The 5 Best Sitcoms of the 2000s, Ranked From Good to Great

The sitcom underwent a dramatic transformation in the 2000s. Traditional multi-camera comedies filmed before live audiences remained a major part of the television landscape, with shows such as “The Big Bang Theory” carrying the torch after “Friends.” But they increasingly shared the schedule with bolder formats that reshaped what a sitcom could look and sound like. By the decade’s end, single-camera comedies, mockumentaries, and self-aware series packed with fourth-wall breaks had become just as familiar.

This ranking of the best sitcoms of the 2000s focuses largely on the series that disrupted convention. More than two decades later, their styles can feel almost comfortingly familiar after countless rewatches, making it easy to overlook how radical they seemed when they first arrived. To narrow the field, we included only live-action shows that premiered in 2000 or later, continued beyond the decade, and aired most of their episodes between 2000 and 2010. That rules out contenders such as “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” despite its obvious place in any wider conversation.

There is one exception to that rule: a cancelled series that later received a revival. We also concentrated on shows that debuted on U.S. networks, which unfortunately excludes this writer’s beloved British cult comedy “Peep Show.” One notable exception made the cut after U.S. awards recognition and a lasting place in popular culture helped propel it across the Atlantic. With the criteria established, we ranked the finalists according to how funny we found them. Here are the results.

Whether we are talking about Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais’ pioneering, deadpan BBC original or the cringe-filled adventures of Michael Scott and his Dunder Mifflin colleagues, both versions of “The Office” changed the sitcom landscape. The British series ingeniously applied a mockumentary framework to the familiar workplace comedy, turning the drab routines of corporate life into a stage for David Brent’s relentless, humiliating quest to win his employees’ approval. When the American adaptation arrived several years later, it initially struggled to move beyond its predecessor’s shadow. After an uneven first season and the possibility of cancellation, however, it developed a distinctive voice of its own—one that was no less excruciating to watch.

Rather than choose between them, we are treating “The Office” as a single mega-franchise. The original remains one of television’s most influential sitcoms, while the NBC remake became one of its most adored. The U.S. series could not have existed without the British foundation, yet its extended run arguably allowed it to surpass that influence, producing celebrated episodes such as “Dinner Party” several seasons into its life. The American show eventually lost momentum, and the British version has become harder to revisit as Gervais’ increasingly controversy-driven persona has aged. Still, no list of the decade’s defining sitcoms could leave either out. By 2010, comedy had been remade in their image.

We generally avoided shows that continued well beyond the 2000s, but most of the defining episodes of Larry David’s post-“Seinfeld” comedy arrived during that first decade. And, to borrow the show’s own refrain, it remained pre-tay, pre-tay, pretty good long afterward.

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” took the observational comedy of “Seinfeld”—already less than generous toward its characters—and sharpened it into something far more caustic. The series featured season-long story arcs, shifting relationships, and a parade of celebrities playing exaggerated versions of themselves, but its engine was always the same: a social mistake that Larry had made or misunderstood. Sometimes the problem began with an innocent misreading; more often, he created it himself. Either way, he responded in the worst possible manner, pushing the “Seinfeld” principle of “no hugging, no learning” into even more uncomfortable territory.

David rarely strayed from that formula across the show’s nearly quarter-century run. Instead, “Curb” updated its social minefields to reflect changing cultural norms while refusing to give Larry anything resembling meaningful personal growth. The moment he began questioning his own righteousness in the middle of an argument, the entire premise would have collapsed.

That stubbornness was central to the show’s longevity. Although much of the series unfolded in Hollywood, it was often uncomfortably easy to recognize ourselves in an irritable man who had no internal filter. There was a particular thrill in watching Larry violate rules of etiquette that many of us have wished we could ignore. The consequences he faced each week were entertaining—and a useful reminder to think twice before saying exactly what comes to mind.

Lisa Kudrow’s post-“Friends” sitcom was largely overlooked by critics and audiences when it premiered in 2005. Co-created by former “Sex and the City” showrunner Michael Patrick King, the series used the emerging mockumentary format to examine the uneasy line between reality television and scripted entertainment. At a time when “American Idol” and other unscripted hits dominated the ratings, traditional network comedies and dramas were fighting for attention. The industry’s fears were channeled through Valerie Cherish, Kudrow’s painfully ambitious protagonist.

Valerie was a largely forgotten star of an early-’90s sitcom when she landed a supporting role on the teen comedy “Room and Bored.” The part was imposed on the show’s creative team because the network wanted a reality series documenting a celebrity comeback to run alongside it. “The Comeback” presents the resulting reality footage in raw, unedited form, placing viewers behind the scenes for every awkward exchange and bruising humiliation.

The friction between the two productions—and the varying degrees of contempt their crews hold for Valerie—gives the cringe comedy an especially sharp satirical edge. The fictional producers routinely manipulate her behavior and reshape her appearances in pursuit of better television. In an era increasingly defined by Bravo-style reality programming, the show’s parody has aged remarkably well. In 2005, however, “The Comeback” was operating far ahead of its moment.

Later revival seasons sent Valerie into the worlds of prestige television and AI-written streaming sitcoms, finally earning the series the critical admiration it had long deserved. With reality TV’s evolution catching up to its premise, “The Comeback” now looks like the definitive sitcom of the mockumentary era—and Kudrow’s performance remains the finest of her career.

We will set aside the ill-fated Netflix revival—did anyone actually make it through the fifth and final season? Even that ambitious misstep, though, cannot diminish our affection for the original three-season run of “Arrested Development.”

Producer and narrator Ron Howard brought the rough, handheld visual style of reality television to a tightly constructed sitcom. Creator Mitchell Hurwitz paired that approach with a story about a wealthy, dysfunctional family forced to cut back after a major real estate corruption scandal. The show soon moved far beyond the grounded realism suggested by its premise, spiraling into a maze of surreal callbacks, intricate wordplay, and meta comedy as Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) attempted to keep his family under control.

Already unusual for a live-action network sitcom of this period due to its shot-on-location form, “Arrested Development” further toyed with the format with its wealth of cutaway gags and repeated breaking of the fourth wall. It was a live-action cartoon shot like a gritty documentary, and its disregard for sitcom conventions has made it one of the century’s most influential TV shows.

More importantly for this list, however, is just how consistently funny it remains on rewatch, with its sheer density of jokes meaning we’re still discovering hilarious new throwaway lines decades later. It hasn’t all aged perfectly (Charlize Theron’s second season romantic interest is, shall we say, a little problematically written), but most of “Arrested Development” is as fresh as the day it premiered.

Premiering in the same season when Aaron Sorkin’s “West Wing” follow-up “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” was expected to become a sensation, Tina Fey’s heightened look at life behind the scenes of a live comedy show very quickly overshadowed the competitor it was expected to get trounced by. Sorkin’s self-important series was too reverent towards comedy writers and their ability to speak truth to power, without any of his scripts for the show containing a single successful punchline.

Fey and co-creator Robert Carlock, on the other hand, were far less enamored with the lame “Saturday Night Live” equivalent in their show’s universe, quickly making it a distant second to the ego-driven feud of its stars Jenna and Tracy (played by the brilliant Jane Krakowski and Tracy Morgan) and cutting-edge satire about showbiz and the stupidity of Hollywood execs.

Some plotlines, like Jenna’s ill-fated Janis Joplin biopic that couldn’t get music or life rights, were directly translated from real entertainment industry headlines at the time. All-timer performances from Fey as beleaguered head writer Liz Lemon and Alec Baldwin as network executive Jack Donaghy anchored the show at its silliest.

However, as was the case when we saw vintage “Simpsons” episodes at a young age, the gag rate remained so consistently high that it never mattered if we got each and every niche pop culture reference thrown at the screen. In terms of sheer joke quantity, “30 Rock” might be the funniest network sitcom to have ever aired.