Comedy · 1980s
The 1980s account for 86 of the 654 comedy shows here, and 97 opening sequences.
ABC carries the most, with 22.
Nine of them rebuilt their titles mid-run, Blackadder most of all with four sequences.
86 shows97 sequences
1 sequence
The Golden Girls
'Thank You for Being a Friend' over four women and a Miami kitchen — a theme so tied to the show that the original songwriter's version is now the obscure one.
- Season 7
1 sequence
Seinfeld
A slap bass figure and a stand-up set — an opening that is literally the comedian's act, which is what the show was sold as.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Cheers
A minute of hand-tinted engravings and old photographs of strangers drinking, none of them from the show and none of them the cast. The bar you are about to spend eleven years in is introduced as the latest in a very long line of them.
- Seasons 1–11
1 sequenceMarried... with Children
Sinatra's 'Love and Marriage' over a Chicago family who demonstrably have neither — one of television's earliest deliberately sarcastic openings.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOnly Fools and Horses
A theme sung by the show's own writer, explaining the premise in verse — and one of the very few British sitcom openings to have charted.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Roseanne
A family at a kitchen table, laughing at something you cannot hear, rebuilt for every season across twenty years and a thirty-year gap.
- Season 1
- Season 10
4 sequences
Blackadder
Four series, four centuries, and a theme re-orchestrated each time to suit the period — lute, harpsichord, military band.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 1 more
1 sequenceThe Cosby Show
A family dancing to a new arrangement of the same theme every season — jazz, big band, calypso — which makes it one of the earliest American sitcoms to treat its opening as something to redo annually.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMystery Science Theater 3000
A man and two robots heckling films, whose theme song exists to explain the premise and then says so out loud.
- Season 1
1 sequenceA Different World
A historically Black college rendered in bold graphic design, with the theme re-recorded by a different artist across the run — Aretha Franklin among them.
- Season 2
1 sequenceMoonlighting
Al Jarreau singing a theme written for the show, over two people who spend four seasons refusing to admit anything.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWho's the Boss?
A theme called 'Brand New Life' over a move from Brooklyn to Connecticut, which is the entire premise sung aloud.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDesigning Women
Georgia On My Mind over an Atlanta design firm, with the cast photographed like a society page.
- Season 6
1 sequencePerfect Strangers
'Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now' over Chicago — one of the decade's most earnest sitcom themes attached to one of its silliest premises.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Young Ones
Four students in a condemned house, and the series that ended the British sitcom's post-war manners in one go.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNight Court
Eighteen seconds of bass guitar and a Manhattan courthouse at night.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFraggle Rock
Jim Henson's series about three societies who cannot see each other properly, made to be co-produced in every country that bought it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceYes Minister
Whitehall obstructing its own minister, opened by Gerald Scarfe caricatures drawing themselves.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequence'Allo 'Allo!
A French café in occupied France, from the same writer as Dad's Army twenty years on.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDoogie Howser, M.D.
A sixteen-year-old physician, and a synth theme that became shorthand for the entire decade.
- Seasons 1–4
1 sequenceMurphy Brown
A Washington newsroom and a Motown needle-drop that changed every episode — the theme was a different soul record each week.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNewhart
The Vermont inn sitcom, and the source of what is still widely held to be the best final scene in American television.
- Season 1
1 sequencePee-wee's Playhouse
A Saturday morning show designed by artists from the New York gallery scene, with a theme sung by Cyndi Lauper under a pseudonym.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Birds of a Feather
Two sisters in Chigwell whose husbands are both in prison.
- Season 1
- Season 10
1 sequenceLate Night with David Letterman
New York at night shot from a moving car, over a jazz-organ theme — the opening that decided what a late-night talk show looks like.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRound the Twist
An Australian children's series set in a lighthouse, with a theme song that asks whether strange things ever happen to you.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHi-de-Hi!
A 1950s holiday camp, the fourth David Croft series in this catalogue.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Wonder Years
Home-movie footage and Joe Cocker singing 'With a Little Help from My Friends' — an opening that establishes the entire retrospective frame before a word of narration.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Kids in the Hall
Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet playing surf rock over five men in a doorway — a sketch show whose theme became more famous than most of its sketches.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEver Decreasing Circles
Richard Briers after The Good Life, running every committee in his cul-de-sac.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFrench and Saunders
Twenty years of film parodies, and the double act that came out of the Comic Strip.
- Season 1
1 sequenceIt's Garry Shandling's Show
A sitcom whose theme song is about being a sitcom theme song, six years before The Larry Sanders Show.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpitting Image
Latex puppets of everyone in public life, opening on the workshop that built them.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Yes, Prime Minister
The sequel that promotes Hacker to Number Ten, and the 2013 revival that recast the whole thing.
- Seasons 1–2
- Season 3
2 sequences
ChuckleVision
Two brothers and a slapstick format that ran for twenty-one series on the strength of one exchange.
- Season 1
- Seasons 17–20
1 sequenceAlas Smith and Jones
Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones after Not the Nine O'Clock News, with a title that puns on a western.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSquare One TV
Mathematics taught as sketch comedy, including a police procedural parody called Mathnet.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMetal Mickey
A robot in a suburban family sitcom, directed by Micky Dolenz of the Monkees.
- Season 1
1 sequenceVictoria Wood: As Seen on TV
Sketches, songs at a piano, and the soap parody Acorn Antiques, which outlived the programme around it.
- Season 1
1 sequence227
A Washington apartment block told almost entirely from its front steps, where most of the cast spends most of the programme.
- Season 1
2 sequences
ALF
A sitcom built around a puppet the cast could not see, worked from a trench cut into the set floor.
- Season 1
- Season 3
2 sequences
Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
Seven British builders sharing a hut on a Düsseldorf site, written as a comedy about not being able to find work at home.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequenceA Bit of Fry & Laurie
Sketches written and performed by two people who had just left Cambridge and sounded like it.
- Season 2
1 sequenceBosom Buddies
Two admen who take rooms in a women-only building in drag, and the first thing Tom Hanks was known for.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBread
Carla Lane's Liverpool family, signing on and eating together, in the decade that made both political.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBrush Strokes
A painter and decorator who cannot stop flirting, written by the Birds of a Feather pair.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCharles in Charge
A student paying his rent by minding somebody else's children, in a sitcom CBS cancelled and syndication brought back.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCoach
A Minnesota football program run by three men who are markedly better at the game than at the rest of their lives.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDear John
A divorced man at a support group of the similarly abandoned, written by John Sullivan.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEmpty Nest
The Golden Girls' neighbour given his own house, two grown daughters and a conspicuously large dog.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEureeka's Castle
Puppets in a castle carried by a giant, made for the channel's pre-school block before it had one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFamily Matters
A Chicago family and a theme about the tiny things adding up, from a spinoff that was quietly taken over by a neighbour.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFamily Ties
A family portrait being drawn and redrawn, over a duet about what would happen without you — sixties parents and a Reagan-voting son.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFridays
ABC's answer to Saturday Night Live, best remembered for the night Andy Kaufman refused to say his lines.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFull House
A San Francisco picnic and a song about everywhere you look — the platonic form of the American family-sitcom opening.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGimme a Break!
Nell Carter keeping house for a widowed police chief, in a sitcom built entirely around her.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGood Morning, Miss Bliss
The series Saved by the Bell was rebuilt out of, with Hayley Mills teaching in Indiana.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGrowing Pains
A Long Island psychiatrist who moved his practice into the house so his wife could go back to reporting.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHale and Pace
Two former schoolteachers doing sketch comedy for ITV for a decade.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHead of the Class
A history teacher handed the gifted programme at a Manhattan school, played by a stand-up who had never taught anyone.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHey Dude
Teenagers working a dude ranch in Arizona, in one of the first scripted series Nickelodeon made itself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Hogan Family
A sitcom that changed its name twice while on the air, from Valerie to Valerie's Family to this one.
- Season 1
2 sequences
It's a Living
Waitresses at a restaurant on the thirteenth floor, cancelled by ABC and revived in syndication.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequenceJust the Ten of Us
The Growing Pains teacher spun off with eight children of his own.
- Season 1
1 sequenceKate & Allie
Two divorced friends sharing a Greenwich Village apartment and bringing up their children in it together.
- Season 1
1 sequenceKids Incorporated
A band of children playing covers in a converted warehouse, and where Fergie and Jennifer Love Hewitt both started.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLife with Lucy
Lucille Ball's last series, pulled after eight episodes of a thirteen-episode order.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMama's Family
A Carol Burnett Show sketch given its own house, dropped by NBC and then run for four more years in syndication.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMr. Belvedere
An English butler working for a Pittsburgh family, out of a film series forty years older than the sitcom.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMy Two Dads
A girl left to two men, either of whom might be her father, by a court that declines to establish which.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOut of This World
A girl with an alien father who can stop time by touching her fingertips together.
- Season 1
1 sequencePolice Squad!
Six episodes of the Airplane! team's deadpan, cancelled on the grounds that watching it required looking at it.
- Season 1
1 sequencePunky Brewster
A girl abandoned in a Chicago apartment building and raised by the man who manages it.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Red Dwarf
The last human alive, three million years from Earth, introduced with a mining ship the size of a city and a theme sung over the end of it.
- Season 1
- Season 10
1 sequenceSaved by the Bell
Freeze-frames of six teenagers over a theme about being late — Saturday morning television's most durable export.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShining Time Station
The American frame built around the Thomas films, with a foot-tall conductor living inside the station wall.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSilver Spoons
A boy sent to live with the father who never grew up, and the model train he rides through the house.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSledge Hammer!
A detective who holds conversations with his revolver, in a parody ABC scheduled directly against the police shows it was mocking.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSmall Wonder
A robot girl passed off as a daughter, in a syndicated sitcom that few people quite believe existed.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceSquare Pegs
Two girls trying to be popular at a Californian high school, one season long and much imitated since.
- Season 1
1 sequenceToo Close for Comfort
A cartoonist whose grown daughters move into the flat downstairs, which is the entire problem.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Tortellis
Carla's ex-husband and his family moved to Las Vegas, and the shortest-lived thing Cheers produced.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Tracey Ullman Show
The sketch show Fox launched its network with, and the one that carried the Simpsons as thirty-second interstitials before they left.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWebster
A boy adopted by his late father's team-mate, in the sitcom ABC ran in Diff'rent Strokes' shadow.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhat's Happening Now!!
The seventies sitcom revived with the same cast grown up and running the diner.
- Season 1
1 sequenceYou Rang, M'Lord?
Croft and Perry's between-the-wars house, played at fifty minutes an episode rather than thirty.
- Season 1