Club Benefits
Sometimes you want to watch shows where you know everybody's name, a familiarity fostered by season upon season and year upon year of episodes, letting you fall in love with a specific cast of characters and the world they occupy. The best sitcoms give you just that, offering countless hours of entertainment with funny folks that become like family over time.
And Paramount+, one of the best streaming services around, offers some of television's most classic comedies, ones that not only stretched across 10-plus seasons and hundreds of episodes, but also have endured decades after they first aired on TV.
'Cheers'
From September 30, 1982, to May 20, 1993, "Cheers" aired for eleven long and lively seasons on NBC, a longevity built around a surprisingly simple premise. Set in a titular Boston bar and helmed by Ted Danson's Sam Malone — the bar's naturally charismatic and notoriously womanizing owner, who is also a former relief pitcher for the Boston Red Sox — the show mines both heart and humor from the boozy socializing of its devoted local patrons, iconically played by the likes of Shelley Long, Nicholas Colasanto, Rhea Perlman and George Wendt, among others.
Together, that swarm of barflies created one of the greatest sitcom ensembles in television history, earning a record 111 Primetime Emmy Award nominations, with a total of 28 wins, including for the performances of Danson, Long and Perlman.
Watch "Cheers" on Paramount+ now
'Frasier'
One of those aforementioned "Cheers" pubgoers managed to hop off the barstool and have an equally successful spinoff: Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) first popped up in the third season of that NBC series as a love interest for Shelley Long's Diane Chambers, but the character's popularity prompted a promotion to full-time status and, later, his own TV sitcom, "Frasier," which ran on NBC for eleven seasons from September 16, 1993, to May 13, 2004.
The long-running spinoff series saw the eponymous lead, a witty but haughty psychiatrist, leave Boston for his hometown of Seattle, where he begins a radio show and reconnects with his father, Martin (John Mahoney), a retired police detective, and his younger brother, Niles (David Hyde Pierce), a fellow psychiatrist.
Watch "Frasier" on Paramount+ now
'Everybody Loves Raymond'
The Raymond in question here is Ray Barone, a Long Island sportscaster and family man played by actor-comedian Ray Ramone, who based this beloved CBS comedy on his own life and family as an Italian-American living in suburban New York.
Airing from September 13, 1996, to May 16, 2005, with a total of 210 episodes across nine seasons, "Everybody Loves Raymond" let you get well-acquainted with the quintessential-yet-quirky characters in Ray's orbit, including his hilariously overbearing parents Frank and Marie — played by the late, great Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle — his perpetually fed-up wife Debra (Patricia Heaton) and his exceedingly jealous older brother Robert (Brad Garrett).
Watch "Everybody Love Raymond" on Paramount+ now
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