Here are 100 books that Sitcom fans have personally recommended if you like
Sitcom.
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I spent my childhood in New York and my early adulthood in Chicago, which inspired my fascination with the histories of cities and how we can analyze their built environments to understand the culture, politics, and economy of these vital but complicated places. I wrote my first book about New York’s SoHo neighborhood to better understand how some former disinvested industrial areas became wealthy and gentrified and how artists became known as critical actors in the contemporary city. Since then, I’ve focused the bulk of my teaching and research on urban history. This list includes my favorite fiction and non-fiction titles about New York’s dynamic art scene. Enjoy!
The most famous chapter of the renowned book on New York history, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, outlines how the Cross-Bronx Expressway gutted once thriving Bronx neighborhoods. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop shows how the global cultural phenomenon of hip-hop arose in the same borough two decades later.
Chang takes readers through public housing recreation rooms, South Bronx streets, and elevated subway lines where a group of musicians, visual artists, and dancers changed world culture. I especially love how the book illuminates how a specific place and time period made possible the development of this now ubiquitous artistic genre.
A history of hip-hop cites its origins in the post-civil rights Bronx and Jamaica, drawing on interviews with performers, activists, gang members, DJs, and others to document how the movement has influenced politics and culture.
These books are all by or about comic geniuses. I have always expressed myself through humor. I never felt I was pretty, so making people laugh was another way of seducing people. I started out by doing improvisational theater on the streets of New York, went on to have a recurring role on Seinfeld, and performed my solo shows on three continents. One of my greatest thrills has been to share the stage with other storytellers while touring with The Moth. When I used my storytelling skills on TikTok, I was amazed at the response. Eleven million Likes is a lot of love. I hope I deserve it.
I love showbiz biographies full of the inside dope on glamorous, brilliant people, because I’ve always wanted to be one of those glamorous, brilliant people.
Mike Nichols knew everyone important in the arts, ate at the most fabulous restaurants, traveled to the most luxurious locations, and owned several grand homes. And I am pleased to report that he was frequently anxious and depressed.
I find it very reassuring to learn that someone who has everything I’ve ever dreamed of is no happier than I am. I know that sounds a little mean, but I never claimed to be perfect.
A National Book Critics Circle finalist • One of People's top 10 books of 2021 •An instant New York Times bestseller • Named a best book of the year by NPR and Time
A magnificent biography of one of the most protean creative forces in American entertainment history, a life of dazzling highs and vertiginous plunges—some of the worst largely unknown until now—by the acclaimed author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back
Mike Nichols burst onto the scene as a wunderkind: while still in his twenties, he was half of a hit improv duo with Elaine May…
Pop culture is my life, and I like my characters to be well-versed in it. There's no reason to pretend otherwise, as what we consume informs who we are as people. Plus, there’s something beautiful in something everybody collectively knows. I’ve worked hard to make pop culture not just an interest but a career path. I currently program films for the Seattle International Film Festival, work as a playwright and performer, cover film, theatre, and burlesque for The Ticket at the Seattle Times, am a frequent guest on podcasts such asFilm at Fifty,and assist at various arts organizations all over the greater Seattle area.
Writer William Goldman, most popular for penning The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and All the President’s Men,embeds himself in the Broadway world, seeing every show in the 1967-1968 season; to quote the This Had Oscar Buzzpodcast, this book is the autopsy. It’s an enormously accessible book about American theatre, with a murderers’ row of interview subjects at Goldman’s disposal and the author’s ability to translate gossip into hard journalistic data. Even the more economics-based chapters, such as a fascinating one on how most plays live or die on presales to well-connected women’s social groups (a.k.a. “Theatre-Party Ladies”), are as breezy as Goldman’s Oscar-winning screenplays. (Content Warning: The book contains some unfortunate and dated language.)
Playwright/novelist/screenwriter Goldman analyzes Broadway from the perspective of the audiences, playwrights, critics, producers and actors. “Very nearly perfect... It is a loose-limbed, gossipy, insider, savvy, nuts-and-bolts report on the annual search for the winning numbers that is now big-time American commercial theatre.” –Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
Pop culture is my life, and I like my characters to be well-versed in it. There's no reason to pretend otherwise, as what we consume informs who we are as people. Plus, there’s something beautiful in something everybody collectively knows. I’ve worked hard to make pop culture not just an interest but a career path. I currently program films for the Seattle International Film Festival, work as a playwright and performer, cover film, theatre, and burlesque for The Ticket at the Seattle Times, am a frequent guest on podcasts such asFilm at Fifty,and assist at various arts organizations all over the greater Seattle area.
Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s oral historyLive From New York(published in 2002, updated and expanded a decade later) is probably the most popular book on sketch comedy giant Saturday Night Live, but I’m more partial to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s 1986 record of the show’s historic but tumultuous first ten years on the air. UnlikeLive From New York, the vibe is less “hanging out with comedy giants” and more “I can’t believe these coked-out maniacs were able to stay alive, let alone create something that’s still going strong.” As SNL approaches its 50th anniversary, see the near-impossible alchemy that changed network television forever.
Saturday Night is the intimate history of the original Saturday Night Live, from its beginnings as an outlaw program produced by an unruly band of renegades from the comedy underground to a TV institution that made stars of John Belushi, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy.
This is the book that revealed to the world what really happened behind the scenes during the first ten years of this groundbreaking program, from the battles SNL fought with NBC to the battles fought within the show itself. It's all here: The…
A theatre, film, and television historian, I've spent the last fifteen years researching and writing about all three areas of entertainment. I'm also a travel and tourism writer for a variety of e-commerce platforms. Television history is an area that I have researched extensively over the last twenty years, resulting in my booksThe Encyclopedia of Television Theme Songs and Sitcommentary: Television ComediesThat Change America.
For those who love television comedy and/or are curious about major players in this genre of entertainment, Sitcoms: The 101 Greatest TV Comedies of All Time will delight. Paging through this colorful book (complete with plenty of accompanying photos), one gets a taste of such shows as I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, The Facts of Life, Cheers, Designing Women, Roseanne, Seinfeld, and The Nanny among them.
The most beloved, most groundbreaking, and most entertaining TV comedies of all time are celebrated in words and pictures-many of them rare-by the award-winning authors of Broadway Musicals. In 101 lively chapters and lots of special features, the authors of Broadway Musicals explore our favorite form of popular entertainment-the TV situation comedy. Of the many hundreds of shows that have debuted over TV's 60-year history, the authors have carefully selected the most influential, popular, and enduring ones, from Gilligan's Island to Seinfeld, I Love Lucy to Will and Grace, creating a history of the medium that goes beyond stats and…
A theatre, film, and television historian, I've spent the last fifteen years researching and writing about all three areas of entertainment. I'm also a travel and tourism writer for a variety of e-commerce platforms. Television history is an area that I have researched extensively over the last twenty years, resulting in my booksThe Encyclopedia of Television Theme Songs and Sitcommentary: Television ComediesThat Change America.
For many, I Love Lucy, starring comic genius Lucille Ball, epitomizes what the great American classic television comedy is. Ben Nussbaum’s I Love Lucy: Discovering America’s Best-Loved Sitcom takes a closer look at this side-splitting comedy and gives us a glimpse into why 70-years later, people still love the antics of the title character.
Running from 1951 to 1957 and in syndication for more than fifty years, I Love Lucy has a permanent place in the hearts of American television-watchers and has reached multiple generations of viewers. Based on the humorous antics of a New York City housewife, her Cuban bandleader husband, and their landlord best friends, I Love Lucy was not only wildly popular but also groundbreaking for its filming techniques, for its use of a live audience, and for being the first television show to air reruns. INSIDE I LOVE LUCY: *The beginnings of the show as well as what made it…
A theatre, film, and television historian, I've spent the last fifteen years researching and writing about all three areas of entertainment. I'm also a travel and tourism writer for a variety of e-commerce platforms. Television history is an area that I have researched extensively over the last twenty years, resulting in my booksThe Encyclopedia of Television Theme Songs and Sitcommentary: Television ComediesThat Change America.
The Golden Girls is one of television’s most enduring situation comedies. The story of four women in their golden years sharing a home in Miami, Florida continues to find a new audience with each generation. Jim Colucci’s book Golden Girls Forever: An Unauthorized Look Behind the Lanai is an intimate and in-depth look at the making of the show and the legacy it has enjoyed.
The complete, first-ever Golden Girls retrospective, packed with hundreds of exclusive interviews, behind-the-scenes and never-before-revealed stories, more than two hundred color and black-and-white photos, commentary, and more.
They were four women of a certain age, living together under one roof in Miami—smart and strong Dorothy, airhead Rose, man-hungry belle Blanche, and smart-mouthed matriarch Sophia. They were the Golden Girls, and for seven seasons, this hilarious quartet enchanted millions of viewers with their witty banter, verve, sass, and love, and reaffirmed the power of friendship and family.
Over thirty years after it first aired, The Golden Girls…
A theatre, film, and television historian, I've spent the last fifteen years researching and writing about all three areas of entertainment. I'm also a travel and tourism writer for a variety of e-commerce platforms. Television history is an area that I have researched extensively over the last twenty years, resulting in my booksThe Encyclopedia of Television Theme Songs and Sitcommentary: Television ComediesThat Change America.
Not all television shows are hit and somehow the decade of the 1980s had the greatest number of sitcom flops. It’s Your Move, The Best of the West, Square Pegs, The Duck Factory, and Life with Lucy are just a handful of the sitcoms that didn’t run for longer than a season. Single Season Sitcoms of the 1980s by Bob Leszczak is a delicious smorgasbord of information about these one-season wonders (and many others) that we barely remember, but refuse to forget.
Single Season Sitcoms of the 1980s is the logical sequel to an earlier work also by Bob Leszczak titled Single Season Sitcoms 1948-1979, A Complete Guide. The decade of the 80s is presently being viewed with much reverence, and television programs, especially the situation comedies from that era, are enjoying renewed interest. Because of the increase in the number of available channels as a result of the exploding cable television industry at that time in history, the number of failed programs was also on the rise.
For every successful sitcom from this period, such as The Golden Girls, Family Ties…
I was five when we moved to Australia, and soon after I discovered two things: I am the seventh child of a seventh child, with magic powers including the ability to see ghosts. My mother’s brother Dennis drowned when he was six. Naturally I started talking to him. Mind you, Mum also told me if the wind changed my face would stay like that, so the ghost thing probably wasn’t true either. Technically she only brought two of us to term. Dennis and I still talk, but we don’t have much in common anymore. With that in mind, please enjoy my ghosty best friends book recommendations.
I found this one in a charity shop and read it in a day. It was a while after that I saw the tv series, and a while after that the movie. And it’s another one I still have in my bookshelves.
It’s another story about finding your place in the world, but at the same time, it’s about a timid widow, mother of two, finding herself through the mentorship of the ghost of a well travelled sailor. One who’s there waiting for her at the end of her life, not her bloody husband!
The basis for Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s cinematic romance starring Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison.
Burdened by debt after her husband's death, Lucy Muir insists on moving into the very cheap Gull Cottage in the quaint seaside village of Whitecliff, despite multiple warnings that the house is haunted. Upon discovering the rumors to be true, the young widow ends up forming a special companionship with the ghost of handsome former sea captain Daniel Gregg. Through the struggles of supporting her children, seeking out romance from the wrong places, and working to publish the captain's story as a book, Blood and Swash,…
A theatre, film, and television historian, I've spent the last fifteen years researching and writing about all three areas of entertainment. I'm also a travel and tourism writer for a variety of e-commerce platforms. Television history is an area that I have researched extensively over the last twenty years, resulting in my booksThe Encyclopedia of Television Theme Songs and Sitcommentary: Television ComediesThat Change America.
Anyone who knows anything about television comedy will tell you that producer/developer Norman Lear was the force behind some of the greatest sitcoms of all time including All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, Good Times, Sanford and Son, and One Day at a Time. The Sitcoms of Norman Lear by Sean Campbell takes a closer look at this titan of television and the game-changing sitcoms he produced.
Archie Bunker, George Jefferson, Maude - the television sitcom world of the 1970s was peopled by the creations of Norman Lear. Beginning in 1971, with the premier of ""All in the Family"", Lear's work gave sitcoms a new face and a new style. No longer were families perfect and lives in order. Mostly blue-collar workers and their families, Lear's characters argued, struggled, uttered sometimes shocking opinions and had no problem contributing to - or at least, acknowledging - the turmoil so shunned by 1960s television. Significantly, not only did Lear address difficult issues, but he did so through successful programming.…
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