Comfort Watch

1971 · 10 Seasons · NBC · Crime / Mystery

Columbo shows you the murder in the first ten minutes, killer's face and all, and then delivers the purest pleasure in television, watching a rumpled man in a raincoat dismantle a genius who thinks he's already won. Peter Falk's lieutenant is one of the great characters in the medium's history, a performance of such perfect calibration that fifty years later the show has become a full-blown comfort-watch renaissance. The formula never changes because it never needed to. Just one more thing, as the man says, the ABC revival years run softer than the immortal 1970s run, and nobody holds it against him.

1985 · 7 Seasons · NBC · Comedy

The Golden Girls put four women over fifty in a Miami kitchen and produced one of the sharpest joke machines in sitcom history, a show that remains funnier line for line than most comedies made since. Bea Arthur's withering Dorothy, Betty White's serenely dim Rose, Rue McClanahan's man-eating Blanche, and Estelle Getty's purse-clutching assassin Sophia form television's perfect comic quartet, and the cheesecake-fueled friendship underneath gave the laughs their staying power. Some period jokes have aged badly and the plots recycle, and none of it matters at the kitchen table. Thank you for being a friend was a mission statement.

1993 · 6 Seasons · CBS · Comedy

The Nanny is the flashy girl from Flushing conquering a Park Avenue mansion one animal-print outfit at a time, and three decades later the formula plays better than ever. Fran Drescher's cosmetics-counter Cinderella brings her voice, her wardrobe, and her mother's leftovers into the household of a stiff British producer, and the ensuing culture collision powered six seasons of Borscht Belt timing, couture-level costume design, and one of sitcom history's defining will-they-won't-theys. Streaming rediscovery turned it into a genuine cross-generational phenomenon. The broad laugh-track machinery and a soggy final season are the tax. The style, in every sense, is the payoff.