The Best Sitcom Of All Time, According To IMDb

In an era when there is more media than ever before, new arbiters have sprung up to guide our increasingly disoriented collective taste. Though it throws up confounding developments such as claiming that Sean Connery's only "perfect" movie is "Darby O'Gill and the Little People," Rotten Tomatoes has emerged as one such guide through the dim and bloated media landscape wrought by the rise of the internet and streaming platforms. Likewise, IMDb, with its devoted user base eager to register their takes on movies and TV shows, has provided another way to decipher modern media.

The site that put "The Shawshank Redemption" at the top of its best movies of all time, IMDb is arguably not the best source of guidance, but at least it brings a certain sense of order to things. We now have the site's 250 best TV shows of all time, for example, which provides a fun little way of testing your own tastes against the masses (or at least the people who vote on IMDb).

Within that hefty list, there are, of course, a multitude of genres, and in terms of sitcoms, one show has proven to be more popular than any other. Thanks to Metacritic, we know that Seth MacFarlane made the worst sitcom of all time, but the best? According to IMDb, that's the American version of "The Office."

"The Office" made number 11 on /Film's list of the best sitcoms of all time, but our own list put more traditional sitcoms ahead of it, such as irrefutable classics "I Love Lucy" and "Seinfeld." The IMDb crowd, however, voted "The Office" all the way to number 27 on the greatest shows of all time list, with a 9.0 rating based on 758,000 votes. ("Rick & Morty," which could also be considered a sitcom, is higher at number 17, but since that's an animated series, we won't count it as a traditional sitcom for the purposes of this conversation.)

That said, there's no hard and fast rules here. After all, it's debatable that "The Office" is a sitcom. Yes, it is a situation comedy in the most basic sense. But it feels so removed from the kind of multi-camera sitcoms we're used to that it seems unfair to compare it to, say, "Friends" or "Frasier," both of which give the sense of watching little 25-minute stage plays. "The Office," on the other hand, is notable for using the mockumentary style and establishing it as a standard for so many primetime shows that followed in its footsteps. It's a sitcom in the basic sense, but it's also nothing at all like the typical examples of the genre.

Still, if we're being fair to the IMDb users who voted the show all the way to number 27, it is the highest-rated show you could reasonably call a sitcom and, regardless, is already well-established as one of the greatest TV shows of the modern age. The best episodes of "The Office" are among some of the best episodes of TV ever made, so if IMDb wants to celebrate it as the best sitcom, why not?

Interestingly, Metacritic lists the best sitcom of all time as the original British "Office," which on IMDb's list of TV shows sits at number 221 with an 8.5 rating based on 127,000 votes. That provides an interesting point of comparison, as the British equivalent feels about as far removed from the comedy of "Cheers" or "The Cosby Show" as possible, and as such illustrates the wide gulf between what we might typically think of as a sitcom and the odd space the U.S. "Office" occupies.

Still, both the British and American versions of the show are technically considered sitcoms, and whether you prefer one over the other, they have both clearly been influential. In the case of the U.S. series, its ranking on the IMDb list is certainly an achievement of sorts. But it's worth noting that, like Rotten Tomatoes or any of these sites that apply metrics and percentages to creative output, such lists should be taken with a grain of salt.

Aside from the fact that IMDb has infamously been subject to review-bombing, it's also just one big argument for consensus. That is to say that the best movie of all time is at the top of that particular list because enough people say it's good. Sure, consensus is pretty much all we have to go on when it comes to trying to get some objective sense of the media landscape, and it's certainly helpful at a time when there's just far too much stuff to watch. But it's also just a reminder that your own taste is ultimately all that really matters — something to bear in mind the next time a site like Rotten Tomatoes claims there are only two "perfect" Alfred Hitchcock films.