Faith Roswell is a Senior Writer on Screen Rant’s Classic TV team. Since earning her degree in Creative Writing over a decade ago, Faith has written articles on film and TV from a variety of different angles. Faith now combines her knowledge of psychology with her love of monster movies to give more insight into what makes the best ones.
You may have read her Screen Rant lists and features covering horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, or read her Amazon Top 10 book, “Movie Monsters of the Deep.”
Faith has had an extensive career as a writer, appearing on BBC live radio, researching true crime for Rotten Mango podcast, and writing for publications including Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura, and The Daily Jaws before beginning here at Screen Rant.
TV sitcoms define a generation. While some, like the British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf, have wild premises, most, like Friends, are based on the day-to-day lives of fairly regular people, which gives future viewers a snapshot of life in the era. The best sitcoms of the 1990s featured plenty of iconic 90s fashion, as well as communication-based mishaps in the years before the internet became part of everyday life.
The 90s was an experimental decade, and this included the approach to sitcoms. TV shows were beginning to follow a wider range of people, while experimenting with themes and formula. That said, the 90s were a very different time, with some odd misconceptions and beliefs making the rounds, so while many 90s sitcoms are still perfect from start to finish, others have aged terribly.
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Friends is the defining sitcom of the 90s, following a group of six friends and their relationships, careers, and mistakes through ten seasons. The show’s impact cannot be overstated, with the actors becoming household names, the characters being recognizable even to people who never saw Friends, and Jennifer Aniston’s iconic hairstyle, “the Rachel,” dominating salons. Still, while Friends may evoke nostalgia for people who grew up watching the show, it is a harsh fact that it has not aged well.
Friends leaned into stereotypes hard, with male characters being ridiculed if they showed a nurturing side and gay characters being one-dimensional. When it comes to Monica’s drastic weight loss, the show was a product of its time and must be understood in this way, but it reveals how diet culture was central to 90s life, and this has not aged well. Other Friends episodes that do not hold up today involve Ross dating a student, characters treating mental illness as a punchline, and sexual assault that is not presented as such.
Men Behaving Badly
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This British sitcom’s title alone might result in a pre-emptive cringe, and even its star, Caroline Quentin, described the show as “past its sell-by date” in an interview with Times Radio. The show followed the mishaps of Gary Strang (Martin Clunes) and his roommates, with a storyline involving an attractive woman who moves in nearby that feels like an earlier version of The Big Bang Theory‘s Penny storyline. The men refer to women by disparaging nicknames, do little other than drink beer, and, in Gary’s case, sleep with his roommate’s girlfriend.
The central characters are presented as punchlines rather than heroes, with their behavior being so bad that it is never admirable, but the largely forgotten sitcom has still aged like milk. While we are expected to laugh at Gary and his friends rather than with them, the show illustrated the worst of British “lad” culture, which involved aggression, sexual assault, and heavy drinking, all presented as humor.
Ask Harriet
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Ask Harriet is about out-of-work reporter Jack Cody, who presents himself as a woman to get a job as an advice columnist. Unfortunately, the columnist is required for in-person meetings, with Cody needing to take his alter ego, “Sylvia Coco,” to the office. The premise and only season was received so poorly that the series has a 0% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and rightly so.
By featuring a man pretending to be a woman so he can get a job, Ask Harriet‘s central storyline reflects a modern moral panic that is so ludicrous that it was the exact punchline of this 28-year-old sitcom. The 1990s might not have been the most progressive era, but even then, the execution of this concept was considered mean-spirited, and only five of the 13 planned episodes ever aired.
Sex And The City
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Sex and the City is one of the best examples of a sitcom that was extremely progressive for its time, before society and culture progressed even further, leaving the show feeling embarrassingly outdated. By featuring candid talks about casual sex and relationships of all kinds, Sex and the City was groundbreaking, with many fans relating strongly to one or more of the four central characters. The show still has an impressive legacy, from tourism in New York to academic studies.
The show acts as a time capsule to the views of the 1990s, and an indicator of how far we have come. The episode in which Carrie dates a bisexual man was extremely forward-thinking at the time for even acknowledging bisexuality existed, yet it presented the character as a stereotype incapable of commitment. The show fares little better when it comes to racism, homophobia, and sexual manipulation, with the iconic Samantha Jones being openly predatory, and this makes the show tough to watch now.
That 70s Show
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That 70s Show was a coming-of-age sitcom that followed the lives of six teenage friends, and made its audience nostalgic for the 1970s whether they had been born by then or not. However, a harsh reality of rewatching the series is that many episodes of That 70s Show have aged like milk. Some of the outdated attitudes in the show are intended for viewers to laugh at the person involved, rather than agree with them, but this does not mean that all the jokes land today.
In 1999, That 70s Show was remade for a British audience as Days Like These, with an almost word-for-word script that just changed some cultural references.
The episode “Eric’s Buddy” included a gay character, which was a very rare move for a 90s sitcom, but he was presented as a villain for no other reason, making the episode into an exercise in bigotry presented as comedy. “Class Picture” involved a male character repeatedly trying to see a female character topless, with her reluctantly agreeing in a move that is understood not to be consensual now. Even off-camera, That 70s Show has had controversy, with Danny Masterson (Steven Hyde) being convicted of rape in 2023.
Seinfeld
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Seinfeld‘s “show about nothing” premise was groundbreaking, following absurd and trivial daily issues rather than large-scale plots, while giving characters intertwining storylines that collided at unexpected moments. The show changed the game for sitcoms, but while many episodes of Seinfeld are still masterpieces today, time has not been as kind to others, which tend to be cringe-worthy at best and hopelessly outdated at worst.
The Seinfeld episodes that don’t hold up today are not always offensive or prejudiced, with some simply being centered around a less-interesting time, like “Y2K,” which featured the short-lived panic around the “Millennium Bug.” On the other hand, the series included plotlines in which sexual assault and flashing were treated as funny, turning the show into a study in how little we understood about predatory behavior in the 90s rather than a nostalgic comfort watch.
Saved By The Bell
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Saved by the Bell was a 1990s childhood staple, with viewers coming of age at the same time as the protagonists, and this is concerning on a rewatch, with grown viewers recognizing Zack’s behavior as extremely disturbing in hindsight. Zack auctions off a kiss from a classmate, befriends people for personal gain, and treats the friends he does have as disposable depending on his own circumstance.
Like many teen-focused dramas, Saved by the Bell touches on topical issues like drug education, but its extreme stance could be seen as laughable in the modern age of energy drinks, with a storyline involving a character becoming addicted to caffeine pills. Even setting aside the Saved by the Bell storylines that don’t work today, the show ignored issues like systemic poverty and racism that a series set in a Southern California school should have recognized, even in the 1990s.
Just Shoot Me!
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If made today, an updated version of Just Shoot Me! could work well, as the show shares DNA with The Devil Wears Prada and Ugly Betty. Following the staff working on a fashion magazine, there was plenty of material to work with related to wardrobe malfunctions and miscommunications. Unfortunately, Just Shoot Me! is one of the hardest sitcoms to rewatch as the show’s creators instead leaned into the worst parts of the 1990s fashion industry.
Showcasing beauty standards that promoted eating disorders, treating older women as punchlines, and including fat jokes in virtually every episode, Just Shoot Me! is a perfect example of the worst of what passed for humor in some 1990s writing rooms. A series like this could have become an icon of the decade that evolved as time went on, and this makes its failure even more disappointing.
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