British Sitcom

2003 · 9 Seasons · Channel 4 · Sitcom

Peep Show is the greatest cringe comedy ever made and one of the best British sitcoms of any era. David Mitchell and Robert Webb are a perfect comedy pairing, and the POV camera format gives the show an intimacy with its characters' worst impulses that's simultaneously hilarious and excruciating. Nine seasons over twelve years is a remarkable run that maintains quality far longer than most comedies manage, and the show's influence on modern British comedy is immeasurable. If you can handle the secondhand embarrassment, there's nothing else like it.

2008 · 3 Seasons · E4 · Sitcom

The Inbetweeners is eighteen episodes of pure comic perfection about four suburban teenagers who are too old for childhood and too incompetent for adulthood. The show captures the specific humiliation of adolescent social climbing with such precision that every viewer recognizes someone they went to school with in every character. Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, James Buckley, and Blake Harrison are a comic ensemble that could carry a much longer series, but three seasons is exactly the right length for a show this sharp, and the restraint is part of its genius.

2006 · 4 Seasons · Channel 4 · Sitcom

The IT Crowd is a brilliantly silly workplace comedy that turns an IT department basement into one of the funniest locations in British television. Chris O'Dowd, Richard Ayoade, and Katherine Parkinson form a comic trio so perfectly calibrated that each of the show's twenty-five episodes delivers reliable laughs. The humor is broad, the characters are lovable, and the show's commitment to classic sitcom structure produces some of the most quotable moments of the 2000s. It's not trying to reinvent the form, and that's entirely to its credit.