The 8 Most Fun Shows of the 1990s, Ranked

The nineties didn’t have streaming, so if you wanted to watch your favorite show, you had to actually be home at eight o’clock on a Thursday or you just missed it, no rewatching until reruns came around months later. That kind of pressure made a hit show feel like an actual event every single week.

These eight are the ones people still bring up unprompted, the shows you can recite half the dialogue from without trying. Some are just plain stupid fun, some snuck in more heart than you’d expect from a network sitcom, but every one of them can still get a room laughing if you put it on today. Let’s dig in.

8

‘Boy Meets World’ (1993–2000)

Image via ABC

This show basically grew up in real time with its own cast, Cory (Ben Savage) starts out as an awkward middle schooler and ends the series married to Topanga (Danielle Fishel) and about to graduate college, and you watched every year of that happen along with him. Feeny (William Daniels), his neighbor and then his teacher for basically his entire education, keeps showing up at every major turning point in Cory’s life without it ever feeling forced.

Shawn (Rider Strong) gets some pretty rough storylines for a kids’ show, an absent dad, real poverty, and the show never makes it an afterschool special about it either, it just lets him be a messed up kid trying his best. The finale ends on Feeny saying “class dismissed” one last time, and if you grew up watching this, that line still gets you a little.

7

‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ (1990–1996)

Image via NBC

Will Smith basically plays a version of himself getting sent to live with rich relatives in Bel-Air, and most episodes are just goofy fish-out-of-water comedy, Carlton’s (Alfonso Ribeiro) dance alone got referenced everywhere for decades after the show ended. Uncle Phil (James Avery) starts out as the stiff, wealthy uncle Will can’t stand, and slowly becomes the father figure Will actually needed the whole time.

Then every once in a while the show just drops a properly heavy episode on you out of nowhere, the one where Will’s actual dad shows up, promises to stay, and leaves again, and Will breaks down asking why his own father doesn’t want him. It’s one scene, and it’s still one of the best pieces of acting from a sitcom actor, period.

6

‘Frasier’ (1993–2004)

Image via NBC

Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) is a snobby radio psychiatrist living with his blue-collar dad, Martin (John Mahoney), who has zero patience for Frasier’s opera tickets and expensive furniture, and that culture clash carries half the show’s jokes. Niles (David Hyde Pierce), Frasier’s equally snobby brother, spends something like seven years pining after Daphne (Jane Leeves), the physical therapist living in the house, without ever telling her.

Some episodes turn into full-on door-slamming farce, people hiding in closets, mistaken identities, everyone talking past each other, and the show times all of it like a stage play instead of a normal sitcom. It’s smarter than most comedies from that decade without ever feeling like it’s showing off.

5

‘Home Improvement’ (1991–1999)

Image via ABC

Tim Taylor (Tim Allen) hosts a local TV show about tools and home repair, and manages to injure himself or blow something up on basically every single episode of it, which was apparently based on Tim Allen’s actual stand-up act before the show existed.

His neighbor Wilson (Earl Hindman) gives him advice over the fence every episode, and the show never once lets you see his full face, just his eyes over the top of the fence for the entire run. It’s a simple, dumb, comfortable TV, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

4

‘The X-Files’ (1993–2002)

Image via FOX

Mulder (David Duchovny) believes in aliens, Scully (Gillian Anderson) is the scientist assigned to prove him wrong, and the show takes almost nine years going back and forth between two totally different types of episodes, one week it’s a government alien conspiracy, the next week it’s just a creepy story about a guy who eats livers.

That mix is honestly what makes it fun to watch now, you can skip the really dense mythology episodes entirely and still get a great, self-contained horror story almost every week. Duchovny and Anderson’s chemistry keeps the show going even in the weaker seasons, and the whole thing basically predicted the entire modern conspiracy-thriller genre before it existed.

3

‘Seinfeld’ (1989–1998)

Image via NBC

This show is famous for being about nothing, and that’s actually true, most episodes are just Jerry, George (Jason Alexander), Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Kramer (Michael Richards) getting annoyed about parking spots or soup or a marble rye. That turned into one of the most quoted shows ever made anyway.

Kramer bursting through Jerry’s apartment door is one of the most recognizable entrances in TV history, and the show’s structure, four separate storylines that all crash into each other by the end of the episode, got copied by basically every sitcom that came after it. The finale is still controversial to this day, but nothing about the ninety-nine episodes before it needed defending.

2

‘The Simpsons’ (1989– )

Image via Fox

The nineties run of this show is what people actually mean when they say golden-era Simpsons, before the jokes got faster than the plots and the family started feeling more like caricatures of themselves. Homer accidentally becoming an astronaut, Bart selling his soul for five bucks, the show could go anywhere in a single episode and it worked almost every time.

Matt Groening built a show that could be a dumb cartoon for kids on Sunday night and also sneak in pretty sharp satire about American life for the adults watching with them. Decades later, it’s still the longest-running scripted show on American television, and the nineties seasons are the reason people still care.

1

‘Friends’ (1994–2004)

Image via NBC

Six friends hang out at the same coffee shop for ten years, and that’s still one of the most rewatched premises in TV history, decades after it ended. Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), Monica (Courteney Cox), Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), Joey (Matt LeBlanc), Chandler (Matthew Perry), and Ross (David Schwimmer) all get roughly equal screen time, which is rare for a cast this big.

Rachel’s haircut alone got copied by half the country at the time, and Chandler’s specific way of making a joke out of every uncomfortable moment basically became its own style of humor people still do today without realizing where it came from. It’s comfort TV in the purest sense, you can put on literally any random episode and just relax into it.

Friends

Release Date

1994 – 2004-00-00

Showrunner

Marta Kauffman

Directors

Kevin S. Bright, Gary Halvorson, Michael Lembeck, James Burrows, Gail Mancuso, Peter Bonerz, David Schwimmer, Robby Benson, Shelley Jensen, Terry Hughes, Dana De Vally Piazza, Alan Myerson, Pamela Fryman, Steve Zuckerman, Thomas Schlamme, Roger Christiansen, Sheldon Epps, Arlene Sanford, David Steinberg, Joe Regalbuto, Mary Kay Place, Paul Lazarus, Sam Simon, Todd Holland