The series was critically championed out of the gate and became such a hit with its intended demographic that it’s often thought of now as a piece of ’90s nostalgia. It did that by eliminating the mom and dad entirely - they die in a car accident before the series begins - and literally putting the offspring in charge, with the irresponsible but technically adult Charlie (Matthew Fox) acting as official guardian. The tale of the Salingers spoke directly to the increasing sense in American culture that the kids, not the parents, were running the show. The genius of Party of Five was that it looked like a teen drama, but was really a family one. The success of Beverly Hills, 90210 in the ’90s made Fox and other networks hungry for more teen dramas. Here, then, are the 50 most-definitive family television shows, ranked in order of their impact and innovation. This allowed us to include shows like Frasier and Golden Girls, which feature adult parents and their adult children, but did exclude series like I Love Lucy and Mad About You, which are more about self, marriage, and work than they are about intergenerational relationships. In the end, we decided that, for the purposes of this list, a family show needed to include at least one parent-child relationship, and that relationship needed to be a central focus. We also tried to weigh family series that are mostly about a chosen family of adults - so many of our favorite series fall into that category, and it was hard to differentiate some of the features we most wanted to emphasize from workplace comedies or friend-group shows. We considered and quickly set aside “appropriate for a family to watch” as a defining element if we’d gone with that, we’d have to exclude shows like The Sopranos and most family dramas. The other tough part was deciding what, exactly, constitutes a “family” TV show. We landed on “definitive” because it pointed to a series as having a significant place in the culture, or of holding a milestone role in the development of the genre, rather than looking at them purely qualitatively. Influence is a tough thing to measure for newer series, and “best” indicates a value judgment that feels separate from the ideas we were trying to get across. When we sat down to write a list of family TV shows that shaped the genre, we thought about words like “influential” and “best.” None of those felt quite right for this project. Why I Wanted to Adapt Roseanne for the Trump Era Serialized cable dramas, reality shows, and sitcoms that push against the traditional forms are now part of the broader idea of what a “family TV series” can be. ![]() Family TV has evolved from the sitcom, a form deep in the DNA of the earliest TV programs, to also reflect changes in how we make and watch TV. Because shows like this have been a part of popular TV programming from the earliest days of the form, they give us a fascinating way of examining ourselves - or at least, examining what we thought of ourselves - over decades of American culture. ![]() But in either case, the TV family show plays with ideas reflecting the current moment, or acts as a model to aspire to (or avoid). Sometimes it’s more of a funhouse mirror, especially for TV dramas that find families in extreme circumstances or comedies that push against familiar norms. On a sitcom it can feel like a literal mirror: The people onscreen sit around a sofa and talk to one another, and we, on our sofas, look back at them. One of the hallmarks of a TV family series is the sense that we’re looking into a mirror. All week long, Vulture is exploring how it’s been represented on our screens. As long as there’s been TV, the family has been one of its favorite go-tos.
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