There are few things better than plopping down on the couch and putting on a good sitcom after a long, hard day. The chance to just relax and laugh at the misadventures of one's favorite characters as they go about their lives can help melt away the stresses of reality.
But the best sitcoms and the best characters are the ones the viewers find themselves relating to on a deeper level. We see a part of ourselves in them. Sometimes, those are big portions. Other times, it's smaller aspects. However, whatever the case may be, there is something in each of them that fans connect to on a deeper level than they may realize.
10 Rebecca Bunch Is Our Obsession With The Past
While most people aren't about to move across the country to follow someone they had a crush on at summer camp some fifteen years earlier, the story of Rachel Bunch on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is one that many people can relate to.
While Rachel went to an extreme, many people have something in their past that went wrong that they can't figure out why or how it happened. That memory gnaws at the back of the mind, sometimes shooting to the forefront of our thoughts, keeping us up at night wondering what could have been.
9 Ben Wyatt Is The Goal Of Being Good Enough
Where Rachel Bunch was unable to move beyond a moment from her past, Ben Wyatt became the poster boy of growth by going from the teen mayor who came up with Ice Town to a well-rounded and well-respected government worker on Parks and Recreation.
Even more, Ben found the love of his life in Leslie Knope and supported her career goals, understanding that her success was his success and that his success was hers. To Ben, being with Leslie was the best thing that could ever happen, and that kind of feeling is something everyone wants.
8 Cory Matthews Lived High School Just Like Us
No one has the exact same high school journey, but there are moments we all experience in those years, and no one TV character captured those moments quite like Corey Matthews on Boy Meets World.
Cory's life, from a young teen all the way through college, was there for the world to watch, and on more than one occasion, every viewer cringed at a moment that they themselves went through. Corey went through his growing pains on TV so that we all knew we weren't alone.
7 Phil Dunphy Never Stopped Being A Kid
No matter how old a person gets, there is a part of them that will always be a kid. The excitement that comes with a new toy, be it an action figure, a video game, or a new surround sound system, never goes away. What changes is that the older we get, the harder it can be to reconnect to those giddy childhood feelings that made the days so much more fun.
But on Modern Family, Phil Dunphy always found a way to reconnect to those feelings, often by joining his youngest child, Luke, in some horribly thought-up plan that was sure to lead to laughs all around.
6 Lucy Ricardo Wanted To Be More
Pretty much everyone has a dream of being famous. Not everyone acts on that dream, but everyone has had a daydream of walking a red carpet and hanging out with the stars at Oscars afterparties. It sure seems like it would be a blast.
And that's all Lucy wanted on I Love Lucy. She wanted to see her name in lights and be a part of the nightly show her husband, Ricky, put on at his nightclub. She wanted to be more than just a housewife, she wanted to be someone people appreciated and cheered for.
5 Chidi Anagonye Wanted To Figure Out Just One Thing
Insecurity and indecision can really eat a person up, and for Chidi Anagonye, his inability to trust himself and to make even the simplest choices not only led to his death but placed him in the Bad Place on The Good Place. But what makes Chidi so very relatable is that everyone feels insecure about the choices they've made and spends too much time trying to make new choices over the course of their lives. We fret over minor details, trying to make sure that what we do is the exact right thing, forgetting that the important thing is to live.
4 Jim Halpert Just Wanted To Get Through The Work Day
Anyone who has worked a nine-to-five office job knows that a big part of that kind of work is just finding ways to fill up the time. Much like Jim Halpert on The Office, we start to come up with ways to deal with our more-than-likely incompetent boss and spend maybe a little too much time trying to figure out what is going on with the weird guy in the office. After all, if filling out one more report or sitting through one more long meeting about nothing is a must, we might as well come up with a way to at least make it all bearable.
3 Pam Beesly Wanted To Be Happy
While Jim Halpert did everything he could to take his mind off of work at The Office, his co-conspirator in all things fun, Pam Beesly, always wanted to see what the world had to offer outside of the offices of Dunder Mifflin. Along with her artistic ability, Pam was more attuned to the world around her than most of her co-workers, and from the start, what she wanted more than anything was to be happy. Thankfully, Pam found that happiness in herself and in the family she started with Jim.
2 Lois Wilkerson Wanted An Orderly Life
While having a family was a dream come true for Pam Beesly, for Lois Wilkerson, it was something of a nightmare. The mother on Malcolm in the Middle, Lois not only had to try and keep her family's home from collapsing while her husband struggled to deal with the basic concepts of being an adult, she had to do it all while also being the only responsible person at her job.
With four wild kids and a rather useless husband, Lois was trapped in a life of chaos, and there are times when we all feel like we're surrounded by a bunch of kids running around breaking everything.
1 George Costanza Just Wanted One Good Day
In all of television history, there is no other character quite like George Costanza. The childhood friend of Jerry Seinfeld on Seinfeld, George had the misfortune of always finding himself in the worst situations. Even when things seemed to be going well for old Georgie-boy, he always found a way to ruin it, be it his job or his upcoming marriage.
And while we may not always find ourselves getting the short straw, we all have times when it feels like nothing is going right, and nothing will ever go right again. And in those moments, we are all George Costanza.