The Abbott and Costello Show
The earliest TV shows were oddly assembled transitions between old genres that were (theater, vaudeville, etc.) and the TV that would become. Abbott and Costello, which debuted in 1952, was one of the most distinctive and acerbically funny of these video lungfish. The loosely connected skits conjured a seedy, hilariously cutthroat world in which there are two kinds of people: the one getting over and the ones getting gotten over on. Straight man Bud Abbott and whiny hustler Lou Costello combined their slapstick and pratfalls with a gleefully misanthropic sensibility; no one could be trusted, even, or especially the kids, as embodied by Stinky, the bratty urchin played brilliantly by The Three Stooges’ Joe Besser. Larry David would make a living out of this attitude decades later, but as Abbott and Costello would say, they were on first.
ABC's Wide World of Sports
The gazillion dollars spent on David Beckham notwithstanding, the idea of sports making Americans aware of the larger world is something of a contradiction in terms. We are the country that plays football with our hands and has a two-nation sports league that holds a “World Series.” But for decades Roone Arledge’s ambitious anthology assembled games from hurling to jai alai, gave weekend couch potatoes a global perspective long before ESPN, and set the standard for nonfiction TV production. WWS showed American fans that there was more to “the constant variety of sport” than the NBA, NFL and MLB—even if that poor “agony of defeat” ski jumper had to sacrifice himself to get their attention.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
The celebrated thriller director lent his name, wit and rotund silhouette to this anthology of suspense, mystery and horror tales. The stories, some original, some adaptations of writers like H. G. Wells, always had knotty twists and often came to macabre endings, as in “The Case of Mr. Pelham,” in which a businessman is stalked by a perfect double who usurps his life and drives him insane. Hitchcock directed only 20 episodes; however, he not only inspired the series’ perverse sensibility but gave each episode a personal introduction and epilogue that showed that—long before HBO made it respectable—not all movie types felt that they were above television. Hitch’s arch sensibility and feel for popcorn entertainment made, in the words of his droll introductions, for a go-o-o-o-d e-e-e-e-vening indeed.
All in the Family
The story of Archie Bunker and his working-class family in Queens arrived on American TVs as loudly and rudely as the “terlet” flush that broke TV ground in the first episode. Archie embodied the shift among blue-collar union guys from New Deal Democrats to what would become Reagan Democrats, clashing with academic lefty son-in-law Michael “Meathead” Stivic. Carroll O’Connor wrung humanity out of his stubborn, racist character, without excusing him, like a man sucking the last wisp of smoke out of a cheap cigar. And the show never let politics overwhelm its heart; it used one of the oldest setups in sitcomville (the locked-in-the-storeroom) to have Archie and Meathead bond over the story of how, as a poor kid forced to wear a shoe on one foot and a boot on the other, Archie earned his embarrassing childhood nickname. Good night, Shoebooty, and thanks.
An American Family
Before reality TV involved writers, immunity challenges and Paris Hilton, there was the Loud family. A public-television crew spent hundreds of hours in 1971 with a “typical” California family that proved to be anything but. Midway through the twelve-hour cinema-verite series, paterfamilias and executive Bill Loud and wife Pat decided to split up. Their son Lance was casually introduced into the gay social scene of Greenwich Village, in what would remain one of the most matter-of-fact treatments of a homosexual TV “character” for decades. The series raised what seem like—in the Big Brother and MySpace era—quaint questions about how videotaping reality alters reality itself. But ethically justifiable or not, it remains one of the greatest documents of American life, American media and the steadily vanishing distinctions between the two.
American Idol
Let’s be clear: this is not the All-Time 100 Best Music list—any crimes against your ears and radio this show has committed are beyond my responsibility. But as a TV show, for all its cheese, filler and loopiness, Idol has done something rather amazing: it’s taken musical performance and criticism and turned it into a sporting event second only to the Super Bowl. Ed Sullivan was about taste handed down to America (and if you’re gonna give Ed credit for the Beatles, you’ve gotta remember Topo Gigio too). Idol is about America’s taste percolating up. The fact that that taste, in a given year, is reliably pretty lousy is beside the point; turning aesthetic debate—Why Is This Thing Better Than That Thing—into America’s single remaining mass weekly entertainment is good in itself. Now if someone could just figure out how to do that for politics.
Arrested Development
On one level, this sitcom about an ethically challenged California real estate family was a catalogue of 21st-century disappointments, from the war in Iraq (where the Bluths scored a sweet “light treason” deal building model homes for Saddam) to corporate corruption (with Enron and Adelphia parallels aplenty). On another level, it had Fonzie as a lawyer, great cousin-incest jokes and puns (as when Buster—perpetually henpecked by his mother Lucille, has his hand bitten off by a ‘loose seal’). The self-referential, language-besotted, in-joke-packed love child of The Simpsons and Christopher Guest movies, AD never forgot the needy human core in its family of freaks—toxic Lucille, spoiled Lindsay, David Blaine wannabe GOB, sexually confused Tobias and so on. The business was fraudulent; the characters and laughs genuine.
Battlestar Galactica
Like Rod Serling did with The Twilight Zone, Ronald D. Moore and David Eick use science fiction to write about current events, in this case, viewing the facts on the ground in the war on terror and the war in Iraq from the perspective of deep space. As in the campy 1970s series it remade, a distant civilization of humans has nearly been eradicated by the sentient robots, called Cylons, that they created. Here, many of the Cylons appear human, adding a layer of sleeper-cell paranoia and moral questions. The Cylons’ evolved status raises philosophical questions—what does it mean to be human?—and complicates things morally when the human military waterboards Cylon captives and stages suicide bombings to end an occupation. A stark, well-imagined story of a war in a galaxy far, far away, yet too close for comfort.
The Beavis and Butt-Head Show
To those who would call this MTV cartoon the boob tube at its most puerile, I have but one rejoinder: You said “boob.” This show’s fart-knocking, frog-smashing anarchy might have put it on the list alone, but B&B was so much more. It was a surreal comedy (“I am the great Cornholio!”). It was one of TV’s great inside critiques, peeling back the MTV fantasy of unattainable cool and personifying the sugar-buzzed idiot-children who paid the channel’s bills. Like creator Mike Judge’s later King of the Hill, Office Space and Idiocracy, it was an unsparing, minutely observed and surprisingly good-hearted picture of consumer America. And to the list of great philosophical dialectics—good/evil, yin/yang—it added another: “That’s cool” / “That sucks.” B&B was on the right side of that one.
The Bob Newhart Show
Which was better: The Bob Newhart Show or Newhart? Both were excellent comedies, with essentially the same laid-back, stammering protagonist. (So similar that it seemed only natural that Bob should end the second show waking up in bed next to Suzanne Pleshette, his wife from the first.) It’s basically like asking: which was better: the ’70s or the ’80s? Well, I’ll say it—the ’70s. Or rather, that decade’s introspective, self-help-focused ethos, and his ’70s sitcom’s psychiatrist’s office setting, were a slightly better match with Newhart‘s sophisticated, droll, talky comedy of neurosis. So I award the nod to Hartley, his talking cures that never quite cured anyone and his windy Windy City patients. (Sorry, Larry, Darryl and Darryl.)
Brideshead Revisited
“I should like to bury something precious every place where I’ve been happy, so that when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I can come back and dig it up. Remember.” This in a sense was the spirit of this lush, 11-part adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel of memory, in which British army officer Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons), just before WWII, recalls his youth at Oxford and his befriending by Sebastian, a fey, teddy-bear-toting dandy who changes his life. In 1981, it was controversial for its sex scenes and its overt and covert homoeroticism. Seen today, it looks at first like a particularly expensive version of the British costume nostalgia that became a public-TV cliche. But what distinguishes Brideshead is its sensitive ability to translate the novel’s tone of wistfulness and regret to the screen. Brideshead took a novel and made it into a poem.
Buffalo Bill
This lustily misanthropic comedy was HBO back when HBO was just a movie channel: it took Dabney Coleman, the movie’s comic villain of choice (Tootsie, Nine to Five), and made him into Bill Bittinger, the preening, conniving host of a local-TV talk show. A man whose only moral dilemma was whether it is better to lie to get a job or to get into someone’s pants, Bill bulldozed over rivals and meek producers on the strength of Coleman’s swaggering, damn-the-likeability performance. This sitcom was smart and ahead of its time, and that plus 50 cents will still get you canceled after two seasons, but it’s hard to imagine Larry Sanders—or Larry David—or David Brent—without Buffalo Bill.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Who says there are no second chances in Hollywood? Joss Whedon saw his script for the 1992 movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer made into a one-joke travesty of a teen comedy. Five years later, like a mystic being resurrected within a pentagram, it came back to life as a magical dramedy, a ripping thriller and the smartest work of girls-kick-ass feminism ever crafted by a pudgy guy who’s into comic books. Sarah Michelle Gellar nimbly handled the show’s undead allegories for coming-of-age conflicts (her stunt double nimbly handled the rest). And the show unspooled a rich mythology, realistic family and relationship stories and the best Sondheimian musical episode ever written for hour long television. The demons and ghouls were comically rubber-faced, but Buffy’s spirit was achingly real.
The Carol Burnett Show
Comic veteran Burnett assembled a tight, remarkably stable ensemble of regulars (Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Tim Conway, Lyle Waggoner) and put out a consistent show that owed as much to personality as brilliant writing. The show relied on funny accents, slapstick and just-plain-shtick (there’s no reason Mrs. Wiggins’ sharpening her pencil should have been so funny; it just was). But what carried it was the good-feeling chemistry between the cast and the versatility of the star, a charming redhead who packed a mighty Tarzan yell.
Next: The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
The idea that there was once an omnipotent, omnipresent and widely respected mainstream media may largely be a myth. But like many myths it has a real-world inspiration, and Uncle Walter’s newscast, in its ’60s and ’70s heyday, is it. Cronkite’s steady demeanor and comfortable manner cornered the market on trust and made him all the more influential the rare times when he ventured into commentary. When Cronkite famously declared Vietnam “unwinnable” in 1968, President Johnson reportedly said that once the anchor was against him, he had lost Middle America. Since he left the anchor chair in 1981, no single newsman (or woman) has ever gotten Middle America back.
A Charlie Brown Christmas
TV doesn’t generally do melancholy, especially at ho-ho-holiday time. Which only makes this special about a loser adopting an anemic Christmas tree, more, well, special. Vince Guaraldi’s cool jazz score is a perfect fit for Charles Schulz’s dry humor, as is the subdued, painterly animation. (And the anti-commercialization message is only slightly undercut by knowing that the original contained product placements for Coca-Cola.) Some viewers are turned off by the dated, un-P.C. explicit religiosity—Linus recites a lengthy New Testament passage about the birth of Christ—but to this Jewish-cum-atheist viewer, its honest faith makes the show more authentic.
Cheers
Long before Lost, there was a series about the connections among a group of unrelated people on an island. This island just happened to have stools around it and an alcoholic ex-pitcher pulling beers in the middle of it. Cheers‘ setting—not home, not an office—set it at the margins of its characters’ lives; a bar is where you go to get away from the big events of your life, not live them out. That meant that Cheers was free to find humor in the little things—Cliff’s obsession with trivia, Norm’s greetings, Carla’s insults. And the one big thing driving the show’s early years, Sam and Diane’s bickering romance, was a rare will-they-won’t-they-oh-they-just-did storyline that didn’t disappoint. Cheers was playful, urbane and bracing as a tall cold one.
The Cosby Show
Since Seinfeld, “hugging and learning” have come to stand for a certain kind of namby-pamby network comedy. But while there was hugging on The Cosby Show, doctor Cliff Huxtable’s love for his kids was filtered through the wry, no-guff sensibility that Bill Cosby developed on his comedy records. And the learning was literal, as the throughline of the series was son Theo Huxtable’s struggles with dyslexia. (The plot became poignant with the 1997 murder of Cosby’s son Ennis, on whom Theo was based.) It’s a sign of how quickly Cosby changed TV that in just a few years it would be the standard that The Simpsons rebelled against. But by introducing TV to upper-middle-class African Americans, the show gave us a realistic sitcom family that America actually could learn from.
The Daily Show
Jon Stewart’s nightly fake-newscast has become a bold, truth-telling Onion of the air for a cynical, disaffected, not-as-ill-informed-as-you-might-think audience. And while we journalists often characterize the show as being about politics, it’s really about us: the show has nailed the reflexive media impulse to rationalize conventional wisdom, to sensationalize, and to reduce everything important to a branded phrase and a dandy graphic. (“Mess O’Potamia,” e.g., for the war in Iraq.) Stewart and company have found the B.S. detector that stenographic media outlets seem to have thrown in the trash, cleaned it off, souped it up, and cranked up its sensitivity to 11.
Dallas
J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) took America from the 1970s to the 1980s. 1978, when Dallas appeared, was in the midst of the Iran crisis, on the heels of gas crunches, energy crises and Jimmy Carter in a cardigan telling us to dial back our thermostats: an oil baron as a primetime villain made perfect sense. And the summer of 1980, when the country caught Who Shot J.R.? fever, was when Ronald Reagan was about to begin the ’80s love affair with business and money. But current-events relevance was just the icing on Dallas‘ petroleum-soaked cake: it was the perfect primetime soap because of its timeless mix of sex, money, intrigue, family and lies. Plus a delightful, stetson-hatted villain whom everyone had a reason to kill—and whom, therefore, viewers wanted to live forever.
The Day After
Set in an around Lawrence, Kansas, this 1983 ABC movie showed the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear war between the US and the USSR. The movie had its share of melodrama, but its depiction of the war’s result was stark: millions die instantly, millions more die slowly, society collapses and the happiest ending is a painless death. Did The Day After change anything? On the one hand, the policy of mutually assured destruction continued; on the other, President Reagan reportedly sent one of the producers a note after the Reykjavik disarmament summit crediting the movie’s influence. Either way, for one night a medium of escapism got 100 million Americans to look at something it spent generations trying not to think about, and that was special enough.
Deadwood
In this Western, the West is not so much won as stolen—first, of course, from the barely seen Indians, then by mining corporations from the prospectors who risked death and ruin to find the gold in them-thar hills. (These thar ones being the Black Hills, of South Dakota, just after Little Big Horn.) The law is as much a bludgeon as a savior, as the powerful strike sweetheart deals and the little guys scrabble as best they can: Al Swearengen, the Bowie-knife-wielding saloonkeeper; Seth Bullock, the lawman with rage issues; and Calamity Jane, the drunk, brokenhearted former pal of the doomed Wild Bill Hickok. Written with Shakespearean filigree by David Milch, these characters gave Deadwood its vulgar poetry.
The Dick Van Dyke Show
TV has always loved to talk about itself, and this sitcom was the first in a line of classic shows set in the TV business. Unlike some of its cutthroat successors, DVD made the TV biz seem downright friendly, as Rob Petrie wrote sketches for the egotistical Alan Brady (Carl Reiner, in occasional guest shots) and cut up with pals Buddy Sorrell and Sally Rogers (Rose Marie, in a rare early role as working woman comic). But this hybrid series was also set half at home, and the comic chemistry between the dashing, ottoman-tripping Van Dyke and a smokin’ young Mary Tyler Moore as Laura makes the show hold up even today.
Dragnet
Viewed alongside a complex modern cop drama like The Wire or even The Shield, Jack Webb’s mother of all procedurals looks like a cave painting. But there’s an artistic economy to the show’s simple storylines and clipped cadences—Det. Joe Friday may never have used a semicolon in his life. And a lot of more ambitious dramas could learn something from its clean, documentary style and single-minded commitment to story, story, story. (“Just the facts, ma’am” was not a slogan but a command.) And then there are the spare, noir visuals; not only did this show teach Law & Order and CSI how to tell stories, it looked damn fine doing it. Friday kept his personal life under his tilted-just-so hat, but he arrested our attention all the same.
The Ed Sullivan Show
For someone under 40, seeing Ed Sullivan on a television screen is astonishing. Stooped, brusque and imposing, he seems not only pre-televisual, but prehistoric. (His contemporaries nicknamed him “Old Stone Face.”) This guy brought us The Beatles? And yet for over two decades Sullivan defined pop culture every Sunday night. By making comfortable older viewers who had grown up before TV, the square Sullivan bridged the generation gap like a Soviet-bloc leader transitioning from socialism to runaway capitalism. Then the revolution overtook him; The Rolling Stones mocked him, The Doors defied him and the young audience finally clicked away from him. But not before he established TV as America’s new arbiter of taste and tastelessness.
The Ernie Kovacs Show
It’s hard to imagine today that, half a century ago, TV was essentially the Internet: a wicked cool invention that experimentalists would toy with just to see what crazy stuff they could make it do. Ernie Kovacs was the most innovative of TV’s early mad scientists, using his comedy hour to spoof such then-new creations like newscasts and ads and using visual effects like upside-down pictures and tilted sets to appear to defy gravity. Comedy is lying done amusingly, and Kovacs knew that TV—which purported to show all but hid everything beyond the outline of the box—was a divine medium for lies. Kovacs would have been a natural in the age of YouTube; instead he made TV into HimTube.
Felicity
The finest, funniest and quirkiest of the ’90s explosion of young-adult dramas, this WB bildungsroman was a rare soap about a young woman in which her personal growth was as important as her love life. True, the title character (Keri Russell) moved across country to follow high-school crush Ben (Scott Speedman) to the University of New York (strongly based on NYU), and the hook of the series was her choice between him and her friend Noel (Scott Foley). But the real storyline—the way it is in college—was as much about discovering what she wanted to do, what her interests were and who she was. Unlike many teen soaps, Felicity recognized that its characters weren’t fully formed: they experimented, they made mistakes, they contradicted themselves and surprised you. Like My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks did for high school, Felicity took on college and aced the test.
Freaks and Geeks
Adolescence never hurt so good as it did in this comedy-drama about outcasts in a Michigan high school circa 1980. Created by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow, it had the hallmarks of Apatow’s later movies: uncomfortable yet sweet relationship humor and a refusal to typecast (the nerds, for instance, are not especially brainy). F&G was also a rare realistic depiction of small-town life, with its class divisions and dawning realizations that some kids’ escape fantasies are more likely to come true than others. All that, plus an outstanding soundtrack (Styx, Rush, Neil Young) and Dungeons & Dragons too; this ur-text of outcast comedy rolled its duodecahedron die and hit 20 every time.
The French Chef
Like many postwar Americans, Julia Child took a trip to France and had meals that changed the way she looked at food and eating. Fortunately for us, she brought back a doggie bag of knowledge and enthusiasm. Child’s public-TV show taught Americans weaned on frozen and canned food that using fresh ingredients didn’t make you superior, it just made you happier; that cooking needn’t be intimidating; and that it was OK to make mistakes. Laughing off her kitchen flubs, employing cream and butter in amounts fit to kill an army and ushering America into the foodie era with a disarming warble, Child served up TV dinners that were actually good for us.
Friends
No sitcom has ever been as deliberately self-effacing as Friends. The title, the theme song, the episode names (“The One Where…”) were self-explanatory at best, insipid at worst. They were friends; they were there for each other. Move along, nothing more to see. But it wasn’t just the sharp writing or the comic rapport that made Friends great. Its Gen-X characters were the children of divorce, suicide and cross-dressing, trying to grow up without any clear models of how to do it. They built ersatz families and had kids by adoption, surrogacy, out of wedlock or with their gay ex-wives. The show never pretended to be about anything weightier than “We were on a break.” But the well-hidden secret of this show was that it called itself Friends, and was really about family.
General Hospital
Considering that successful soaps tend to outlast stars, viewers, and nearly everything except giant tortoises and redwoods, it makes more sense to assess them by their individual eras rather than as overall series. In the Luke and Laura Era, during the late ’70s and early ’80s under producer Gloria Monty, GH had the greatest cultural reach of any daytime soap ever. It dominated the ratings—nearly 30 million people watched the star-crossed couple wed—and paved the way for primetime soaps like Dynasty, with its over-the-top stories and characters like the Quartermaine Family. The glitzy, garish, ga-ga golden era of GH defined a TV genre in which too much was barely enough.
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
Burns and Allen’s vaudeville-to-screen transition was one of the first comedies that could properly be called a sitcom, as opposed to a string of funny bits. But it also presaged the form-breaking experiments of decades later, as Burns “broke the fourth wall” to comment on the action directly to the audience. Like the racist caricature of Jack Benny’s manservant Rochester, Allen’s scatterbrained wife—all together now, “Good night, Gracie!”—can be hard to take today. But as a performer, Allen was every bit Burns’ comic equal, and she gave her persona enough verve and canniness to suggest that Gracie was ditzy like a fox.
Gilmore Girls
Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel must have had personal trainers who had them lift tiny weights with their tongues. Amy Sherman-Palladino’s chatter-rich scripts brilliantly took single mom Lorelai and teen daughter Rory and made them the stars of a Tracy-Hepburn love story. (Sample: Rory teases her mom about dating a much younger man. Lorelai: He’s in his twenties! Rory: He must have been a very good boy to deserve such a happy day. I bet they let him ride a pony.) But what sold the show was Graham and Bledel, as a mother-daughter duo who could never say I love you—however indirectly and snarkily—often enough, or in too many words.
Gunsmoke
Like it’s six-foot-seven star James Arness, this classic Western seemed to go on forever, setting the drama-series longevity record at 20 seasons. Arness’ Marshal Matt Dillon was the focus of life in Dodge City, Kan., whose large ensemble also included young Burt Reynolds as a half-Indian blacksmith and Amanda Blake as saloon keeper—or was that “saloon keeper”—Miss Kitty? (In an earlier radio version of the show, Kitty was implicitly a prostitute.) Crisply directed, moral but not naive, Gunsmoke showed good winning out over greed and brutality, but—like Dillon in the opening shootout—good was always only a split-second ahead on the draw.
Hill Street Blues
The Prisoner and miniseries told serial stories before Hill Street, and The Fugitive hung a years-long chase on its otherwise self-contained episodes. But Steven Bochco’s cop drama popularized the serialized “story arcs” by proving that audiences would have the patience to stick with a story longer than 60 minutes. Hill Street proved that a TV show could make a virtue of messiness in plots that didn’t resolve neatly (or sometimes at all) and heroes who crossed ethical lines. Through conflicted captain Furillo, abrasive Buntz and biting-prone Belker, Hill Street showed us imperfect people delivering imperfect justice in an imperfect world, and did it to near perfection.
Homicide: Life on the Street
This deeply character-based police drama from Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson was notable for being a show where the murders were less important than the psyches of the cops who solved them (and sometimes failed to). The ongoing drama involved the Baltimore detectives who tried to turn the writing on the murder board from red (unsolved) to black (closed), including cerebral, intense Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher), sensitive rookie Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor), imperious Lt. Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto) and sardonic John Munch (Richard Belzer). With an acute sense of the media, political and spiritual ramifications of crime, Homicide drew a broad picture of how many lives were changed when one is taken.
The Honeymooners
The story of bus driver Ralph Kramden and wife Alice was an unfancy celebration of unfancy people. The episodes—most of them sketches within The Jackie Gleason Show—were limited to sparse sets, usually the Kramdens’ bare bones Brooklyn walkup. But the dynamics between rubber-faced Gleason, Audrey Meadows and swivel-hipped jack-in-the-box Art Carney as sewer guy Ed Norton made the setting seem expansive. OK, so it was TV’s most famous example of spouse-abuse-threats-as-comedy. But knowing that there was no way Alice was ever actually going to go to the moon only added to Ralph’s blobby comic ineffectuality.
I, Claudius
Where would we be without the Romans’ contributions to civilization? The Latin alphabet! The aqueduct! And, of course, the respectable public-TV orgy! This seamily intellectual 1976 miniseries about Rome’s stuttering-but-savvy fourth emperor established what would become HBO’s modus operandi, and not just because it tread similar ground to Rome or because it happened to involve a certain conniving mother named Livia. It proved that the lofty and the sordid were not mutually exclusive, by offering a politically acute version of history that also showed us what happened when the togas came off.
I Love Lucy
The sitcom that by now is almost a synonym for “classic” got that way by doing all the things that everyone at the time knew you weren’t supposed to do. You couldn’t have a female star who was both attractive and funny. You couldn’t have her male lead be an urban Latino—playing those devil conga drums at that!—whose Cuban accent was thicker than a platter of ropa vieja. You couldn’t for God’s sake build a storyline around a (gasp!) pregnancy. Lucille Ball’s contributions to TV’s past are so obvious—Vitameatavegamin, the Tropicana Club, the slapstick routines—that it’s better to note what this show says about today’s future: sometimes the greatest sign of a future-classic TV show is that it doesn’t look like classic TV.
King of the Hill
The most acutely observed, realistic sitcom about regional American life bar none, this animated series is a lot like its protagonist, Texas propane salesman Hank Hill: it isn’t flashy, never gets a lot of attention, but it does its job year in and year out. With a harsh war-veteran father, a pudgy son more interested in prop-comedy than football and a stubborn, Boggle-obsessed wife, Hank tries to avoid both his dad’s callousness and P.C. feel-goodism while sticking to his principles of hard work in a world that rewards shortcuts. Creator Mike Judge makes Hank funny in his pained Boy-Scout rectitude without making him a figure of fun for it, and with its canvas of mega-stores and Laotian yuppies, the show sees modern America’s fine detail like an electron microscope.
The Larry Sanders Show
If there’s one thing Hollywood has more of than self-love, it’s self-loathe. Premiering right around the King-Lear-like bloodsport over the future of Johnny Carson’s throne, Garry Shandling’s comedy cast a gimlet eye on insecure, petty late-night host Sanders, and found no shortage of takers in showbiz to send themselves up: Ellen DeGeneres, Carol Burnett, Roseanne and David Duchovny, evincing the most unsettling man-crush TV has ever seen. But the needy heart of Sanders was its supporting characters, including Jeffrey Tambor as self-promoting, self-hating sidekick Hank “Hey Now!” Kingsley, and Rip Torn as Artie, the most terrifyingly unctuous producer ever to stalk a green room. Shandling revealed Hollywood’s blemishes like the world’s funniest jar of makeup remover.
Late Night with David Letterman (NBC)
Why not CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman? Lower stakes = greater comedy, something Letterman proved in his early days as a local weatherman, predicting hailstones “the size of canned hams.” Like Ernie Kovacs (q.v.), Letterman at his best gives you the feeling of being lucky enough to watch him play with this awesome toy he’s been given. It was here that he honed many of the features he brought to CBS—Top Ten Lists, Stupid Pet Tricks—dropped watermelons off the tops of buildings, donned an Alka-Seltzer suit (in homage to Steve Allen) and had unsettling run-ins with Harvey Pekar. He also sharpened the ironic sense of humor that, far from being easy nihilism, is rooted in a good old-fashioned Midwestern distaste for phonies. David Letterman can be a ham, but he’s never canned.
Leave It to Beaver
I’ll be honest: I did not expect to put this show on this list. I mean, Leave It to Beaver? That sugar-coated jawbreaker of ’50s naivete? But on a fresh viewing, this show—unlike, say, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet—holds up. Jerry Mathers came across as a real kid, tentative, not too bright and fueled by a boy’s natural cocktail of curiosity and fear. (Beaver’s imagination always served up far more gruesome consequences for his antics than he ever actually suffered.) And in an underrated performance as Beaver’s dad Ward—June always got all the love—Hugh Beaumont added just a note of fallibility and wistful nostalgia to the typical role of the all-knowing dad.
Lost
In a way it’s a misnomer to call Lost one of TV’s best shows—it’s a fine show on the level of character and writing, but what makes it a classic is that it’s the finest interactive game ever to appear in your living room once a week. An elaborate fractal pattern of intersecting stories concerning plane survivors on a not-quite-deserted island, a secretive international organization and a monster made of smoke, Lost only begins with the 60 minutes you see on TV. Its mysteries, clues and literary-historical allusions demand research, repeat viewing, freeze-framing and endless online discussions. And in a medium where executives assume that viewers will flee anything that remotely challenges them, Lost proves that millions of people will support a difficult, intelligent, even frustrating story—as long as you blow the right kind of smoke at them.
Married... with Children
In 1989, Michigan housewife Terry Rakolta organized a boycott against this family insult comedy, deeming it offensive, raunchy and sleazy. Curious viewers tuned in, agreed with her—and kept the show on the air for over 10 years. Shoe salesman Al Bundy (like the show, he spent his career stooping as low as possible) was crude, saddled with an oversexed wife and disappointing kids, and Ed O’Neill—one of the best character actors on TV—played him to whiny perfection. Like the Simpsons, the Bundys were really a twisted mirror of TV’s instant-gratification culture, an illustration of deadly sins—lust, sloth, greed—suitable for a medieval morality play. Zestily lowbrow and sex-obsessed, Married was dedicated to the classical ideal that unhappy families were more interesting than happy ones… and a lot funnier.
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
“Ahead of its time” is a cliche for cult shows, but it may also be an understatement in this case. I’m not sure the time will ever quite come for Norman Lear’s fantastically weird, deadpan parody of soap operas and consumer culture. A nightly comedy-drama, set in a small town in Ohio, its stories involved country music, a murder mystery and the title star, played by Louise Lasser in her iconic pigtails, a housewife obsessed with waxy buildup on her kitchen floors. Following the binge of the ’60s and the purge of Watergate, Lear’s unsettlingly sardonic show captured a hungover America, wandering in a Valium-like haze, morally adrift, and addicted to—you guessed it—television.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
When the former Mrs. Rob Petrie made it, after all, onto her own sitcom as a single TV-news producer in Minneapolis, it was liberating for women on TV. But it also liberated TV for adults, of both sexes. Since Mary Richards was neither a wife nor a mom nor (a la That Girl) a single gal defined mainly by her boyfriend, her self-titled sitcom was able to be a sophisticated show about grownups among other grownups, having grownup conversations. Moore made Mary into a fully realized person, iconic but fallible, competent but flappable (“Mr. Gra-a-a-ant!”), practical but romantic. Mary Richards was human and strong enough to be laughed with and laughed at, and that was the kind of liberation that mattered most.
M*A*S*H
Before M*A*S*H, the line between TV comedy and TV drama was as well demarcated as the DMZ between the two Koreas. This military-doctor comedy daringly combined zany humor—equal parts Marx-Brothers slapstick and high-class wordplay—with dark drama, as when the war claimed the life of the base’s first chief, Col. Henry Blake. (The show banned canned laughter in its operating-room scenes, presaging the single-camera, laugh-track-free comedies of today.) Like many great shows, M*A*S*H stayed on the air a few years too long, got preachy, and grew as shaggy and soft as B.J. Hunnicut’s anachronistic hairdo. But it proved that comedy could be serious, drama could be funny and both could cut like a scalpel.
The Monkees
Remember, this is not a musical top-100 list—see the entry on American Idol. But whatever contributions the Prefab Four didn’t make to music, their show was a form-breaking tribute to video chaos. This sitcom-cum-marketing-platform was surrealistic, experimental, self-referential and as trippy as a network show of the time could reasonably be. (It’s funny to think that it was on the same network that was airing the drug-paranoid Dragnet ’67.) Davy, Micky, Mike and Peter made up what they lacked in musical cred with real acting chops, using improv in a way that foreshadowed shows like Reno 911! while the show’s psychedelic wackiness presaged the hallucinatory Saturday-morning shows of Sid and Marty Krofft. And as for its show of TV’s power to fabricate pop sensations? Again… see American Idol.
Monty Python's Flying Circus
If not for the efforts of five Britons (and one American animator), paid for by the BBC and imported by PBS, nerds the world over would still have to impress each other by quoting the periodic table of the elements. Python made erudition cool by tearing out the final stones in the Hadrian’s wall between high and low culture, showing that Sartre references and “botty” jokes could live together in hilarious sin. The show’s droll, Dadaist sketches—I won’t try to list them, but your brother or nephew in college will be glad to—hold up so well decades later because they focus on the timeless: philosophy, the class system and, of course, the eternal issue of transvestitism in the lumber industry.
Moonlighting
Moonlighting was a show about solving crimes in the same way that Cheers was a show about mixing drinks. The draw of this romantic dramedy was the screwball interplay between cocky private eye David Addison (Bruce Willis) and tough-talking ex-model Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd). Their on-again, off-again relationship—which, like most such TV romances, was best when it was off-again—was by far the show’s most intriguing mystery. But the greatest attraction was the show’s flights of fancy: musical episodes, takeoffs on The Honeymooners and The Taming of the Shrew and the occasional fantasy sequence involving Dr. Joyce Brothers and Ray Charles. The show’s on-screen bickering was reflected in backstage chaos, and viewers drifted away after a couple seasons, but it was a crazy love affair while it lasted.
MTV 1981-1992
In a way, a list of the 100 best TV shows misses the point of how people watch TV in the cable era: they watch networks—HGTV, ESPN, Nickelodeon—as much as they do shows. MTV, in the pre-Real World era, was the first network to teach viewers to watch this way, when the moon man planted its flag and killed the radio star in 1981. Quick-cut and compressed—video in concentrate form—music videos were not just a new way of selling music: they changed TV series (the pitch for Miami Vice was simply, “MTV cops”) and influenced movies (graduating directors like Spike Jonze, David Fincher and Michel Gondry). The best clips from MTV’s all-video ’80s heyday—from Michael Jackson to Talking Heads—captured the power of the music, rather than replacing it. MTV taught us to see with our ears and listen with our eyes.
My So-Called Life
Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz made their name in TV with thirtysomething, a drama about solipsistic adults who saw their every minor crisis as an all-consuming tragedy. In other words, they acted like teenagers. And in the producers’ follow-up high-school drama, the same navel-gazing was somehow more sympathetic and appropriate. Angela Chase (Claire Danes) was a fully realized TV teen, smart and perceptive one minute, whiny and unstable the next, ready to burst into red-faced tears after getting jerked around by learning-challenged heartthrob Jordan Catalano. Angela’s narration was angsty in that ’90s, suburban, I’ve-listened-to-In-Utero-a-million-times way—”School is a battlefield for your heart”—but she won the battle for our hearts anyway.
Mystery Science Theater 3000
With so much TV, from reality shows to bad movies, the best entertainment is what happens in your living room. This basic-cable masterpiece raised talking back to the TV into an art form, as a human and his robot buddies were consigned to live on a satellite, watching lousy movies against their will. The team’s rapid-fire references ranged from the scatological to the Biblical (“Give us Barabbas!” they shout over a crowd scene in Attack of the Giant Leeches). With other meta-TV shows like E!’s Talk Soup, MST3K was an example of what culture critic Steven Johnson called “information filters,” or media about other media; it filled the snarky role of blogs before blogs existed. From the vantage of MST3K‘s lonely Satellite of Love, pop culture was hell, and heaven too.
The Odd Couple
It’s the concept that launched a million lousy pitches. (“He’s an uptight accountant in jail for securities fraud! His cellmate’s a fast-talking pimp! They’re the original odd couple!”) But this classic sitcom made lightning strike twice by casting Tony Randall and Jack Klugman as finicky Felix and slovenly Oscar, fitting the roles as perfectly as Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau did in the film (based on the Neil Simon play). The pair were lonely ex-husbands—at a time when it had just become acceptable to talk about D-I-V-O-R-C-E on TV—slowly, reluctantly realizing their faults and culpability for their problems. Urban, urbane and stagey in the best sense of the word, this sitcom affirmed that opposites could attract an audience. I still don’t forgive it for the Lethal Weapon movies, though.
The Office [American]
This remake ditched the melancholy of the BBC original (q.v.) in favor of a cheekier rebelliousness: a little less Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a little more Office Space. It also has a deeper, diverse bench of characters, including schoolmarmish Angela, chatty Kelly, cold-hearted Ryan, creepy Creed, angry Andy and screw-you-guys clock-puncher Stanley. The carryover stories have been complicated as well, especially the Pam and Jim romance, which has allowed Pam more of an inner life and self-discovery. Still, I’d pay to see an alternate-universe scenario where Dwight Schrute meets Gareth. (And just so you don’t think I wimped out by including both on the list: I like it better than the BBC version. Let the fighting begin!)
The Office [British]
Ricky Gervais delivers a cringe-tastic performance as David Brent, a paper-company manager and frustrated singer-comedian, who’s never met a work situation he couldn’t turn into a potential lawsuit. Whether accidentally braining a new hire with a soccer ball or hijacking a training session with a sing-a-long of Free Love Freeway, Brent combines a blinkered egocentrism with the pitiable determination to be liked: “I’ve created an atmosphere where I’m a friend first, boss second. Probably entertainer third.” What makes Brent funny is that he’s wrong; what makes him sympathetic is that he really believes he’s right, and with mainly good intentions. He may have been neither a good friend nor boss in the end, but he was certainly entertaining.
The Oprah Winfrey Show
Is it an exaggeration to say that Oprah (why did anyone ever bother giving her a last name?) is the biggest star in TV history? Certainly no one has ever done so much with the power of a camera, a philosophy (uplift, pop-psychology, confession) and a magnetic personality. Half therapist, half saleswoman and all businesswoman, Oprah leveraged her show with Warren Buffett-like skill into a financial and philanthropic empire. Even her train wrecks—Tom Cruise, James Frey—are entertaining. America’s Best Girlfriend has a supernatural gift for making you think she is talking to and about you, even when—more often than not—she is actually talking about herself, and that makes her the spirit of daytime TV incarnate.
Pee Wee's Playhouse
Paul Reubens’ sweet, surreal Saturday-morning show was a gift to all ages. Reubens’ hyperactive man-child lived in a house populated by living furniture, a French talking globe and a genie, and visited by jheri-curled Cowboy Curtis (a young Laurence Fishburne). Pee Wee knew what kids wanted: cartoons, craziness and a secret-word excuse to SCREAM REAL LOUD! With its camp, gender transgressiveness (Mrs. Steve?) and Miss Yvonne’s over-the-kids’-heads innuendoes, some parents found the show too adult, and when Reubens was arrested at an adult movie theater in 1991 for indecent exposure (kids’ entertainers can’t have sex drives!) it was over. But he left behind several seasons of a show that taught kids it was OK to be weird and different—even if real life didn’t return the favor to him.
Playhouse 90
While Playhouse 90 was unquestionably a great show, it wasn’t really a great *TV* show; it was a theater repertory producing stage plays that happened to have cameras pointed at them. But TV is a distribution tool as well as an art form, and Playhouse 90 produced some of the finest writing and acting that TV’s electrons have managed to carry. Its original productions—often performed live—included Requiem for a Heavyweight and The Miracle Worker, while its adaptations brought writers like George Bernard Shaw and William Faulkner some of the biggest audiences they would ever have. Later TV dramas took advantage of the wider possibilities that videotaping offered, but this anthology gave them a high target to aim for.
The Price Is Right
Much-loved but less respected than brainiac quiz shows like Jeopardy! and Twenty-One, TPIR has earned its longevity by making the skills of everyday consumer life into entertainment. The show’s contestants aren’t held up as smarter than the home viewer—they are the home viewer, excitability, comfortable T-shirts and all. The show’s populism extended to its recently retired host Bob Barker, who was so much more accessible—literally, letting contestants hug and paw him—than the lectern-ensconced hosts of other game shows. How can you put an actual retail price on that?
Prime Suspect
The title of this British series may have referred to the targets of crime investigations, but the chief person of interest was always detective Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren). A cop with a drinking problem and unstable relationships, Tennison was better at chasing down killers than her personal demons. The series, created by writer Lynda La Plante, dealt with the special challenges Tennison faced as a woman officer—in one season, she has an abortion, which is neither condemned nor treated as a social statement—but not by making her a paragon. Tennison could be curt, volatile and simply unpleasant. But her weaknesses also made her empathetic and intuitive. Acted with daring and honesty by Mirren, Tennison made strengths of her weaknesses.
The Prisoner
You can trace Lost, The X-Files, and every other paranoid show-puzzle in the last few decades to this enigmatic story of Number 6 (Patrick McGoohan) and his attempt to escape a charming little gulag by the seaside. The British series (seen first by Americans on CBS) imagined a deceptively beautiful totalitarian community—”the village”—in which people’s memories were erased, no one could be trusted and the premises were patrolled by the most sinister big white balloons you ever saw. Resonant with cold-war suspicions (who is the enemy? Is it us?), the 17-episode series offered closure of a sort, though fans argue over its details and its resolution to this day. Whatever your theory, this most Kafkaesque of TV series was, well, captivating.
The Real World
Before it became a college internship in binge drinking and casual sex, this ur-reality show was an actual interesting social experiment—if not the kind it was advertised as. No, it was not really about what happened when seven kids living under cameras “start[ed] getting real.”(That’s why it was all the more arresting in season 3 when actual reality intruded on the show in the form of AIDS activist Pedro Zamora, who died soon after the season aired.) It’s about performance, and young people’s complicated relationship with authenticity and privacy in the Internet age. Survivor added a million-dollar giveaway to the concept, but in The Real World—as in Laguna Beach, and for that matter, nearly every MTV reality show since— attention itself is the prize.
Rocky and His Friends
Considering that we didn’t all get blown up, I think we can now agree that the Cold War was worth it, if only for giving us this Ike-era spy-vs.-spy send-up, in which Rocket J. Squirrel and lovable dimwit Bullwinkle J. Moose defended the US of A against Pottsylvanian sneak Boris Badenov and the slinky Natasha Fatale. Writer-animator Jay Ward’s other creations (on Rocky as well as its follow-up The Bullwinkle Show) included oblivious Mountie Dudley Do-Right; time-traveling canine inventor Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman; and the Fractured Fairy Tales narrated by Edward Everett Horton. All shared a love of puns (Bullwinkle was an alum of Wassamatta U), a fast pace and a nothing-sacred sensibility. Rocky may not have won the space race, but it gave red-blooded American kids a leg up on the Russkies in appreciating satire.
Roots
The most watched TV drama ever, Roots reached the height of TV’s ability to spur social discussion by surveying the depths of America’s original sin. The show, viewed by over 100 million Americans, provided a surrogate family story for millions of African Americans whose histories were lost in the culture-obliterating diaspora, and confronted whites with the brutalities of slavery. How authentic Roots‘ history was remains open to question: scholars have cast doubt on Alex Haley’s novel (which he said was based on genealogical research into his own family); the miniseries itself tended toward melodrama. But it started an important conversation about race in America and spurred popular interest in long-neglected African American history. Whether Roots offered the right answers or not, its power came from getting America to ask the right questions.
Roseanne
The concept behind Roseanne was so simple it was radical: a sitcom about a blue-collar family in the Midwest, with money troubles and unvarnished family issues, headed by a strong-willed woman who said what was on her mind. Roseanne (nee Arnold, nee Barr) and her TV family dealt with subjects that were rarely handled in family comedies: domestic abuse, mental illness and plain old-fashioned money dramas. Barr benefited from great supporting actors, including John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf and one of TV’s most believable casts of kids. Roseanne often got as much attention for its problems as its successes (the star’s backstage temper and National Anthem singing, the lottery-winning storyline of the last season). But that’s fine: like many ambitious works—and its star—Roseanne never offered a dull moment.
Sanford and Son
Never was a more unlikely comic adapted so effectively to a sitcom as Redd Foxx. Foxx, whose stage act liberally employed words and references that you still can’t use on broadcast TV, was cleaned up, but not smoothed over, as junkyard proprietor, serial over-actor, widower and ornery cuss Fred Sanford. But Foxx’s transition to TV wouldn’t have worked without the understated work of Demond Wilson as his son Lamont. Lamont was the suffering grown-up, dreaming of building up the family business (or ditching it and moving out) and chafing at having to keep Fred out of trouble. Fred was the manipulative child, having another in a series of “heart attacks”—”I’m coming to join you, Elizabeth!”—when he needed sympathy. Sanford and Son may not have played to the champagne crowd, but it went down like a smooth glass of champipple.
Saturday Night Live
For its first couple of years, SNL was a genuine comedic rebellion, with the like of John Belushi affecting a rude mid-’70s punk-rock pose. With success, SNL went from playing CBGB to stadiums, but as the Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers and Tina Fey peaks proved, mass success doesn’t always mean the death of funny. SNL is not really a TV show anymore so much as a graduate school of American comedy, and it’s been as significant for the kind of artists it didn’t know what to do with (Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman) as for the stars it effortlessly launched (Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler). And every now and then it proves it can still matter, as when Rudolph Giuliani joined producer Lorne Michaels for the show’s pitch-perfect return after 9/11. (Michaels: “Can we be funny?” Giuliani: “Why start now?”) Like a land shark, or a certain organ in a box, SNL can still surprise you.
Second City Television
Like SNL, SCTV had a history of launching comedy’s Next Big Things (John Candy, Rick Moranis, Martin Short)—but without the bothersome distraction of being a massive hit. Originating in Canada, the sketch show had a certain modesty that fit the stereotype of the self-effacing Canadian; even its most popular creation, Bob & Doug McKenzie’s “Great White North,” was a good-natured parody of government-mandated, low-budget “Canadian culture” programs. It was wry where SNL was brash and meta where SNL was direct (each show took place in the context of a fictional low-budget TV network). That’s not to say SCTV was dull and cerebral—what with the Shmenge Brothers and the blowing things up “real good”—but SCTV dared to be little, and was bigger for it.
See It Now
On the one hand, the title captured the potential of the then-new medium for journalism: we will record it, and you will see it, now. (The first shot was a then mind-blowing split-screen live image of both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans: two coasts, in your living room, at once!) On the other hand, See It Now did not just use television as a transmission tool; it took full advantage of TV’s editing and production capabilities to assemble a new kind of news narrative. Its most famous confrontation was between Edward R. Murrow and Red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose old-fashioned demagoguery proved no match for TV’s power to rebut his claims and, worse, allow him to make a fool of himself on camera, letting America see him, and clearly.
Seinfeld
Channeled through Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David’s most dyspeptic ideas about people preferring the misery of others to their own mild inconvenience came off as amusing rather than misanthropic; through David, Seinfeld‘s what’s-the-deal riffs became piercing insights, not trivia. And few roles have been so perfectly cast and complemented as Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the sharp-tongued Elaine, Michael Richards as gawky oddball Kramer, Jason Alexander as self-interested George, and Seinfeld as, well, Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld was a hearty soup of humor, a layered marble rye of humanity, master of its comic domain—it was real, and it was spectacular.
Sesame Street
Recognizing that television was going to be an electronic babysitter whether anyone liked it or not, Jim Henson and his Muppets provided a safe, friendly haven that spoofed the media world that kids were immersed in when the show wasn’t on. From Kermit’s news reports to Guy Smiley’s game shows to Elmo’s World, Sesame Street has been filled with shows within shows, which take the commercial TV world’s come-ons and apply them to educational building blocks. Along the way, kids have learned about friendship, cooperation and even (through Mr. Hooper) death. The show’s format has evolved over the years (recently taking cues from hits like Blue’s Clues and Dora the Explorer), but it remains one of the savviest things ever brought to kids by the letters T and V.
Sex and the City
The Naked City, indeed. This HBO comedy, based on the columns of Candace Bushnell, divided women into four archetypes: preppy Charlotte, sardonic Miranda, assertive (in and out of bed) Samantha and neurotic narrator Carrie. In truth, there was always more talking than headboard bumping on SATC, and that was always the point. You came for the—well, coming—and you stayed for the banter, the analysis of what society expects from single (and married) women, the Big-vs.-Aidan arguments and the friendship. Contrasting the glamour of upscale Manhattan life with the mundane hard work of committing and coupling, SATC, struck the right balance of fantasy and realism—just like a good relationship.
The Shield
Although this police drama was inspired by a cop-corruption scandal of the 1990s, when it debuted in 2002 it had a distinctly post-9/11 theme: what moral compromises are we willing to accept in the name of safety? It centers on Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), an extremely effective, extremely shady cop heading an LAPD unit that takes down murderers and pushers, usually trampling the Bill of Rights and pocketing dirty money for themselves in the process. The Shield depicts a dirty, red-in-tooth-and-claw L.A. where no one, from cop to politician, white, black or brown, is entirely selfless. No show does a better job of making you feel your TV screen needs a good Windexing when an episode is over.
The Simpsons
The Simpsons is the TV equivalent of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (once parodied in the opening “couch gag”). After it came along, nothing was the same, and it established a generation’s cultural references and sensibility. (Is there any situation without a suitable Simpsons quote?) Starting out as a family cartoon, it grew a cast of hundreds that spanned celebrity (Ranier Wolfcastle), religion (the de-diddly-vout Flanders family), business (C. Montgomery Burns) and immigration (Apu). But maybe its best and favorite subject has been television itself—”Teacher, mother, secret lover!”—which it has lampooned through Krusty the Clown, Kent Brockman and the Laramie Cigarette sponsorship of Radioactive Man. It even embodies its own critique in the person of crabby superfan Comic Book Guy, but for all the long-lived series’ ups and downs, it remains the Best. TV Show. Ever.
The Singing Detective
In Dennis Potter’s masterwork miniseries, novelist Philip Marlow (Michael Gambon) lies in a hospital bed with a crippling skin condition, mentally reworking a pulp detective story while thinking back to his troubled childhood in wartime England. As the detective story (whose protagonist is also called Philip Marlow) and real-life story unfold, characters from Marlow’s inner and outer worlds begin to mingle, as the figures from his past become conflated with the characters they inspired, as well as with people from Marlow’s present life. Mixing fact and fiction, past and present, dream and waking life in an inspired modernist welter — along with 1940s’ musical production numbers—this daring dramatization of the subconscious puts Ally McBeal’s dancing baby to shame.
Six Feet Under
Alan Ball’s all-in-the-funeral-family drama expanded on the themes of his movie American Beauty: families keep secrets, people maintain facades, and while death may be final, life is messy. The saga of the Fishers reveled in its characters’ contradictions: matriarch Ruth (Frances Conroy) was both uptight and free-spirited; artist daughter Claire (Lauren Ambrose) was insightful yet whiny; son David (Michael C. Hall) was repressed yet brave; other son Nate (Peter Krause) was idealistic yet could be a total jerk. In its bravura last few episodes Nate dies of a brain hemorrhage — just after splitting up with his wife from his hospital bed — and the Fishers themselves became the mourners, celebrating Nate’s imperfect life and moving on. The elegiac epilogue, fast-forwarding through the lives and deaths of each remaining main character, was the series’ best imaginable epitaph.
60 Minutes
“You know I hate to miss 60 Minutes,” Elaine says in the “Puerto Rican Day” episode of Seinfeld. “It’s part of my Sunday weekend wind-down.” For nearly 40 years, 60 Minutes has been simultaneously confrontational and as comforting as a mug of warm milk. The show has been much imitated (where would your local-news’ Shame On You segment be without it?) and has had its embarrassments (the tobacco back-down chronicled in the movie The Insider, a good number of Andy Rooney segments). But it sticks to the ideal that a camera could be a crowbar to pry out truths. In a medium that depends on millions sitting and watching, it reminds us that TV can be most effective (or scary) when watching you.
Soap
This racy soap-opera parody was over the top of the top, with storylines ranging from Latin American revolutions to alien abductions to religious cults to demonic possession. Built around the saga of the upscale Tate family and the middle-class Campbells, the sitcom was unapologetically outrageous, but it wasn’t totally outlandish. Part of its appeal and daring was that it showed, at the tail end of the sexual revolution, that the real world was changing in ways that soaps could barely keep up with. Along with the wacky amnesia plots, there was also interracial marriage and prime time’s first un-closeted major gay character, played by Billy Crystal. Sure enough, the show was regularly protested by groups who considered it morally depraved. But, hey, it was the end of the ’70s. Who wasn’t depraved?
The Sopranos
To get a sense of how The Sopranos changed TV, get a pen and make a list of the 20 best TV dramas before 1999. That list will very likely include Magnum, P.I. This mafia saga showed just how complex and involving TV storytelling could be, inspiring an explosion of ambitious dramas on cable and off. In Tony Soprano’s world, it wasn’t the Mob that kept pulling you back in to old, destructive patterns, it was your family: your controlling mother, your maddening wife, your feckless kids. Meanwhile, the big-F Family drama of the declining Mafia business offered popcorn entertainment alongside the deeper insights. Some fans may have hated the series’ abrupt ending, but the fact that the show’s last moments obsessed us demonstrates that America never stopped believin’ in the power of this story.
South Park
Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Comedy Central cartoon has been America’s best source of rapid-fire satire for a decade now, blasting hypocrites left and right and giving the final (and usually, the dirtiest) word on Elian Gonzalez, Terry Schiavo and numerous celebrity flip-outs. But the show’s authentic, filthy heart is the four foul-mouthed, truth-telling Colorado boys at its center. Eric Cartman, especially, is a creation for the ages — America’s wants and appetites rolled up into one pudgy package. The show’s best episodes are not the current-events riffs but the stories about the boys, like “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” in which Cartman concocts a Grand Guignol revenge against a tormentor involving cannibalism and a trained pony. Parker and Stone put the “id” in kid, and for that, we respect their authoritah.
SpongeBob SquarePants
Since its founding in 1979, Nickelodeon has developed many good-for-you programs—Blues Clues, Dora the Explorer—aimed at spurring kids’ education and development. SpongeBob is not one of those shows. But it’s the most funny, surreal, inventive example of the explosion in creative kids’ (and adult) entertainment that Nick, Cartoon Network and their ilk made possible. Animator and marine-biology teacher Stephen Hillenburg translated the objects of his study in to the Dadaist world of Bikini Bottom, where the title character flips Krabbie Patties, creates disasters and gets by on good-natured innocence. SpongeBob may not have a spine, or much of a brain, but he’s all heart.
SportsCenter
A confession: I am not a sports fan, and rarely turn on the TV to get a score or a highlight of anything. And yet I watch SportsCenter — indirectly, anyway — every time I see a Daily Show, a Keith Olbermann Countdown or even a certain brand of smart-assed commercial. For sports fans, it’s delivered the news and numbers, at all hours of the day, since ESPN began in 1979. For TV at large, it pioneered a kind of loose, allusive hipster humor, part Caddyshack, part Monty Python — “Bring me the finest meats and cheeses in all the land!”—that’s spread throughout cable and even to news desks. Its best host pairings — like Olbermann and Dan Patrick, or Stuart Scott and Rich Eisen—were as much comic duos as newsmen. (Aaron Sorkin took on the format in his highbrow sitcom Sports Night.) As a sports show, I’m sure SportsCenter was a fine enough staple; as a TV comedy, it was en fuego.
Star Trek
For a show that was set hundreds of years in the future, Star Trek was very 1960s: not just the miniskirts, but the war and race allegories that creator Gene Roddenberry wrote into the series. Capt. James T. Kirk led a crew of all colors (and ear shapes) across the universe to follow the Prime Directive and defuse conflicts. Though the sci-fi show was colored by its troubled times, it also had a genuine postwar optimism, believing that technology, science and cooperation could actually lead humanity to unity and progress. Dated as the original Trek can look—with Kirk chasing galactic babes and space hippies—its first-rate sci-fi plots still hold up, as does the hope that hundreds of years from now we might be still boldly going.
St. Elsewhere
Physicians, heal thyselves: the story of St. Eligius, a Boston hospital of last resort for poor patients (hence its nickname) was important not so much for the diseases its doctors cured as the afflictions they suffered. Neither soap stars nor Welbyesque saints, Elsewhere‘s characters dealt with infidelity and moral crises; one was discovered to be a rapist, while another contracted AIDS. Elsewhere pioneered the quirky humor of modern dramedies, full of in-jokes and pop culture references (fictional TV doctors would sometimes be paged on Eligius’ intercom). The loved-hated finale still divides fans; the entire series was revealed to take place in the imagination of the autistic son of Dr. Westphall (Ed Flanders), who turned out not to be a doctor at all. But it was a beautiful dream while it lasted.
The Super Bowl (and the Ads)
Get this tv seriesFirst devised as a condition of the merger of the AFL and NFL, the big game quickly became the kind of national communion that only TV could make—a day long ritual and feast, an event that you watched because you needed to watch that thing that everyone was watching. And in 1984, with the debut of the Apple Macintosh 1984 ad, the game became a showcase for commercials and seemed to realize its true purpose: to be a massive, expensive, profligate tribute to the desires of America’s consumers and to the full bellies of its warehouses. (Somewhere in all the movie previews and product launches, a game still gets played.) Showy, theatrical and full of talking animals, America’s favorite short-film festival erases the boundary between shopping and entertainment, if there ever was one.
Survivor
In reality TV, 90% of success is in the concept, and Survivor‘s remains the master equation: isolation + cash prize * hot-weather clothing = entertainment. Still, the 10% that is execution separates the best from the rest, and Survivor remains a constantly surprising and enthralling game, both socially and physically. Even after seven years, there’s no clear single best way to win the political game of Survivor: is it better to be liked (Africa’s Ethan) or respected (the first season’s Richard), a master athlete (Palau’s Tom) or a master strategist (All-Stars’ Rob and Amber)? Whether or not it sheds any light on how people behave in “real” society, it remains the most engrossing example of how people really behave in the fake society of a high-pressure TV contest.
Taxi
A taxicab is just a space you occupy on the way from somewhere you wanted to be to the next place you want to be more. That was the way most of Louie De Palma’s employees looked on their time at the Sunshine Cab Company. Whether an aspiring actor, a bad-luck boxer, a self-proclaimed reverend or a befuddled immigrant, Taxi‘s motley characters spoke to a universal feeling. ‘This job isn’t who I am. It’s just what I do’—who hasn’t felt that? But while a majestically weird Andy Kaufman and gleefully troll-ish Danny DeVito drew the big laughs, the emotional heart was soulful sad-sack Alex Reiger (Judd Hirsch), the one cabbie who was just a cabbie. Whether or not anyone in this garage was ever truly going anywhere, the ride was worth it.
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
Tonight was zippy with Steve Allen, unpredictable with Jack Paar and—well, still on the air with Jay Leno, but it was under Johnny that it reached its apex as a cool but comfortable late-night hangout. It’s a tough balancing act to give a late-night show broad appeal: you’re speaking to both the elderly and young night owls, you need to be relaxed enough to put your viewers to bed without putting them to sleep. Carson was just the right mix of ingenuous Midwesterner and urban sophisticate, in control but self-deprecating, quick-witted but not enervating. His comic style was as smooth as his pantomime golf swing, and he stayed in control even when being climbed by all manner of zoo animals. Ushering viewers from waking life to dreamland, he gave America thirty years of good nights.
24
I was hesitant to include this show after its sixth—and admittedly terrible—season. It’s easy to forget, though, how new and bracing the format that’s now routine once was. Created before Sept. 11 and debuted just weeks after, 24 captured the country’s edgy mood, and not just because it was about terrorism. With its breathless real-time format and multi-screens, 24 reflects the same information-overload media culture that gave us the zipper and screens-within-screens on cable news. The computers work a little too efficiently, the LA traffic is suspiciously light and Jack Bauer never has to take a leak, but Kiefer Sutherland gives Bauer psychological weight in the most outlandish situations, racing against a ticking clock that tolls for us.
The Twilight Zone
Many TV writers spend their careers trying to get critics to take them seriously; Rod Serling’s genius was to create a serious show and convince people that it was frivolous. The Twilight Zone‘s anthology episodes were mini masterworks of pulp storytelling, but they were also comments on conformity, McCarthyism and the threat of nuclear war, among other (often unnoticed) subjects. Yet in a famous 1959 interview, Mike Wallace asked Serling why, with the show, he had given up writing anything “important.” The Twilight Zone wasn’t self-important, though, nor was it an editorial—many of the episodes were about more philosophical conflicts, or just old-fashioned sci-fi mind-blowers. But Serling taught TV writers a lesson that’s lived on today in shows like Battlestar Galactica: if you’ve got a point to make, sometimes it’s better to let the monsters and robots do the talking.
Twin Peaks
David Lynch and Mark Frost made something really weird happen, and I’m not talking about Laura Palmer’s murder, a dancing dwarf, a Log Lady or an owl. They turned primetime TV into a giant indie art-house theater, and regular American channel surfers by the millions became its black-turtlenecked denizens. The story of a teen girl’s death in the Pacific Northwest—and the pie-eating, deadpan-soliloquy-spouting FBI agent investigating it—carried on the theme, from Lynch movies like Blue Velvet, of sordid secrets and ancient horrors hid behind a facade of wholesome Americana, proving that TV could equal or surpass film in its storytelling ambitions. Twin Peaks may have had the shelf life of a freshly poured cup of coffee, but it was damn fine nonetheless.
The West Wing
The fall after the Clinton impeachment trial, The West Wing offered a fantasy: a stand-up president (Martin Sheen) who really never did have sexual relations with that woman. Aaron Sorkin made policy debates as dynamic as a police shootout; the show trademarked the kinetic hallway “walk and talk scene” and crackled with sharp, witty dialogue. It could be preachy, self-congratulatory and idealized, but maybe making a dark critique of government would have been the easy thing to do; instead, The West Wing asserted that people in government could be competent and well intentioned. For many, of course, the real point of watching the show was the 30s-screwball-comedy flirtation between Josh and Donna. But at heart The West Wing was a civic romance in love with democracy, and it didn’t care who knew it.
What's My Line?
Early in this game show, you are reminded of what a different time it was made in, and I don’t mean when the intro proclaims it “television’s gayest game!” It’s when panelist Bennett Cerf is introduced as a “publisher, raconteur and wit.” Try to imagine somebody on Deal or No Deal being willingly labeled with any of those three descriptives. The concept was simple: a celebrity panel asked yes-or-no questions of guests and tried to guess what they did for a living. But the real game—as on You Bet Your Life or, later, Match Game—was listening to the panel reason and trade witticisms. The cocktail banter and the choice of panelists—columnists, politicians—befit a time before the Jerry Springer / Charlie Rose apartheid of low and highbrow talk TV. The stakes may have been low on What’s My Line?, but the conversation was raconteurriffic.
WKRP in Cincinnati
This radio workplace sitcom was as disposably ’70s as the loud patterns on Herb Tarlek’s leisure suits, but it was something more too. It’s probably best remembered for its gut-busting stories of office hijinks and promotions gone wrong (“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!”). But it was an underratedly smart show, infused with a sense of things ending—especially, the free-form, anarchic, album-rock ’70s. (One of its most moving episodes was about the 1979 Who concert stampede disaster at Riverfront Stadium.) From its wistful theme song—”Just maybe think of me once in a while”—to its setting at a small-market station past its heyday, WKRP mixed a few bittersweet notes into its playlist of savvy comedy.
The Wire
Through a sprawling, Balzac-ian network of cops, their targets, and the politicians and bureaucrats around them, The Wire tells the story of a declining industrial city—Baltimore, but it could be many others—and the people struggling amid, or profiting off of, its downfall. In The Wire‘s view, the world is not divided cop-vs.-robber or black-vs.-white so much as machine-vs.-individual; officer, teacher, drug soldier or pol, people are screwed by institutions that discard them when they’re used up and reward inertia over innovation. (The best chance, The Wire suggests, is for free agents like its unlikely hero, the street bandit Omar, who robs drug dealers and answers to no one.) Yet the series—which, by the way, is also a fantastically realistic cop show—is also funny and the opposite of nihilist, giving everyone from detectives to junkies dignity. Occasionally, it even offers a glimpse of something like hope, which is all the sweeter for being harder earned.
Wiseguy
Vinnie Terranova (Ken Wahl) wasn’t a bad guy: he just played them on TV, as a deep-cover agent who insinuated himself into crime organizations. Where past cop shows were obliged to wrap up their investigations in 30 or 60 minutes, Wiseguy‘s lasted months, allowing Vinnie to risk not only his body but his soul as he developed troubling empathy for his prey. But the real stars of this show were the captivating villains, played by the likes of Tim Curry, Jerry Lewis and Kevin Spacey, who delivered one of TV’s all-time great guest turns as the decadent, volatile arms dealer Mel Profitt, who held a gun on Vinnie in a game of Russian Roulette and deadpanned, “The idle rich are so hard to entertain.” Ah, but they were so entertaining themselves.
The X-Files
In this aliens-among-us mystery, sci-fi writer and surfer Chris Carter melded ’60s don’t-trust-the-Man paranoia with ’90s black-helicopter paranoia. FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) was his own biggest x-file, pursuing a conspiracy that involved the alien abduction of his sister. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) was his rational foil, doubting his outlandish theories even after she experienced a disappearance-and-implantation episode herself. Mulder and Scully also solved standalone paranormal cases, but the the big draw of the show was its baroque mystery—as well as its comic relief and Mulder and Scully’s nerdy sexual tension—and the show petered out after Duchovny jumped ship. But for years this conspiracist gem drilled into our reserves of horror and mistrust, and struck black oil.
Your Show of Shows
With a staff that included Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner and Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H), Sid Caesar’s variety show indirectly launched a generation of movie, TV and theater comedy brilliance. But the main attractions here were Caesar and costar Imogene Coca, who paired up on outstanding live skits and parodies. Coca was a versatile performer, who could play aristocrats as well as hoboes; Caesar was fast-talking and dynamic. It was a tremendous weekly output for a relative handful of performers and after four years Caesar and Coca split up, but not before giving birth to sketch comedy as we know it—a show of shows indeed.
How I Chose The List
First, I apologize. I know I left some of your favorite shows off this list. How do I know that? Because I left some of my favorite shows off this list. (The Rockford Files, Get a Life and Aqua Teen Hunger Force, for starters.) The happy and unfortunate fact is that there are far more than 100 great shows, and more created every year. Adding to this list would be easy; taking shows off is the tricky part.
How did I settle on this list? Each previous All-Time List—movies, albums and novels—was divvied up between two critics. I’m TIME’s only TV critic, so I have twice as much opportunity to be wrong. Starting months ago, I polled friends and colleagues, read other lists and spent days watching DVDs and going to the Paley Center for Media to re-evaluate shows I hadn’t seen in decades. And I set a few guidelines:
—It’s My List… which means that it’s unavoidably subjective, indefensible and shaped by my experience. I included British shows, for instance, but not many, and generally those that got wide exposure on American TV. Because I’m American, and we’re like that.
—… But It’s Not All About Me. This list is not just about what I like or have fond memories of, or it would include Man vs. Beast and Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp. Like any critic, I relied not just on my gut but on aesthetic priorities. (Important: voice, originality, ideas, character and influence. Not so important: social conscience, moral values, educational content. I sincerely hope that no one over 5 watches TV to improve him or herself.)
—No Grading on A Curve. There are shows that have been handicapped because they had to deal with restrictive broadcast standards, because the medium was new, because they had to get a bigger audience than boutique cable shows, and so on. This is not fair. It is also not my problem. I aimed to make a list of the 100 best TV shows, not the 100 best shows “considering what they had to put up with,” “for their time” or “if you like that sort of thing.”
—Spread It Around. Is The Price Is Right objectively equal to The Sopranos? Of course not. But TV would not be TV without game showsand talk shows, and sports, and soaps, and videos and even commercials. TV should be smart, but TV should also be dumb. So while I judged each show on its merits, I also stepped back, looked at the list, and tried to give an overview of what TV is and has been: fiction and non, daytime and primetime, highbrow and low, broadcast and cable.
—It’s Not a Popularity Contest. This list features huge hits and commercial disasters. Some great shows have big universal themes and wide appeal; others have small audiences, not because people are stupid, but because they have themes (say, inside-show-business satire) that only so many people care about. I don’t believe that the people are always wrong (or I’d never have picked American Idol), but if I put shows on the list simply because a lot of other people would, I might just as well have thrown together Nielsen’s top 100 and gotten the whole thing done in an hour.
—Two Shows, One Slot. Where two shows with the same creators or talent had similar themes, milieus, characters or narrative styles, I generally picked one. So: Monty Python but no Fawlty Towers; Cheers but no Frasier; Seinfeld but no Curb Your Enthusiasm; The Bob Newhart Show but no Newhart; My So-Called Life but no thirtysomething. I did include both versions of The Office because they were different achievements (the American is the better series, Ricky Gervais’ the better performance), but also because—all together now!—it’s my list.
—The One-Year Rule: I considered only shows that debuted before 2006, to see if they held up beyond one season or (if they lasted a year or less) if they have held up over time. Sorry, Friday Night Lights.
Those are my rules; I took them seriously, and broke most of them at least once. Ultimately, I also had to realize that this isn’t the Periodic Table of the Elements; it is a freaking top-100 list. It is hopefully well-informed, but it is not inherently more correct than your top-100 list. Lists are meaningless: they sell magazines and give you something to talk about at the bar. Lists are incredibly important: they are how we define what matters to us, what we want entertainment and art to do, what we expect of our culture.
Most of all, lists are about having fun and picking fights. If you have read my list and think I am a moron, that’s all the thanks I need.
A - F
- The Abbott and Costello Show
- ABC's Wide World of Sports
- Alfred Hitchcock Presents
- All in the Family
- An American Family
- American Idol
- Arrested Development
- Battlestar Galactica
- The Beavis and Butt-Head Show
- The Bob Newhart Show
- Brideshead Revisited
- Buffalo Bill
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- The Carol Burnett Show
- The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
- A Charlie Brown Christmas
- Cheers
- The Cosby Show
- The Daily Show
- Dallas
- The Day After
- Deadwood
- The Dick Van Dyke Show
- Dragnet
- The Ed Sullivan Show
- The Ernie Kovacs Show
- Felicity
- Freaks and Geeks
- The French Chef
- Friends
G - M
- General Hospital
- The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
- Gilmore Girls
- Gunsmoke
- Hill Street Blues
- Homicide: Life on the Street
- The Honeymooners
- I, Claudius
- I Love Lucy
- King of the Hill
- The Larry Sanders Show
- Late Night with David Letterman (NBC)
- Leave It to Beaver
- Lost
- Married... with Children
- Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
- The Mary Tyler Moore Show
- M*A*S*H
- The Monkees
- Monty Python's Flying Circus
- Moonlighting
- MTV 1981-1992
- My So-Called Life
- Mystery Science Theater 3000
N - S
- The Odd Couple
- The Office [American]
- The Office [British]
- The Oprah Winfrey Show
- Pee Wee's Playhouse
- Playhouse 90
- The Price Is Right
- Prime Suspect
- The Prisoner
- The Real World
- Rocky and His Friends
- Roots
- Roseanne
- Sanford and Son
- Saturday Night Live
- Second City Television
- See It Now
- Seinfeld
- Sesame Street
- Sex and the City
- The Shield
- The Simpsons
- The Singing Detective
- Six Feet Under
- 60 Minutes
- Soap
- The Sopranos
- South Park
- SpongeBob SquarePants
- SportsCenter
- Star Trek
- St. Elsewhere
- The Super Bowl (and the Ads)
- Survivor
T - Z
- Taxi
- The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
- 24
- The Twilight Zone
- Twin Peaks
- The West Wing
- What's My Line?
- WKRP in Cincinnati
- The Wire
- Wiseguy
- The X-Files
- Your Show of Shows