The Nanny

The Nanny was born at 30,000 feet. Fran Drescher, then best known for small film roles, found herself on a transatlantic flight with CBS president Jeff Sagansky and pitched him a sitcom on the spot — an idea she'd hatched while visiting the model Twiggy in London, imagining a spin on The Sound of Music where the door opens on her instead of Julie Andrews. She created the show with her then-husband Peter Marc Jacobson, and it premiered on CBS on November 3, 1993: Fran Fine, a fashion-loving Jewish girl from Flushing, Queens, talks her way into a nanny job in the Manhattan townhouse of Broadway producer Maxwell Sheffield.

The engine of the show was collision — Fran's leopard print, miniskirts, and foghorn laugh against the Sheffields' old-money reserve. She mothered the three kids (Maggie, Brighton, and Gracie), traded flirtation-by-insult volleys with Maxwell, and watched the real comedy pros work the margins: Daniel Davis's butler Niles waging a years-long war of barbs against Lauren Lane's scheming C.C. Babcock. Drescher's wardrobe became a character in itself — decades later the show is still mined by fashion accounts as a lookbook of 90s designer excess.

The series ran six seasons and 146 episodes — Fran and Maxwell finally married in the season-five finale — and ended on June 23, 1999. It collected twelve Emmy nominations (winning one) and traveled astonishingly well for a comedy built on a Queens accent: it aired in more than eighty countries and ranked among the highest-rated shows of the decade in Australia. For a generation of viewers, the whole premise still unspools instantly from memory the moment the animated theme song starts.