It also sounds like a case of rose-tinted glasses - I watched many of those 90s sitcoms as they came out, and most of them are definitely mediocre! And this fa

It also sounds like a case of rose-tinted glasses - I watched many of those 90s sitcoms as they came out, and most of them are definitely mediocre! And this fact was noticed contemporaneously - remember all of the very serious thinkpieces opining that people were rotting their brains in front of the TV watching content so brain-dead that you need a laughtrack to tell the audience when to laugh. Personally I think that was just snobbery - the mediocre sitcoms were fine and perfectly ok entertainment and there was no need for any kind of moral panic - but let's not pretend that that was some kind of golden age of sophisticated content.