Carla Lane's 'Butterflies' seemed to be on in our house at all times when I was a kid, as did 'The Good Life.' But it was 'Fawlty Towers that made me really sit up for the first time. Basil's incandescent rage made me howl.
When I was growing up, I watched every sitcom imaginable.
I think the longer a sitcom is on the air, by necessity, the dumber the characters have to get: otherwise, they would be learning and growing, and they won't be funny, so they have to get more and more extremely whatever they are.
My desire for my own sitcom began as a little girl - I spent hours lying on my belly on the shag carpeting getting lost in the world of the '70s sitcom. All I wanted to do was run away to the Brady house, The Partridge Family bus; even the project on 'Good Times' seemed better than Clark, NJ.
Everyone told me that British sitcom was dead. Then I looked at 'Seinfeld' and 'Frasier' and thought, 'No it's not, it just needs more gags.'
'I Love Lucy,' the first classic, really belonged more to the Wacky Woman genre than the domestic sitcom; 'My Little Margie' and 'I Married Joan' were among the shrill, coarse imitations.
I think the Mama people remember is from 'Mama's Family.' She really turned into a pretty cool character. The sketches from the 'Burnett' show, if people are old enough to remember, were written by writers who all hated their mothers.
There are lots of comic bosses and fathers in sitcoms, but the comic landlord remains rare.
I thoroughly enjoy sitcoms - the schedule that comes with them and the camaraderie you feel with a certain group of people when you've been working together for a long time.
What you aspire to on a sitcom is the feeling of live comedy.
Sitcoms always made the most sense to me. I grew up watching them every day with my dad. Every Monday, Tuesday night, we would be sitting in front of the television watching any kind of sitcom. I connect with that more, but I love to do whatever kind of role.
With classic sitcoms like MASH, the characters all drove each other crazy, and that's what you loved to see.
There was a time when I couldn't watch sitcoms for a while because it was just cacophony, it was just noise.
As much as I loved Pacino and De Niro and wanted to be a dramatic actor, I also grew up on sitcoms. I grew up on 'M*A*S*H' and 'All In The Family' and 'Cheers.' And then around this time - this would have been '95, '96 - I was so into 'Friends' and 'Mad About You,' the idea of being on a sitcom became a very real thing that I wanted.
