Good Sitcoms, For a Change

Having posted about one of the worst sitcoms ever, I should call attention to the release, today, of season sets of really good sitcoms: season 2 of Soap and season 3 of All in the Family.

Season 3 of All in the Family was one of the best, with most of the episodes written by the three writers who did the most (after Norman Lear, and perhaps even more than him) to make the show what it was: Don Nicholl, Michael Ross and Bernie West. They worked on AITF up until the end of the fifth season, after which they left to do Three's Company. (One of the best episodes of the third season, "The Bunkers and the Swingers," is kind of like a more sophisticated version of Three's Company; Ross and West wrote it.) Some of the best episodes from this season include "Everybody Tells the Truth," where Mike and Archie have equally distorted memories of Archie's encounter with a black repairman's assistant (Archie remembers him as a scary militant, Mike remembers him as an Uncle Tom, and only Edith remembers him as he really was), and "The Battle of the Month," where a PMS-experiencing Gloria snaps at her husband and parents.