I Put My Childhood Sitcom on Trial and the Verdict Was a Spreadsheet

There's a moment in every adult's life when they think, I should rewatch that show I loved as a kid. Most people follow that thought with popcorn and comfort. I followed it with a spreadsheet.

The show in question was my entire personality between the ages of nine and thirteen — a mid-90s sitcom about a group of friends in a big city, the kind every network made three of that decade. I taped episodes off network TV on a VHS labeled (by me, in gel pen) "GOOD ONES." Revisiting it felt like rereading a diary. I expected warmth. Instead, somewhere around episode six, I muttered "why would he DO that" at my laptop, opened Google Sheets, and typed a column header: Problems.

The spreadsheet won an Emmy that night.

The Rules of My Experiment

I kept it simple. For every episode, I logged three things: plot holes (blue), jokes that had aged like milk left in a hot car (red), and one craft note — anything the episode did structurally that I, as a writer, wanted to steal (green). One row per episode. No skipping. No fast-forwarding through the theme song, because that's a sin.

By episode ten I had forty-one blue cells. By the finale, I had watched a character get a job he was wildly unqualified for, lose it, and get a nearly identical job the following season with zero acknowledgment — a plot device so reusable the writers basically wore it out like a pair of sneakers.

The Crimes, Ranked

The plot holes were the least interesting problem, honestly. Sitcoms run on convenient misunderstandings; that's the engine, not a flaw. What genuinely startled me was how often characters changed personality to serve a joke. One of the friends — my childhood favorite, my letter-writing inspiration — flips from deadpan to frantic depending on what the scene needs. Nine-year-old me never noticed. Thirty-something me kept a tally: eleven episodes, eleven betrayals.

Then there were the red cells. Jokes about people's weight, jokes about a character's culture played for the hundredth time, a running gag that amounts to "isn't it funny when a man has hobbies." I didn't log these with outrage so much as exhaustion. It was like visiting your elementary school and realizing the ceilings were always that low. It's not that the building changed. You did.

What the Green Cells Knew

Here's the twist I didn't expect: the craft column was the fullest one.

The show was lazy about continuity and ruthless about structure. Nearly every episode hit the same shape — cold open, false solution, real solution, tag — with the reliability of a metronome. The writers knew exactly how long a runner could go before audiences wanted the payoff, and they hit that beat like clockwork. One episode does an entire breakup and reconciliation in the background of the A-plot, wordlessly, over four scenes. That's not dumb writing. That's control.

Somewhere in season two I realized the uncomfortable thing: I write like this show taught me. My instinct for when a scene has overstayed its welcome. My weakness for the cold open. My belief that a running gag, deployed with discipline, is one of the great pleasures in storytelling. I didn't learn those things in an MFA program. I learned them at 8 p.m. on a Thursday with a bowl of cereal.

Can Nostalgia Survive a Notebook?

The final tally: sixty-two plot holes, twenty-eight expired jokes, forty-four craft notes. If you read only the numbers, you'd assume I destroyed something I loved.

I didn't. What actually happened was stranger. The show stopped being a memory and became a colleague. I can see its seams now, and seeing the seams is a kind of intimacy that nostalgia never offered me. When I loved it blindly, it was a warm blur. Now it's a machine I've taken apart on the kitchen table, and I know which gears were cheap and which ones are genuinely brilliant.

Nine-year-old me would be horrified by the spreadsheet. But I think she'd also recognize it — because "GOOD ONES," that gel-penned VHS label, was its own kind of curation. I was already taking notes. I just didn't have columns yet.

The spreadsheet is saved. The show is still on my shelf. And the next time I can't figure out why a scene in my own draft isn't working, I know exactly which rerun to consult.