56. "A Night In," Porridge (1974)

Welcome to the “100 Best Sitcom Episodes of All Time,” a countdown for 2012. Each episode will get a separate blog post, counting backward toward No. 1. A list of the programs revealed so far is here and an introduction to the project is here.

For a few months in fall 1975, Barney Miller was followed by On the Rocks, a multi-camera sitcom that took place in a prison, leading ABC to promote the pair as "funny cops and funny robbers." To me, a cellblock is a natural setting for a sitcom, since one thing the genre excels at is showing how people adjust, or fail to adjust, to living with each other. The Sartre play No Exit, in many ways a prototype for the sitcom, is about a prison-like version of Hell, so why shouldn't there be a successful comedy about an actual prison?

But On the Rocks was a flop, and the only successful American series about a prison* has been HBO's Oz, a Grand Guignol tale of guards and inmates getting raped, shot, stabbed, blinded, lit on fire, and poisoned with ground-up glass. The violence on Oz ensured it a loyal but limited audience, but I suspect that Americans would get even more queasy about a realistic "stir-com," since it would necessarily have sympathetic characters and we don't like to contemplate how many redeemable people we send to jail. (Just try to make a sitcom out of this.)

*A commenter points to Prison Break, which I should have also mentioned, though much of it takes on the outside.

The British, perhaps because they don't send as many people to the Big House, have been more successful in utilizing the prison setting, and Porridge was one of the more popular sitcoms there in the 1970s. "A Night In," its third installment, is a "bottle" episode that takes place over one night as two new cellmates get to know each other. Norman Fletcher ("Fletch") is a career criminal who reluctantly teaches a newer inmate, Lennie Godber, how to cope with life in the inside.