20 Best TV Comedy Shows Of The 21st Century

Tina Fey’s 2004 hit Mean Girls, an acerbic teen comedy, proved one of the new millennium’s most quotable comedies and was proclaimed an instant classic upon release. Expectations were inevitably sky high for her sitcom debut, a presumably somewhat autobiographical look into the life of Liz Lemon, a TV comedy writer who struggles to hold her life together whilst juggling the egos of her show’s stars.

What seemed like it could have been a vanity project soon became one of TV’s zaniest and most irresistibly surreal comedies, combining dumb jokes with surprisingly sophisticated satire in a show which took on TV as an institution, corporate America, contemporary culture, and the toothless state of modern topical television like Saturday Night—Sorry, we mean TGS with Tracy Jordan. Meanwhile, the show made sure to never get to dark in between brutal barbs by relying on the warm charm of its hilarious supporting cast.