The sitcom is one of the most reliable formats in TV history for a reason. Situational comedy — characters stuck together in a recurring setting, sam
The sitcom is one of the most reliable formats in TV history for a reason. Situational comedy — characters stuck together in a recurring setting, same problems, same dynamics, episode after episode — works because it’s built on comfort. You know these people, where they live, and what’s going to set them off. That familiarity is the whole point. It’s why people still rewatch Seinfeld and Friends decades later, and it’s why a good sitcom, even a short-lived one, never really goes away.
The shows on this list all got cancelled before their time. Or, at least, before they got a proper send-off. However, they never stopped being worth watching. The good news is that they’re all still out there, and right now, you can watch every single one of them for free.
‘Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23’ (2012–2014)
This one deserved way more than two seasons on ABC. The setup is uncomplicated: June (Dreama Walker), a sweet, hopeful woman from the Midwest, moves to New York City with plans to work at a nonprofit and build a real life. She ends up sharing an apartment with Chloe (Krysten Ritter), who is immediately and enthusiastically terrible. She scams people, she lies constantly, she has absolutely no interest in being a good person. Dreama Walker plays June as naive without being a pushover, and Krysten Ritter plays Chloe as awful without ever losing your affection.
The friendship that develops between them shouldn’t work, but it does. James Van Der Beek also pops up as a fictionalized version of himself to take the show to another level. He is fully committed to the bit and completely in on the joke. The show had a specific energy: swift, a little dim, very New York, not interested in being liked by everyone. That probably made it a tough sell for ABC in primetime. They aired the remaining episodes out of order after low ratings, which made an already compact run feel even more messy. It was cancelled before it ever got a real chance to find its audience, and that’s a real loss because this is exactly the kind of weird comedy that gets better the longer it runs. You can watch both seasons on Tubi.
‘The Jeffersons’ (1975–1985)
One of the all-time greats, full stop. The Jeffersons started as a spin-off of All in the Family — George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) was Archie Bunker’s (Carroll O’Connor) neighbor — but it became its own thing almost immediately. The premise is right there in the theme song: George built a chain of desiccated cleaning stores, made his money, and moved his family into a luxury high-rise in Manhattan. A Black family that earned its way into a world that wasn’t built for them, navigating success, class, and race at the same time, with one of the loudest, most specific main characters in sitcom history leading the charge.
George Jefferson is opinionated, abrasive, sometimes wrong, and completely compelling every single episode. Sherman Hemsley plays him like nobody else could have. Isabel Sanford as Louise, “Weezy,” is the other half of what makes it work. She’s the one who keeps George from completely imploding. Sanford won an Emmy for the role in 1981, the first Black woman to win Lead Actress in a Comedy, which tells you something about what she was doing week in and week out. The show ran 11 seasons and 253 episodes on CBS, and then in 1985 it was just over. The cast showed up expecting to start a novel season and found out it had been cancelled. Hemsley and Sanford never got to say goodbye to these characters properly, and neither did the audience. But you can still enjoy the ride, for free, on Pluto TV.
‘My Wife and Kids’ (2001–2005)
This is Damon Wayans at his best. My Wife and Kids is a classic early-2000s family sitcom where Wayans plays Michael Kyle, a successful businessman and father of three who has his own very specific philosophy about parenting: let the kids make mistakes, watch what happens, and trust that they’ll learn something by the end of it. It sounds hands-off, but the joke is that Michael is completely hands-on — he’s engineering the failures. He sets up the situations, steps back, and waits. It’s a little mean, it’s very witty, and it works because Wayans clearly loves these characters even when he’s torturing them.
Tisha Campbell plays his wife Jay, and she’s the real anchor of the show, the one who actually holds the family together while Michael runs his experiments. The kids are great too, especially Junior (George O. Gore II), who might be one of the funniest dumb-but-lovable sons in sitcom history. The show has that balmy family comedy energy that draws comparisons to The Cosby Show, and those comparisons are fair, but My Wife and Kids has its own thing going on. It’s a little looser, a little more physical, and very much built around who Wayans is as a performer. All five seasons are on Pluto TV right now.
‘Party Down’ (2009–2023)
If you’ve never seen Party Down, stop reading and just go watch it. It’s about a group of failed Hollywood dreamers who work for a catering company, and it is genuinely one of the funniest shows ever made. The premise is uncomplicated: every episode is a different event. A birthday party, a bar mitzvah, a corporate mixer, the crew has to get through it all while their personal lives quietly fall apart in the background.
Adam Scott, Lizzy Caplan, Ken Marino, Jane Lynch — the cast is stacked with comedy heavyweights before they got large. The writing is piercing too, with every episode somehow getting better. It only got two seasons before it was cancelled, which still feels like a crime. (It did eventually get a revival, so there’s a little more to watch once you’re done with the original run.) The first two seasons of Party Down are free to stream on Plex.
‘ALF’ (1986–1990)
Look, if you grew up in the ’80s , you lready know. If you didn’t, ALF is about an alien (full name: Alien Life Form) who crashes into a suburban family’s garage and just… stays there. He eats cats, complains constantly, and causes problems in every episode.
It ran four seasons on NBC before being canceled on a cliffhanger that was never resolved, which was brutal at the time. It’s very much a product of its era, but in a fun way. Good for a nostalgia watch or for showing someone younger what TV used to look like. Relive the ’80s by watching it on Pluto TV.
‘Dr. Ken’ (2015–2017)
Ken Jeong has been witty for a long time, and Dr. Ken gave him room to carry a whole show. He plays a doctor with a terrible bedside manner and a messy home life, and the family dynamics are what make it work. It’s a classic multi-cam sitcom in the best way — comfortable, witty, uncomplicated to watch.
ABC only gave it two seasons, but it holds up, especially as the kind of Friday night show you put on when you don’t want to think too strenuous. Stream both seasons on Tubi.
‘Kevin Can Wait’ (2016–2018)
You kind of can’t talk about Kevin Can Wait without talking about what happened between Season 1 and Season 2, so let’s just get into it. Season 1 is a pretty standard Kevin James sitcom. He plays Kevin Gable, a recently retired cop settling into life at home with his wife and three kids. It’s fine. The kind of show CBS has been making forever. Erinn Hayes plays his wife Donna, and she’s good in it. Then the season ends, and over the summer, news breaks that Hayes has been let go, and her character is going to be killed off. The reason, more or less, was that the show wanted to bring in Leah Remini.
Here’s where it gets complicated. James and Remini spent nine seasons together on King of Queens, and the chemistry between them is real and proven. When Remini shows up in Season 2, the show does get funnier. If you’re a Kevin James fan, or you have a cushioned spot for King of Queens, there’s enough here to make it worth your time. He’s genuinely good at this format, and Remini reminds you why they worked so well together the first time around. Watch it on Tubi for free.
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