The Ten Best MARTIN Episodes of Season One

https://jacksonupperco.com/2022/11/02/the-ten-best-martin-episodes-of-season-one/

I love Martin. I think Martin Lawrence is one of the funniest people we’ve ever covered on this blog, and I often find myself guffawing at the outrageous comedy offered in a dozen or so terrific episodes of his self-titled sitcom — episodes that I’m thrilled to be adding to this blog’s figurative rolodex. But in order to appreciate this series, I want to be clear about its strengths. For starters, I can’t pretend to consider Martin the paragon of an ideal sitcom. Although it has a classic design and embraces the conventions of the multi-camera format, indeed developing into a more traditional sample of this genre as its run progresses, I neither think it compares favorably to other situation comedies from this era based on the definition we’ve established, nor do I think the elements that create its sitcom status are what make it so hilarious. Oh, said elements are helpful, yes, in the same way that any basic structure helps focus material, but if I’m being honest, Martin is funny because it embodies the wild and free-spirited comedy of its star Martin Lawrence, a standup comic for whom FOX built this sitcom. And as a series on a network still willing to experiment, Martin — mainly in its first few years — has a sense of imagination and abandon that grants it a uniquely comic ethos, one that renders its “situation comedy” aspects relatively thin and sketch-like, distinguishing the show from other contemporaneous sitcoms via uproarious laughs that reflect the sensibilities of its star, but with limitations that can’t be disguised both narratively and by way of character. That is to say, Martin isn’t a sitcom worth watching because it’s a textbook example of the form — it just doesn’t have the excellent character work of Frasier or the influential storytelling of Seinfeld, for instance — but rather, it’s a sitcom worth watching because it’s hysterical and satisfies its own terms, as a vehicle for a great star and his one-of-a-kind comedy, which paired well with a network once upon a time willing to take risks with shows that were genuinely different, and on talent (like this entire cast of incredible Black performers) who maybe wouldn’t get a chance elsewhere.