5 Timeless '90s Sitcoms That Still Make Us Laugh

Whether set primarily in an office, a hangout spot, or an actual domestic environment, a great sitcom can be like a second home. The best examples of the classic mishap-based half-hour TV comedy format are full of well-calibrated humor, and can produce multiple belly laughs per minute when firing on all cylinders. 

But there's an element to sitcoms' endurance that has less to do with humor per se, and more with the respite they can offer from the world: If they do their job right, their characters become akin to friends we want to spend time with. Each episode becomes a visit into a soothing world, in which trouble and disorder are just farcical elements of a carefully-orchestrated good time. The '90s, in particular, were replete with wonderful sitcoms that found their way into millions of hearts in the U.S. and around the world, and came to feel like weekly check-ins with people that viewers loved — or, at least, loved hanging out with. 

While some '90s sitcoms didn't age well, many of the best comedies of that period are timeless creations, with episodes and moments that still inspire as much joy and prompt as many giggling fits as they did back then, if not even more. If you're feeling nostalgic about the era in which TV comedy began to morph into what it is today while still drawing upon the classic tenets of the format, read on for a list of five classic '90s sitcoms that transcend time and still make us laugh all these years later.

NBC's "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" could have just been a passable star vehicle, and it still would have probably gone down in history — after all, not a lot of shows can claim to have kickstarted a leading man career as gigantic as Will Smith's. But the Andy Borowitz and Susan Borowitz-created series is a bastion of '90s television for many other reasons beyond that. 

Smith's presence is clearly a key factor in why the show is so fun to watch; he had charisma and presence down to an art form from the get-go. But Smith was also central to why "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" worked so well on a conceptual level, in a way that speaks to the show's crafty, enduring brilliance. In addition to being a boisterously funny culture-clash comedy about a working-class young man acclimating to his relatives' rich lifestyle, "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" doubles as a genuinely searing and profoundly moving meditation on the nuances of the Black American experience.

It's maybe the single sitcom with the highest rate of gut-punching, tear-jerking moments snuck in between gags and silly-looking plots. In that sense, a large part of the show's appeal stems from watching Smith bloom as both a dramatic and comedic actor in real time, going from a rip-roaring newcomer to someone who could hold his own in emotionally heady scenes next to someone like the great James Avery. Thanks to an incredible ensemble and equally brilliant writing, "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" remains hilarious and moving to this day.

No other sitcom in the history of the medium has been as purely dedicated to the art of eliciting laughs as "Seinfeld." Premiering in 1989 but as culturally connected to the '90s as any film or TV production, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld's NBC series eschewed the sitcom tradition of angling for coziness and affection alongside the humor. Instead, it took it upon itself to discover how high a TV comedy could climb if freed to let its characters be utterly, irredeemably awful people.

Put simply, this gutsy gambit changed the face of American television. The chronicles of comedian Jerry Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld) and his group of petty, scheming, resentful, and hopelessly unlucky friends became a kind of compendium of the absurdities of human existence as observed from late-century New York City. Things go constantly wrong on "Seinfeld," with the most rambunctious farcical intensity imaginable, and everyone in the main cast is constantly fielding crises and disasters of their own making. And yet it's all so overwhelmingly funny that it feels cathartic, almost liberating, like a sublimation of viewers' cattiest everyday anxieties into the realm of high art.

It's not for nothing that it's often deemed one of the very best sitcoms of all time, and perceptible as an influence on so many contemporary comedy series of the darker and snarkier variety. Even setting aside its historical importance and rarefied conceptual ambition, this show simply remains hilarious — and, in its own twisted way, surprisingly cozy — decades on, and the funniest "Seinfeld" moments are the gift that keeps on giving.

It's something of a cliché to point to a beloved show from a bygone era and affirm it as a crucial precursor to the television of today, but in the case of "NewsRadio," the legacy is just plain to see. The Paul Simms-created NBC show still echoes through virtually every workplace sitcom made after it. And what's extra impressive is that the show managed to cast a shadow that big even though it wasn't much of a ratings hit: Between its 11 schedule changes, "NewsRadio" never reached the same echelon of mainstream ubiquity as some of its NBC contemporaries.

And yet, it's an inarguable classic, and many of its best episodes feel like direct forebears to the bone-dry, razor-sharp, surrealism-prone single-camera work-coms of the 2000s onward. This outsized impact is a testament to the consistent, ageless brilliance that "NewsRadio" maintained throughout its five seasons and 97 episodes, on which the tales of daily life at an AM news radio station in New York City could become springboards to flights of boundless comic imagination.

But imagination and cultural foresight (seriously, it's uncanny how much the zany gag-avalanche style of this show anticipates the likes of "30 Rock" and "Community") are just one part of the appeal. Even the brainiest sitcom writing in the world wouldn't hold without an engaging set of characters, and the cast of "NewsRadio" is one of the best of the '90s as well, with everyone from Dave Foley to Maura Tierney to Stephen Root to Phil Hartman teaching ensemble comedy masterclasses by the episode.

A lot of great sitcoms are also great romcoms, and few shows have ever done better in that department than "The Nanny." Created by Peter Marc Jacobson and Fran Drescher, this CBS classic stars Drescher as Fran Fine, a woman who, in the midst of a funk following her breakup with her bridal-shop-owning former boyfriend-slash-boss, finds employment as the new nanny for the Sheffields, a wealthy British family living in New York City.

In the grand tradition of "The Sound of Music," the Sheffield kids (Nicholle Tom, Benjamin Salisbury, and Madeline Zima) have been sorely missing joy and wonder in their lives since the death of their mother, while their father, Broadway producer Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy), is particularly in need of a shake-up. Enter Fran — who, unlike Maria von Trapp, changes the family's lives not with music and treks to the mountains, but with candid, big-hearted working-class wisdom and an inexhaustible zest for the joys of style and fashion.

Fran alone is one of the best protagonists that sitcoms have ever given us, and the show is fully in sync with her larger-than-life charisma. "The Nanny" was a well-deserved phenomenon in the '90s and remains an irresistible romp to this day, from the liveliness of its writing and rapid-fire barb-trading, to the tenderness with which it pays tribute to New York City Jewish culture, to the delightful slow-burn approach all six seasons take to the overarching story. Gradually reaching the point where Fran and Maxwell begin to curve toward each other romantically is worth watching again and again.

The practice of building a multi-camera sitcom around an up-and-coming comedy star, who in turn lends their name to the main character and the show, is nearly as old as the TV medium itself. There's a reason why it works: If the central figure is dependable enough, a great, enduring sitcom doesn't have to be much more than a weekly excuse to spend time with them, let them do what they do best, and watch them spar with a cast of equally skilled comic performers. 

As shows with that time-tested template go, one of the most legendary is "Martin." This John Bowman, Martin Lawrence, and Topper Carew-created production ran from 1992 to 1997, and spotlights Lawrence at a time when he was moving from stage comedy in New York City clubs to stratospheric mainstream fame. 

His character, Martin Payne, begins the series as a disc jockey at the fictional radio station WZUP and goes through several other professional posts over the course of five seasons, but the gist of any given episode of "Martin" remains much the same: Martin's sanguine, chaotic, self-aggrandizing, yet enormously charismatic personality wreaks havoc in his various relationships, leading to farcical mayhem that gives the whole cast (including legends like Tisha Campbell, Tichina Arnold, Jon Gries, and Garrett Morris) the opportunity to go big and commit wholeheartedly to the most outlandish scenarios. The show's accessible, absurdity-based humor made it a massive hit and a pillar of Fox's '90s programming; to this day, there are few more reliable sitcoms you can put on from that era.