After that, NBC started sliding in the ratings, and it never managed to establish another sitcom hit on the level of Friends or even Will & Grace. The latter’s 2006 finale marked the official end of "Must See TV," which was rebranded as "Comedy Night Done Right." An equally boastful piece of branding, yes, but similarly on-point: Even with the boom of original cable programming, NBC remained the most powerful producer of challenging, intelligent comedy. The Office premiered in 2006; though a remake of a UK hit, it had a sharp originality lacking in most TV comedy. Other networks had clever standouts, most notably Arrested Development on Fox, but that show could never even settle into a timeslot and was cancelled before its time. NBC’s Thursday programming was no longer a ratings juggernaut, but it was the most fertile creative environment in mainstream television.

The Office was an actual hit, and by far the best NBC could do in terms of viewers. But built around it was a relatively stable assortment of critically acclaimed “cult hits,” almost all of them single-camera comedies, which marked a sudden reversal from the mainstream multi-camera laugh-track sitcoms that had dominated the previous two decades. Emmy-guzzling juggernaut 30 Rock debuted in 2006 and ran for seven seasons. The underrated and basically forgotten My Name is Earl, a white-trash sitcom with a heart of gold, lasted for four years. Parks and Recreation debuted in 2008, as did the whip-smart Community, which is the only survivor of the era. But Community will air its sixth season online at Yahoo, and Parks closed out its run in a fairly ignominious timeslot: 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, having burned its final season off in barely advertised, back-to-back airings.

Yankeesrj12/Wikimedia

If it wasn’t clear that NBC was out of the quirky comedy game, one indication was its decision to pass on the sitcom Mulaney in 2013. Produced by a network titan (Lorne Michaels) and starring one of its brightest young prospects (comedian John Mulaney, who had become a top writer at Saturday Night Live), NBC reportedly didn't pick the show up for fears that it would be too niche, even though it was a multi-camera project about the life of a stand-up comedian, echoing the glory days of Seinfeld. Mulaney’s relative youth and popularity on the Internet seemed to count against him, and the show was eventually picked up by Fox and significantly retooled.

In 2013, instead of Mulaney or the fifth season of Community, NBC rolled out a lineup that practically screamed “we wish it were 1984 again.” Parks led the night, but it was followed by culture-clash comedy Welcome to the Family (premise: What if a white lady married a Latino and their parents had to hang out?), divorced-dad multi-cam Sean Saves the World (starring Sean Hayes, softening but recycling his Will & Grace shtick) and seemingly the safest bet of all, The Michael J. Fox Show. The triumphant return of the Must-See TV wunderkind himself, with a new family sitcom to call his own. What could go wrong? Well, everything—the “NBC Family of Comedies,” as the new branding put it, didn’t last three episodes, and none save Parks made it through a full season.