Best ensemble cast?

Your standards describe a good, versatile cast. But an ensemble cast shouldn't have an obvious star. The actors around him were all aces, but there's a reason it was called "The Andy Griffith Show" and not "Mayberry".

 

Doesn't "Seinfeld" shoot that theory down?

 

Why would it? Seinfeld was the clear star of the show. There were Elanie and Kramer and Costana and even Newman-driven plots, but all roads led to Jerry.

Friends, by comparison, was a pie split six ways.

 

Well, Alda was the obvious star on MASH and Ron Howard on 'Happy Days.'

 

Aldo and Howard became the obvious stars, but I don't think the show existed to be a vehicle for them. Even toward the end of MASH's run, when it was obvious that Alda's "this damn war" soapboxing drove the show, it still wasn't Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce and the Seven Surgical Dwarfs. Closer, but not quite yet.

 

"Happy Days" was strictly a vehicle for Ron Howard at the outset. Tom Bosley and Marion Ross were semi-recognizable TV character actors, but that was it. Opie had been a featured lead on a top-10 show for nearly a decade.

"MASH" wasnt sold as the "Alan Alda Show," but the focus was on him. He wasn't a big Hollywood A-list actor, but he had topped the bill on "Paper Lion" and "Mephisto Waltz," which had done decent runs in the theaters.

Actually the marketing campaign for "MASH" was kind of weird: obviously it was supposed to be a kind of spinoff of the movie "M*A*S*H," but the movie was a very hard-R when it came out, so there wasn't much overlap with the 'family viewing' audience.

I never saw the movie "M*A*S*H" for some 25 or so years afterward. I always thought Donald Sutherland was Trapper John and Elliot Gould Hawkeye.

 

In that case, I would submit that it was a star vehicle that evolved into an ensemble cast when others caught up. The other Seinfeld characters caught up to a lesser degree, but it was still Jerry's show to the end.

 

No way.
'Seinfeld' evolved into an ensemble show. The Jerry storylines we often the B or C plots in an episode.

 

Homicide: Life on the Street

 

But Jerry was still the selling point, still the anchor. It wasn't Kramer's standup in the intro (oh if it were, thought). You'd be hard-pressed to merely call him first among equals.

 

The two most amazing things about The Simpsons, to me, are that they've kept the same cast together for 25 years, and that none of them have really done much in the way of side projects. I think Yeardley Smith and Hank Azaria (and, of course, Phil Hartman early on) are the only regulars who have done anything in Hollywood outside of The Simpsons. I don't even think a lot of them have done voiceover work, or at least not enough to be noticed.

 

You know they're not real, right?