The best sitcom of the 1990s was NewsRadio.

This is a high honor. The '90s featured a host of great sitcoms. There was Seinfeld and Roseanne and Frasier and Friends and The Larry Sanders Show, all shows that are the ancestors of so many great shows on the air right now. (They also had the golden years of The Simpsons, which I don't classify as a "sitcom," because it's animated. Accuse me of splitting hairs, if you must.)

But to me, NewsRadio outdoes those shows. It's a show that's at once deliberately classical, engaged with and appreciative of TV history, but also free-form and loose. It turns one of the most low-concept premises ever — here are some funny people who work in a New York City radio station — into big laughs and (dare I say it?) high art. Plus it turned 20 on March 21, 2015. It's as good a time as any to revisit its legacy.

NewsRadio is a show you've likely not seen, unless you're a diehard devotee like me. Though the entirety of its five-season, 97-episode run has been collected on DVD, it appears only sporadically on streaming sites, episodes floating on and off of them like some sort of beautiful sitcom Brigadoon. The show, always low-rated during its run on NBC, largely succeeded in spite of its treatment at the hands of the network, where it would have 11 different timeslots in those five seasons. If you saw NewsRadio, you either sought it out or you stumbled upon it by accident.

The best sitcom of the 1990s and one of the best of all time. That's a big claim. Let me try to back it up.

And yet it's rare for me to find people who've seen NewsRadio and aren't extremely passionate fans of the show. It inspires raves. You're either a fan, or you haven't seen it.

Still. The best sitcom of the 1990s — one of the best of all time — that's a big claim. Let me try to back it up.

The visual style: perfectly executed mania

To me, the chief achievement of NewsRadio is visual. It's one of the best-directed TV shows I've ever seen, but to understand why requires a brief detour into sitcom production.

Most of the comedies on TV right now are what is called "single-camera sitcoms." A more accurate term would be "cinematic sitcoms," because their production is more like a movie than anything else. Actors perform in front of multiple camera setups over the course of several days: a director will shoot one person talking in a scene, then the other person, then both at once, over several separate takes. This format includes fake documentaries like Modern Family and The Office, as well as shows like Community or New Girl that look like mini-movies each week.

Yet the history of TV comedy features far more sitcoms called "multi-camera sitcoms," or, more accurately, "theatrical sitcoms." These shows take the form of miniature, recorded plays. They are shot on big, central sets, in front of an audience of strangers brought in just for the program. Those strangers' laughs are recorded to provide the bursts of laughter that accompany every joke. The director uses a four-camera setup to capture every angle she might need at once, instead of shooting all of the actors on separate occasions. Current examples of this format include The Big Bang Theory and Mom, but most of the great TV comedies of history have been shot like this, including All in the Family, Cheers, and Seinfeld.

Rather than trying to create energy through editing, NewsRadio creates energy through the simple mania of its staging

NewsRadio fits comfortably into the multi-camera sitcom wheelhouse. But it goes one step further by trying, as much as possible, to make everything really feel like a stage play you just happen to be watching on your television. Rather than trying to create energy through editing, NewsRadio creates energy through the simple mania of its staging. The camera sits, holding the frame in a long or mid-shot. Characters burst in and out of the frame, creating an escalating sense of chaos. It is, in its finest moments (and there are many), almost perfectly executed farce.

Let's look at the show's distinctive style in motion:

Joe Furey, a writer on the show for all five seasons, told me this was very much intentional on the part of creator Paul Simms and the other writers. (Simms declined to be interviewed for this story.) Furey cited influences like stage farce and Marx brothers movies, projects where directors trust the performers to carry the energy forward and the audience to play along delightedly.

"We wanted it to play out like a play would, where a lot of it would just sort of happen live — as much as you can do that on a show," Furey said.

Thus, much of NewsRadio happens in, essentially, real time. The show's construction means near-constant escalation, and the show's biggest laughs come from just how much comedy can be mined out of the actors creating energy, rather than the director. It's like the show is daring itself not to cut sometimes, not to rob any moment of its power by cutting to a reaction shot.

"There's nothing funnier to us than a guy leaving and then returning immediately or falling into frame from above or popping up from below," Josh Lieb, another writer on the show for all five seasons, who now serves as showrunner on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, told me.

Of course, none of it would be possible without great actors.

The cast: a Murderer's Row of comedic acting talent

The assembled list of cast members of this show reads like a who's who of well-known players now. Though pretty much everybody in the cast was an unknown when the show debuted, almost all of them have gone on to long, fruitful careers.

The cast merged almost supernaturally quickly

The show was built around Kids in the Hall veteran Dave Foley as Dave Nelson, one of the most sympathetic bosses in TV history. Rather than drag out a potential romantic pairing, Simms and his fellow writers (to the consternation of their network) put Dave in a romantic relationship from episode two onward with Lisa, the woman who dearly wanted his job, played by a then-unknown Maura Tierney. And Dave's most constant antagonist was blowhard anchor Bill, played by Saturday Night Live veteran Phil Hartman, the show's main draw when it launched.

Spinning out from those triple axes was a Murderer's Row of comedic acting talent. Stephen Root as wackadoodle boss Jimmy James. Vicki Lewis as quirky secretary Beth. Andy Dick as office spaz Matthew. Khandi Alexander as the glorious anchor Catherine. Joe Rogan as earthy handyman Joe.

The cast merged almost supernaturally quickly. "We gelled right away. It was a blast," Tierney told the A.V. Club's Will Harris in 2014.

And, more important, the writers clicked with the actors, too. As the show came together, they were able to write to the best possible comic energies for all eight performers, creating an ensemble that could have felt overstuffed but never did.

"It's not very often that you get in these situations where a lot of stuff clicked. You felt like, 'This works!'" Furey said.

The characters: distinct, relatable personalities

The reason the writers and actors could bond so quickly is because Simms designed the show to create eight characters who would all interact differently with one another. A scene between Dave and Lisa is not the same as a scene between Bill and Lisa, or a scene between Bill and Dave. Simms designed the ensemble of characters so that every single one created subtly different conflicts with every other character.

Those characters had something too many sitcom characters of the era lacked: relatability

It's amazing to watch NewsRadio today and realize just how thoroughly any given episode is dictated by which characters it focuses on — but also just how easily the writers could puncture any story with a perfect riposte from a character who wasn't particularly involved in that week's storyline. Matthew's neediness is perfectly balanced by Bill's arrogance. Beth's playfulness is perfectly balanced by Joe's manchild nature. And Dave's pragmatism is perfectly balanced by Jimmy's childlike whimsy.

But what's remarkable is how true this is of every character pairing on the show. In any given scene, in any given relationship, a character can be protagonist, antagonist, sidekick, or foil. NewsRadio is almost supernaturally well-designed, in a way that creates pleasing, thrilling synchronicity.

And those characters had something too many sitcom characters of the era lacked: relatability, even if it didn't seem like it. Lieb tells me about how frustrated the show's staff would get every time NBC tried out some subpar show between Friends and Seinfeld, when NewsRadio clearly should have gotten a shot in that prized timeslot. Those shows, Lieb says, often seemed to the NewsRadio writers as if they were filled with characters who had never had a recognizable human emotion in their lives.

But NewsRadio was different. "As insane and stupid and sociopathic as the characters acted, it was always important that their motivations be understandable," Lieb said.

The stories might be wacky and over-the-top, but anyone can relate to Dave's hurt feelings or Lisa's frustrations at always being passed over for a promotion she probably deserves. It was NewsRadio's genius to spin this into complete lunacy.

This is why, for me, the series could never entirely recover from the loss of Hartman before the final season. (He was murdered by his wife, Brynn.) The show gamely brought in Jon Lovitz to replace Hartman, as nebbishy Max Lewis, but it simply couldn't figure out a way to fit him into the ensemble.

"There was a lot of good stuff," Lieb says of the fifth and final season. Nevertheless, "we never really quite cracked where Max Lewis fit into the ensemble."

You might also trace this slow dissolution to Catherine's departure early in season four. (Alexander felt the character was never as well-served as the other seven — a fair observation.) Suddenly, the show was without one of its most reliable foils for office ludicrousness, and it became easier for scenes to spin into further outright lunacy.

The writing: "Let's just make it as funny as we wanna make it and see what happens"

Joke for joke, NewsRadio is as funny as any show in TV history. (Watch some of its best moments here.) It's also almost completely devoid of references to the world of the '90s, something Furey assures me was intentional, to allow the show to hold up in future decades.

The vast majority of the writers on the series were in their twenties, which both Furey and Lieb say provided a kind of extension of college life. The writers would screw around and do anything to avoid work, until it was time to turn around an episode, at which point they would work long hours and turn out draft after draft after draft of scripts that just kept getting better. Lieb told me he thinks he threw out more stuff on NewsRadio than he got on the air. He says this as a point of pride.

"It was absolutely the best time of my life, and absolutely the worst time of my life," Lieb marvels. "We were making a great show we all loved, and we all loved and hated each other."

"We were making a great show we all loved, and we all loved and hated each other"

That combination of work avoidance and hardcore work ethic extends to the show itself. NewsRadio is madcap, with its constant acceleration and energy, but it's also disciplined, careful. Everything is under control, even if you can't quite see the people pulling the strings behind the scenes.

But they are there, in the form of a writing staff that lavished attention and detail on not just the dialogue but also the stories, making sure the characters' motivations always rang true and the plots made sense. Even when the series was setting fantasy-driven episodes in outer space or on board the Titanic, the stories were these intimate little character pieces that spiraled outward into ever-increasing weirdness. And it all felt effortless.

And, as Furey suggests, the constant worries that the show would be canceled contributed to the writers' choices to go further and further into craziness. The attitude at the time was, "'Fuck it.' Let's just make it as funny as we wanna make it and see what happens," he said.

"We kept thinking every season we were going to be canceled."

The audience: its own character on the show

The phrase "laugh track" is the easiest way to denigrate a sitcom these days, even though very few shows ever use such a thing. (In the industry, "laugh track" refers solely to the use of prerecorded laughter, not the laughs of a studio audience recorded live on the night of the taping.) NewsRadio certainly didn't. The show's "tape nights" are legendary, for how much fun they could be and how much fun the actors were to watch.

The actors and writers fed off the energy of the live audience

And the actors and writers fed off the energy of the live audiences. Furey tells me about how the show would always preshoot the complicated pratfalls and stunts Dick was required to perform as Matthew, just in case they weren't pulled off at a taping. That way, there was no need to take the time to reset a stunt if it was a flop at the taping. But if the stunt went off at the taping, the show invariably used that version in the final cut.

Furey says this was because the stunts filmed before an audience almost always had a stronger energy than the preshot ones. The actors responded to the laughter, to the feeling of all of those people in the dark, waiting to see them be funny.

"I think multi-camera is the show that best simulates the theater experience or the caveman experience of watching you friends do a sketch in a cave somewhere," Lieb says.

And NewsRadio has that feel. The audience, for lack of a better phrase, becomes another character in the show, hanging on every word, bursting into appreciative laughter at every new, clever turn of phrase.

The legacy: a perfectly polished sitcom gem

Does NewsRadio have a legacy? If you're at all like me, you probably ascribe more importance to it than it probably deserves. For as much as I love the show, it's not as if there are tons of multi-camera sitcoms left on the air, much less ones with the energy and verve of NewsRadio. The show's approach to the format, to making every episode as much like a stage play as possible, ended up being a bit of an evolutionary dead end.

And yet ...

The series managed to sell enough DVDs to eventually get all five seasons of its run out there on disc. It still has a surprisingly large cult fanbase, one that was able to fill a theater for a reunion of the show's cast and crew at this year's San Francisco Sketchfest. It exists as a kind of perfectly polished sitcom gem, a show crafted by people who knew television backward and forward, for people who knew television backward and forward.

It was a series that used very old forms to tell a very new story about the way workplaces turn us into caricatures of ourselves

In its own way, it was as engrossed by the history of its medium as The Simpsons. It just aimed to put that engrossment in the midst of the most traditional TV format of them all, one that has existed since the days of I Love Lucy. It was a series that used these very old forms to tell a very new story about the way workplaces tend to turn us into caricatures of ourselves, how tiny events (like a change in snacks or one person getting a new chair) can spin out of control into immense crises.

The show didn't make it past that fifth, flawed season. There was a plan for a sixth season that would be rebooted and set in the small-town milieu of New Hampshire, but NBC canceled the series. NewsRadio remains that lost classic, the show so many people would love if they could just see it. Maybe, with the rise of streaming, that day will come very soon.

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Television