Classic Sitcoms We Want To Get The Dramatic Treatment

Let's face it, we live in the intellectual property era, a business school way of saying "every movie, TV show, or book is ripe for reboots, remakes, or sequels." However, now we're seeing something else — a reimagining. Take a story people know and love but tell it in a different way. Enter "Bel-Air." It's based on the popular syndicated sitcom "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," which ran for six seasons on NBC from 1990 to 1996. (You're humming the theme in your head right now, right?) Only instead of a sitcom with a studio audience, the story is being told as a single-camera drama. 

"Bel-Air" began with a proof-of-concept trailer and short film in 2019 from creator Morgan Cooper, which caught the attention of Will Smith himself and became a Peacock series in 2022. So the moral of the story is if you're dreaming of making an "ALF" drama series, go for it. Of course, "Fresh Prince" and its semi-autobiographical, rags-to-riches story of Will Smith going from the mean streets of Philly to the posh neighborhoods of Bel-Air lends itself well to drama, which got us thinking: What other shows work with this reimagining? We admit some of these would be stretches, but they'd all definitely be interesting. See if you agree with our picks. Here are classic sitcoms we want to get the dramatic treatment!

"Friends" ran for 10 seasons on NBC and certainly left its mark. According to Time, over 65 million viewers watched the finale, "The Last One," making it the fourth most-watched sitcom finale in history. Its popularity hasn't waned. HBO Max paid $500 million for streaming rights, while 29% of U.S. streaming households watched the reunion special on May 27, 2021. What made this tale of six friends who lived in impossibly spacious apartments in New York City so compelling to so many people? 

It was the perfect distillation of Gen-Xer angst about, well, everything: relationships, friendships, career, family, and the ever-present struggle to "have it all" within a socially acceptable time frame. Basically "Reality Bites," only, y'know, really, really popular. "Friends" would lend itself very well to drama. However, instead of recreating "Friends" with a Millennial/Gen Z cast, we think there's something inherently Gen X about this story. Maybe because Gen Xer's simultaneously sought and resisted the American Dream, while following generations seem to have abandoned it entirely. The series debut could be called "The One without the Laugh Track."

While "Sanford & Son" was the first primetime sitcom starring predominantly Black performers, "Good Times" was the first to feature a Black nuclear family. While "The Cosby Show" 10 years later was about an upper middle-class Black family, the Evans family were very much the working poor, residing in an impoverished housing project in inner-city Chicago. "Good Times" was a spinoff of a spinoff, featuring characters who started in "Maude," which itself was a spinoff of "All in the Family." Between those shows, "The Jeffersons," and a few others, clearly there was an "All in the Family" universe before anybody ever heard of the MCU. 

Anyway, "Good Times" ran for six seasons from 1974 to 1979 on CBS. Despite being a successful comedy, "Good Times" dealt with serious subject matter, with lead character Florida Evans working as a maid as her husband, James, bounced from job to job, scraping by doing manual labor while refusing to accept charity, despite frequent bouts of unemployment. All the while, Florida and James dealt with the trials of raising three sons in a poor neighborhood. The synopsis sounds like a drama, but "Good Times" was very much a comedy, though we could see it playing serious if it was rebooted today.

With a theme song called "Love Is All Around You," featuring lyrics like "who can turn a world on with her smile?" and "you're going to make it after all," you might forget that "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was pretty revolutionary. As Elena Nicolaou writing in Refinery29 put it, "'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' was the sitcom the women's movement needed. It might sound absurd now, but Mary Richards was a radical character because Mary was unabashedly single and more interested in pursuing her career at a TV station than nailing down another fiancé." Before "Murphy Browne," "Roseanne," "Grace Under Fire," "Sex and the City," and so many more, there was Mary Tyler Moore, whose namesake sitcom ran for seven seasons on CBS from 1970 to 1977. 

The setup seems standard today: A single woman in the big city pursues the brass ring, not a wedding ring. The same show set in the present day wouldn't be that unique, but set it as a drama in the 1970s and you've got a show reminiscent of "Mad Men" — part character study, part historical critique of a bygone era. The show practically writes itself. The only problem with a dramatic reimagining of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" is you cannot possibly recast TV icons Mary Tyler Moore, Betty White, and Ed Asner.

"The Cosby Show" proved there was a massive audience for sitcoms centered around middle-class Black families. In its wake came another sitcom about a Black family that wasn't as popular as "The Cosby Show" at the time but is arguably more iconic today: "Family Matters." The series started as a spinoff of "Perfect Strangers," making it one of the few examples of spinoff that was more successful than the original. "Family Matters" was a mainstay on ABC's TGIF lineup before switching networks to CBS in 1997. In total, "Family Matters" ran for nine seasons, bidding adieu on July 17, 1998. 

"Family Matters" centered around a middle-class Chicago family, with Reginald VelJohnson starring as Officer Carl Winslow. A Black police officer who contends with racial tensions between minority communities and the police force in one of America's most crime-ridden cities seems ready-made for the dramatic treatment. That's especially true considering Officer Winslow was such a mild-mannered man who only ever wanted to do right by his community, do his duty, and be a good husband and father. The one challenge with making "Family Matters" a drama? How do you handle the most famous character from the show — Steve Urkel? Urkel was an inherently over-the-top, comic character, but TV's uber-geek could be toned down to be more realistic, serving as the springboard for an anti-bullying storyline. But is a toned-down, realistic Urkel really Urkel?

"All in the Family" was groundbreaking for bringing serious situations and storylines ripped from the headlines to the sitcom format. However, a dramatic rendition wouldn't be much different from the original (just not as funny and without the live audience). So instead, we're going to talk about its spinoff series, "The Jeffersons." Also a groundbreaking show, "The Jeffersons" told the story of Archie and Edith Bunker's neighbors, George and Louise Jefferson, who ditched Queens to move on up to Manhattan to a deluxe apartment in the sky. 

One of the longest-running sitcoms ever, "The Jeffersons" lasted for 11 seasons from 1975 to 1985, longer even than the nine seasons of "All in the Family." While "The Jeffersons" already tackled some serious subject matter (racism, suicide, the KKK) and even prominently featured racial epithets on prime time TV, the show itself was very much a comedy. But what if it wasn't? You wouldn't have to change much. A successful Black couple from working-class Queens encountering prejudice in their Manhattan penthouse in the 1970s is ripe for dramatic dissections on race and class, especially with George Jefferson's penchant for bigotry and sexism of his own. But like most shows on this list, "The Jeffersons" proved that oftentimes the best way to tackle tough issues is with laughter.

Calling "I Love Lucy" a sitcom is like calling Elvis Presley a singer. "I Love Lucy" isn't a classic sitcom; it is the classic sitcom — a totem of Americana that transcended the TV screen to become an iconic piece of global culture. 

While "I Love Lucy" wasn't the first sitcom, its stars and executive producers, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, effectively established the format that continues to this day. That's both in terms of production — with its three-camera, pre-recorded, studio audience setup — and creative content, with its storyline centered around a charismatic lead within a self-contained universe. This was all in contrast to other 1950s sitcoms, which were part of a variety show ("The Honeymooners") or had leads breaking the fourth wall ("The George Burns & Gracie Allen Show"). 

All of which is to say that turning the ultimate sitcom into a drama borders on sacrilege. We humbly ask the reader to hear us out and not burn us at the stake. Beneath the comedy, "I Love Lucy" has all the ingredients for a drama — an uber-talented song-and-dance man facing prejudice for being Cuban in 1950s America, with a beautiful housewife who adores her family life while also dreaming of establishing an identity for herself. With the Oscar-nominated "Being the Ricardos" and Amy Poehler's documentary "Lucy and Desi" bringing the First Couple of American comedy back in the public eye (really, they never left), maybe now is the time for a dramatic retelling of their most famous characters?