Throughout its initial success and later criticism, sitcom Good Times revolutionized prime-time television. While the story lines of 1950s and early 1960s television sitcoms provided little more than cautious counsel on the minor vicissitudes of family life, the decade of the 1970s ushered in what came to be known as the era of relevancy in television programming. In Good Times, which aired on CBS from February 1974 to August 1979, suburban street crime, muggings, unemployment, evictions, Black Power, and criticism of the government were frequent and resounding themes. The show is regarded as perhaps the first in prime-time television to tackle such issues with any measure of realism. It stretched the boundaries of television comedy and provided a different view, not only of black family life, but of the social fabric of 1970s American society in general.

Good Times, along with Maude, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, and...