Frasier got a heavy dose on this list, and all three episodes work for very different reasons. Up front: It’s because I loved this show in the hospital, because it usually was just stimulating enough to make me think, but funny enough to make me laugh and get more oxygen to reduce pain. It was basically part of my rehab. But, for the three episodes, I’ll stand by them as being different enough to all make it: The first, “Rooms with a View,” is a thoroughly dramatic episode that accurately portrays some of the most difficult times a family can have. The second, “Three Valentines,” contains one of the most amazing solo performances on film. This one, though, is what happens when an ensemble comedy comes together perfectly. It does everything from puns to comic misunderstandings to over-the-top slapstick, and it does it well.
Part of the premise of Frasier is that Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) and his brother, Niles (David Hyde Pierce), are both very uptight and snooty while their father, Martin (John Mahoney), is an unpretentious everyman ex-cop. They often try to dream far beyond their own abilities, because they assume they are amazing at everything. It’s the hubris that makes for such entertaining falls. And this episode features one of the most common cases of hubris: Believing that you can start your own business with family. I’m not saying it always fails, but when it does, it’s a train wreck of epic proportions.
SUMMARY
The episode starts with one of Frasier’s and Niles’s favorite restaurants closing. As they go for a last meal, they manage to convince themselves that they not only can, but should, take over the restaurant and run it themselves, despite their father pointing out that they have no experience in the restaurant field, and, in fact, no desire to put in the work of running a restaurant, saying “You don’t think about the hard work or the long hours. No, to you, owning a restaurant is just wearing fancy clothes, hobnobbing with your friends and turning your enemies away at the door.” They summarily ignore this, and decide that they will open the restaurant as “Le Freres Heureux” – The Happy Brothers.
At first, everything goes well. The brothers find out that the head chef at another restaurant wants a change, so they secure him. They manage to get a fresh shipment of the chef’s specialty, anguille, a type of eel. And they even manage to find a place for the aging former head waiter of the restaurant as the new valet. People are packed in, and everything is going great on the opening night of the restaurant, and the brothers are bragging about how wrong their father was to doubt them. In sitcom terms, they just gave Zeus the finger.
Right on cue, everything starts to go wrong. Frasier and Niles each give the head chef contradictory orders, and proceed to get angrier and snippier about him failing to, somehow, obey both of them, until the chef quits. Then, upon finding out the immigration bureau is dining in the building, the entire kitchen staff runs out the door. At which time they decide that Niles can be the head chef, right until Niles finds out that not only is everyone ordering the chef’s specialty, but that the chef preferred to kill his eels personally, so all the eels in the restaurant are currently alive. From there, it just keeps escalating. Fires, floods, explosions, electrocutions, sexual harassment, until, finally, they decide to literally drive a car through the wall and demolish most of the restaurant. And all with a ridiculous amount of clever, fast-paced, joke-filled dialogue.
The episode ends with the brothers asking their father if he’s ready to say “I told you so.” He remarks that he’s taking the high road, because he knows that they’re just going to punish themselves more than enough… and then proceeds to say “I told you so,” because he’s a father of adult children and that’s what they do.
END SUMMARY
The beauty of this episode is that it dedicates itself to just showing you the same disaster that you’ve watched on TV a thousand times before, but instead of merely inviting the audience to view the destruction, the focus is usually on the amount of effort that Frasier and Niles have to put forth to try to avoid it, making it all the more tragic and humorous when it ends up failing entirely. It’s a classic comedy formula done to the utmost.
Update: John Mahoney has sadly passed away before this article was posted. He was a huge part of all of these episodes, and he will be missed.
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Leslie, with encouragement from Justin (Justin Theroux), a man she’s been dating, goes to find the lifeguard and reunite the lovers after all these years. Unfortunately, while Marlene grew up to be a civic leader, the lifeguard, Frank (John Larroquette), is just a barrel full of problems. He’s immature, unsophisticated, unemployed, and just generally is the worst. Marlene understandably wants nothing to do with him.
This episode starts with Leslie having her first V-Day with a serious boyfriend, Ben. She makes an overly-elaborate series of puzzles involving multiple riddles that range from “weird” to “punishingly difficult.” Even Leslie admits, at one point, that it’s probably impossible for Ben to actually solve them all. In desperation, Ben asks Ron and Andy for help. Along the way, Ben finds out that Ron actually loves puzzles and riddles, despite his earlier objections to them. In the end, Ron intuits the final solution to Leslie’s riddle, saving Ben.
Meanwhile, Leslie asks the office to help find a boyfriend for Ann, who is somehow single despite being sweet, smart, and looking like Rashida Jones (it actually gets explained later that she has some issues). At the same time, Chris, the perpetual optimist, is depressed because he has been dumped by his most recent girlfriend. At the end of the episode, Ann ends up hanging out with Tom, which proves to be a horrible mistake, and Chris realizes that he’s only single because he broke up with Ann for basically no reason aside from location. This leaves both of them in the position to get back together in the future, after they both grow a little bit.
30 Rock is a show about putting on an 
At the beginning of this episode, Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) has set a root canal on Valentine’s Day, which she calls “Anna Howard Shaw Day” after the female civil rights leader born on Feb. 14, but discovers that everyone else has plans and thus she has no one who can drive her home while she’s under anesthesia. At the same time, her boss, Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), meets Avery Jessup (Elizabeth Banks), the ultra-conservative woman of his dreams. Jack tries to woo her, including planning a celebrity party where he invites Jon Bon Jovi (Music Guy), but ends up snubbing him because he’s interested in what she’s saying. Naturally, they bang, and agree to go out again on V-day. On Valentine’s Day, Liz gets her root canal, telling the dental staff that she’ll be fine to go home. On the way out, however, Liz hallucinates that the nurses are her ex-boyfriends, leading the staff to call Jack to help. Jack agrees, but Avery assumes that it’s just an excuse to dump her after they’ve had sex. Jack counters by offering to have her come along, which impresses Avery even more with his kindness. Liz passes out, but at least she knows she has a friend.
Cards to each other. Unfortunately, Ralph Wiggum (Nancy Cartwright), who is not the brightest kid in the class… nor the most sanitary, doesn’t get a single card. Seeing him heartbroken, Lisa feels pity for him and gives him a card saying “I choo-choo-choose you.” This leads Ralph to fall in love with Lisa, who does not reciprocate. At all. This is made worse when Ralph and Lisa are picked to play George and Martha Washington in the school play.
Alright, because this list is biased, Frasier is 
The episode starts when Niles is going into surgery for a heart problem, one that is apparently extremely urgent. Niles had almost no symptoms, and only went to the doctor on a strange hunch. He is only 43, and of a thin build, so this isn’t something that he would have thought of as being a possibility. It’s also right after he finally got married to Daphne, the woman he’s been chasing after for the duration of the show. The set-up is especially brutal to the viewer’s emotions, because it reminds us that at any point we can suddenly, and randomly, lose everything, even right after we get what we wanted. Throughout the episode, the hospital sees each of the main characters and recalls a memory while the characters cope, shown by a room being filled with the characters in their pasts. For Niles, going into surgery uncertain of living, we are shown flashes of his entire life, from Daphne telling him lovingly that she’ll be there for him, to his times there with his last wife who was emotionally abusive, and even images of his father bringing him an Archie comic when he was hurt as a child.
While Niles is on the table, each member of the family is trying to cope with the stress of the situation in their own way. Frasier tries to break everything about the surgery down clinically to distance himself from the emotional burden of the situation. To him, Niles is just a machine that’s being fixed, not a loved one who might be in trouble. He evokes memories of the first time he met his newborn brother and of the time that he bribed his brother to keep silent about breaking his leg. Martin, as a father, denies recognizing any possibility that he’s losing his son, but we are shown the hospital remembering the last time he was in the hospital, when the doctor telling was him that his wife had terminal cancer.
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