most powerfully poignant "serious" moment any sitcom has ever achieved.

Rowan Atkinson and Tony Robinson in Blackadder.

7. Arrested Development

Always under-appreciated, almost every sitcom today wishes it could be the saga of the privileged but trouble-stricken Bluth family. Reviving the career of Jason Bateman, making the careers of Will Arnett and Michael Cera, and opening our eyes to the wondrous comedic talents of Portia de Rossi, Arrested Development's array of rapid-fire one-liners, visual gags, blink-and-you'll-miss-it cultural easter eggs and winking self-reference was a masterpiece of comedy technique allied to characters so distinctive and eccentric each one could carry a show on their own.

The distinctive and eccentric characters of Arrested Development.

6. Seinfeld

​The show about nothing that was really about everything, Seinfeld broke rules, pushed boundaries, and built a template for the comedy of minutiae, self-obsession and amorality that many have tried to replicate without success. With four indelible characters careening through lives of increasingly chaotic futility, Seinfeld fused its creator's observational gaggery to a loveable cynicism and admirable commitment to the ethos of "no hugging, no learning" that made TV history.

5. Monty Python's Flying Circus

They were the Beatles of comedy, and their original sketch show dynamited the doors of possibility. Every episode of the Flying Circus was a kaleidoscope of surreal insanity, with enough disparate ideas to sustain an entire series of most shows. Taking the sensibilities of Spike Milligan, adding intellectualism and subtracting self-indulgence, the show changed the rules for what comedy could be. With barely any celebrity impressions, precious few recurring characters, and a dislike of punchlines, the Pythons relied purely on a richly flowing river of comedic inspiration, rickety sets and tiny budgets no barrier to the pure boundary-busting force of their lunacy.

4. Archer

It's a spy spoof, but no summary has ever been so inadequate. Archer blows its narrow premise up into the slickest, snappiest, most gut-bustingly brilliant cross-pollination of genre parody and workplace sitcom ever drawn. With a peerless voice cast and a gorgeous retro aesthetic, Archer crackles with whiplash dialogue and wields sex and violence like a rapier. Its mixture of the high concept and mundane is addictive, and the title character, the alcoholic, sexoholic, narcissistic, highly skilled yet irresistibly idiotic killing machine Sterling Archer, spearheading a beautifully conceived crew of loons.

ABC2 program - Archer. Images supplied by ABC TV publicity.

3. Family Guy

Decried as crass, crude, derivative and offensive to pretty much everyone capable of being offended, Family Guy is loathed by at least as many people as adore it. But surely no show has ever so completely disregarded any other objective than getting a laugh by any means possible. In its recklessly irrelevant non sequitur cutaways, its sledgehammer pop culture references, its Pythonic absurdism and gleeful tastelessness, Seth MacFarlane's original cartoon opus hurls blizzards of gags every minute of every episode, and the vast majority stick, thanks to the show's dreadful secret: it's a hell of a lot smarter than anyone gives it credit for, even as it pushes forward with its central thesis: everyone's an idiot.

The Griffin Family: (L-R) Chris Brian, Peter, Stewie, Lois and Meg in Family Guy. Photo: Channel Seven Publicity.

2. Fawlty Towers

Only 12 episodes were made, in two seasons four years apart. But such episodes they were! John Cleese and Connie Booth constructed a textbook farce that went off with clockwork precision, every line perfectly placed, every scene exquisitely crafted, and all dosed with the edge of divine madness that Cleese brings to all that he touches. To recognise the possibilities of the hotel setting was inspired; to create the monstrously inadequate Basil Fawlty was the comedic art raised to impossible heights. Ahead of its time for attention to detail and ruthlessly hysterical crisis escalation, those 12  diamond-sharp half-hours remain unmatched by a thousand imitators.

1. The Simpsons

Oh yeah, you'll say, it hasn't been good for years. But leaving aside the fact the tired recent Simpsons episodes are still better than almost everything else on TV, if this granddaddy of grown-up animation had ended after season 10 it would have provided a longer streak of utterly perfect TV comedy than any other show has come close to. Throughout the '90s The Simpsons was almost frighteningly good, a dizzying blend of just about every comedic style – domestic sitcom, farce, satire, slapstick, surrealism – that took on every facet of modern life and spun gold from them. Homer Simpson is the greatest TV character ever created, and Springfield contains a dozen others deserving of honourable mentions. The fact it's still going, even for those who've wearied of it, is testament to the fact that entered all our souls and can never be dislodged.

Simply the best The Simpsons. Photo: Network Ten Publicity