7 Best Sitcoms to Watch on Netflix
Movies are great, and Anime is fun, but sometimes you just want to relax with a good old-fashioned sitcom. As old as the television itself, the so-called “situation comedy” is one of the simplest formats in short-form comedy. Just take a family or a group of friends, add a problem that can be solved in 22 minutes, and voila, you’ve got yourself a sitcom — laugh track optional. After a bit of a decline in favor of prestige dramas like Mad Men or The Sopranos, the sitcom is back in a big way, thanks to the rise of streaming services like Netflix.
That’s because they’re the perfect format for any situation. Sitcoms are great if you only have a half-hour and need a quick chuckle, but they’re also good for binging on a lazy Sunday when the only plan is to shove as many hours of TV into your eyes as possible, before rejoining the rat race on Monday. The sitcoms on this list range from high-concept fantasy to classic family shenanigans, but one thing they all have in common is that they’re guaranteed to tickle your funny bone. Here are the seven best sitcoms you can watch right now on Netflix.
Arrested Development
It’s rare for a sitcom to feature a family of objectively terrible people with practically no redeeming qualities, but essentially, that’s what Arrested Development is. A formerly wealthy family, disgraced when their patriarch is thrown in jail, the Bluths put the “fun” in dysfunction in a way no TV family has before or since.
Originally airing on Fox in the early ’00s, Arrested Development didn’t really find its audience until Netflix picked it up in the early 2010s. The show proved to be such a big hit that the streamer even started producing new episodes again. Arrested Development‘s fourth season aired six years after the series was originally canceled in 2006, followed by a fifth season five years later. The last two seasons are largely considered to be inferior to the original three, however, so we won’t blame you if you skip them.
Kim’s Convenience
One of the benefits of streaming over broadcast is that platforms like Netflix offer a lot of premium content from outside the US that viewers would otherwise miss. Kim’s Convenience is that kind of series — a Canadian gem that introduced the world to both Simu Liu of Shang-Chi fame and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, who plays X-Wing pilot Captain Carson Teva in several of the Star Wars shows on Disney+.
Kim’s Convenience follows the Korean-Canadian Kim family as they operate a convenience store in Toronto’s Moss Park neighbourhood. The series’ selling point is its ability to balance commentary on the immigrant experience with screwball comedy in a way that feels both honest and laugh-out-loud funny.
Seinfeld
The legendary show about nothing is somehow just as funny now as it was when it debuted on NBC 36 years ago. What can we say about Seinfeld that hasn’t been said a million times already? The show had an immeasurable impact not only on sitcoms as a genre but also on the broader pop-culture landscape. Seinfeld coined the phrase Yadda, Yadda, Yadda, created… in centuries, and somehow managed to get an entire episode about adult solo-relaxation past the censors. Not bad for a show about nothing.
The Good Place
In an age when network TV had become a wasteland of mediocre content catering to the minority of television viewers who hadn’t yet hopped aboard the stream train, The Good Place proved that basic cable could still produce a bona fide hit. Of course, the show only got more popular once it hit Netflix.
The Good Place explores the afterlife — here represented by the titular “Good Place” and its opposite, “The Bad Place” — in a way that is deep but never preachy. Thanks to a stellar cast and phenomenal writing, The Good Place manages to be a thought-provoking exploration of existentialism and ethics while also being laugh-out-loud hilarious.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
You may have noticed that so far, all of the sitcoms on this list got their start somewhere other than Netflix. Not so with Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. The Netflix original is not only one of the best sitcoms on the streamer but one of the best sitcoms in the last 10 years period. When Kimmy Schmidt made her debut on Netflix in 2015, the streamer had already proven it could do drama with hits like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. Comedy, on the other hand, was something new for the platform.
Luckily for Netflix, NBC passed on Tina Fey and Ellie Kemper’s cult-survivor sitcom, then titled Tooken, leaving it ripe for Netflix’s taking. The show was a smash hit, and Netflix has been producing quality comedy ever since.
How I Met Your Mother
Look, we’re going to level with you: when viewed through 2025 eyes, How I Met Your Mother’s protagonist Ted Mosby is — to quote the show — “a jerk.” If you can look past that, however, the show has some truly all-time great bits. The “slap bet”? Robin Sparkles? Swarley? All legen — wait for it — dary.
Boasting above-average joke-writing and a cast that had more chemistry than any other group of friends on TV, How I Met Your Mother is a modern classic that we can’t recommend enough.
Young Sheldon
Sitcom spinoffs seem to come in one of two varieties: complete garbage or better than the original show. As you probably already know, Young Sheldon falls firmly in the second category. The Big Bang Theory may have started out universally beloved, but at some point, it became the sitcom equivalent of Nickelback or the Michael Bay Transformer movies. Clearly, someone was watching the show, but all you saw publicly were people clowning on it and pointing out its flaws. Young Sheldon followed an opposite trajectory. On paper, a sitcom about a young Sheldon Cooper sounds like the biggest train wreck in history. In practice, however, the series is a surprisingly heartfelt period piece about a middle-class family in the early ’90s.
Gone is the shrill, one-dimensional caricature that Sheldon is in The Big Bang Theory, replaced with a sweet, mildly annoying but infinitely more relatable young man. Young Sheldon also replaces Big Bang’s other nerds, whose only purpose was making Star Trek and Doctor Who references, with the much more sincere Cooper clan. The result is a modern comedy that harkens back to the golden days of sitcoms while also feeling fresh and original.
Do you agree with our picks for the best sitcoms on Netflix, or would you choose something else? Let us know in the comments!