You've maybe seen it in a lot of movies. But it was horrible tank for the crews in WW II. Many an Allied tank crew would have to be scraped off the inside of the tank after taking a direct hit by a German Tiger or an 88 mm anti-tank gun. It wasn't called a Tommy cooker for nothing. Without air power to help the Germans would've slaughtered the Allied in their Shermans. Its protection was totally inadequate and it originally had a woefully inadequate gun. It was upgraded later to a version that could actually kill the German tanks.

Here's a movie clip that's accurate in the sense that it shows how helpless individual Shermans were against even a single Tiger.