Here’s Rob McElhenney's Remarkably Eclectic Mount Rushmore of Sitcoms

Everyone knows that Rob McElhenney loves Seinfeld, but the selection process for his top four favorite sitcoms of all time is an even stranger “contest.”  

As the creator and star of the longest running live-action sitcom in American TV history, McElhenney is more of an authority on the issue of which comedy shows deserve to be immortalized in stone than anyone in the country. After all, the shows that influenced McElhenney led to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and it’s only fitting that the man responsible for such a masterpiece should pick the series that his own magnum opus will be listed alongside for generations to come.  

So, if we were to actually construct a physical monument honoring the top sitcoms of all time, McElhenney would undoubtedly be on the selection committee of the Sitcom Mount Rushmore. And during his recent appearance on Hot Ones, he explained why he would build it with minimal government oversight or regulation in honor of Ronald Reagan.  

When Hot Ones host Sean Evans asked McElhenney to name his “Mount Rushmore of Sitcoms” shortly after the duo took bites out of wings drenched in the dreaded hot sauce “Da Bomb,” McElhenney feverishly listed a top four that has us wondering whether Da Bomb is also a deliriant.  

“Seinfeld, because I’d never seen anything like that before. Uh, British Office, because I’d never never seen anything like that before,” McElhenney began his all-time sitcom list innocently enough before throwing in a name that we’d sooner associate with the founder of Suds than the creator of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. “I’m gonna say, Friends, I think Friends.”  

“Because you’d never seen anything like that before?” Evans joked.  

McElhenney clarified of his Friends inclusion, “I’d seen lots of things like that before, but never executed that well, and (it) was a big inspiration for Sunny, oddly.”  

But by far the oddest entry on McElhenney’s sitcom Mount Rushmore was the final face, and it’s only fitting that the Abraham Lincoln slot would go to a remarkably Republican series. “And Family Ties,” McElhenney finished the list, “Because Michael J. Fox was my idol.”

Yes, the painfully 1980s NBC sitcom about a Reaganite Republican teenager and his hippie liberal parents is McElhenney’s favorite show of all time, and Alex P. Keaton is Ronald “Mac” McDonald’s hero. I’m starting to think that he really wasn’t joking when he called the toxic spill at the Jersey Shore “liberal bullshit.”