So it was good? I kind of lost interest because last season was so mediocre. But I'm hoping to get to it at some point.

I just watched that episode today! I'm really loving this show.

The Middle - Suburgatory - Modern Family - Happy Endings was pretty good too. (Except for maybe Modern Family).

Season 4 is typically around the time it sets in. You're right that Coach is probably too new for that kind of thing though.

The abbreviation of the new NCIS show really makes me happy.

You just described the trajectory of literally every sitcom in TV history. It's best to just enjoy it and not worry about it too much, because it's more or less inevitable as a comedy ages.

I always thought S3 felt like the least writer-heavy soon. If anything I remember their presence increasing a little around S5 or so (and then decreasing again in the last two seasons).

A lot of people seem to have the same opinion, but I just never really cared all that much about the writers. They're fun characters when they're needed, but they're not an overly rich source of stories and the show seemed to realize that pretty early on, even the second half of Season 1 is a lot less TGS-heavy. I…

6 had a lot of weird episodes that weren't very funny and never seemed to go anywhere (the Tracy becoming smart one was pretty bad, as well as Meet the Woggles and The Shower Principal) but it also had some all-time classics like Leap Day and the second live episode, and I really appreciated Liz's storyline that…

Totally. They are also two of the only shows where I can see a single line from the show without any context whatsoever and crack up laughing.

Season 4 is probably my least favorite season, just because the plots and characters were starting to grow thin. Turning Liz into basically a spinster and Jack into a two-timing douchebag was not the shows' finest hour. (There are individual classics through-out that season though, such as Dealbreakers Talk Show and…

"I killed Jenna Elfman, is that right?"

Regarding the Simpsons comparison, I've always felt that you could feel the Simpsons influence in all of the NBC Thursday night comedies: The Office with its character-driven pathos, Parks & Rec with its world-building, Community with its plot/genre experimentation…but 30 Rock definitely inhereted its humor. They have…

There actually will be, unless you are suggesting that A to Z and Bad Judge are so bad that they are not sitcoms.

And yet "That '90s Show" and "The Book Job" are.

It looks terrible, but John Mulaney is a really funny guy and there's lots of good people involved. So if nothing else, it should be worthy of coverage just for the "how did they fuck this up?" aspect.

They base coverage on page views, not TV show ratings. Maybe not enough people were reading about BBT. That's…kind of surprising to me, but who knows?

I think you can just include the holdovers in S9 as part of the golden era and be safe. That includes City of New York, Lisa's Sax and Lisa the Simpson. There's good stuff in the rest of the season, like The Cartridge Family, but I can mostly live without them.

These seem like pretty major oversights. They're both AV Club favorites, no? I can't imagine their page views were that dire.

Yeah, I can't imagine how A to Z is worthy of coverage but Mulaney isn't. Even if Mulaney sucks, it's going to be a pretty interesting failure. A to Z is just…bland.