YOUR Top Five TV shows

Tough to just pick 5:

Hill Street Blues
M*A*S*H
West Wing
Dick Van Dyke
Big Bang Theory

Leaving out many ....

 

I forgot Rosanne. That show was amazing save the last season or two. It went downhill after Sara Gilbert went to college, but it was always must see for me.

 

M*A*S*H
Law and Order
LA Law
St. Elsewhere
All in the Family

 

1. Get Smart
2. The Honeymooners
3. All in the Family
4. The Sopranos
5. Gunsmoke

Honorable mention:

Streets of San Francisco
Twin Peaks
Southpark
Hawaii Five-O
Family Guy
The FBI
The Simpsons
McHale's Navy
Dragnet
MASH
F-Troop
Sanford and Son
Columbo
The Odd Couple
The Untouchables
The Fugitive
Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Twilight Zone

 

I've been rewatching 'Mr. Show' on IFC.

What a great show.

 

In no particular order

Homicide
Hawaii Five-O
The Wire
West Wing
Cheers/Frasier (tied because of a spinoff)

 

Battlestar Galactica
Peep Show (BBC)
Life on Mars (BBC)
The Wire
Married With Children

 

The Inbetweeners
West Wing
Weeds
It's Always Sunny
Knight Rider (best show ever when I was 7)

 

Most of you are familiar with my posts and, thus, familiar with how much I overthought the hell out of this list. Even establishing criteria was difficult; there's so much more to analyzing television shows than analyzing movies, which finish up within three hours, all ends tucked in and all ties severed.

I love TV because it's not neat, because there always a loose end. Very few shows began and ended exactly how and when the creators planned. You keep creating new plots in hopes of keeping the threshing machine fed, even long past the point where the show ideally would have moved on to pasture. How I Met Your Mother is the most extreme example of this; a show with a clear starting point and a clear finish line that can be reached at any point, whenever CBS allows.

Most successful shows drag on too long. Most unsuccessful shows wrap up too soon. I decided the fair way to judge TV shows is to look at the entire body of work. Freaks and Geeks never had a bad moment, but it lasted 18 episodes. The Simpsons was golden for a decade, then dragged on for another decade-plus.

So my main criterion was simple: Which shows provided my favorite moments and did so with a degree of consistency?

1. Seinfeld
There was never any doubt on this one. Seinfeld existed for nine seasons and was brilliant for seven, Seasons 2-8. The first season is flawed but approachable in its flaws, has all the raw elements that would make the show great and improves greatly as it goes. The ninth season was all over the place but produced several of the most iconic moments in the show's run. The rest? Season 4 is the best non-serialized season in TV history, and every season has 10-plus standout episodes. The characters were original, the premise was absurd and the writing was real and spectacular.

2. Cheers
Cheers' first five seasons have formed the basis for every will-they, won't-they plot in every sitcom since. Diane was the perfect foil, and Sam was the perfect lead. But if the show had ended when Shelley Long left, it would be at least five spots lower. Instead, Cheers' last six seasons were a pitch-perfect showing of ensemble comedy. It's incredible how often they never left the bar for entire episodes; actors aside, Cheers must have been a cheap show to shoot. But that simplicity provided warmth in a way no other show I've seen has had. The Cheers bar was the best set in TV history, often acting as a key character in itself. There's also a lot to be said about a show with arguably the best pilot and the best finale ever. Cheers wasn't as original as Seinfeld, and it only occasionally was as funny. But I wouldn't change it. It's the most approachable show ever.

3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
This show featured a far-out premise, goofy name, hot blond lead, California high school setting and weird mix of weekly plots and serialization. It shouldn't have worked, at least not with critical praise and good (enough) ratings. But Joss Whedon is a genius. Buffy had its ups and downs throughout its run, but I connected with these characters and the world they inhabited. I don't go for much in the way of fantasy, but the core of this show was built on human relationships. The characters are fresh and the writing is sharp. The emotional moments are real and refined, even when they involve a key character going insane with power and nearly destroying the world. Sarah Michelle Gellar doesn't get enough credit for her acting as Buffy, either.

4. South Park
Trey Parker and Matt Stone get me. They're relentlessly cynical and overthink things and end up hating everybody and everything when push comes to shove. Also, they are creative to a fault. You can tell when they threw something into an episode entirely because it made them laugh, and I love those moments. No show vacilates between absurdly crude and poignantly cynical better. South Park provides stronger social commentary than The Daily Show ever could because South Park willingly and openly mocks its own existence and takes no sides on any matter. South Park will make mock you for being right and doing good. It's a show for smart assholes. Most of us are assholes. Some of us are smart, too.

5. Friday Night Lights
Five months ago, I hadn't seen an episode of this show. That's ridiculous. It's completely and totally up my alley, and I never watched it before because I hadn't started watching it in the beginning and never made time for it. On my first viewing, I found a bunch of small flaws with it, mostly stemming from the lack of continuity from season to season. But I keep coming back to it when I'm looking for something to watch, and the reason is it's wonderful. The characters are deep and real despite the huge cast. The plots are smart. Four of the five seasons are memorable and awesome. Even the oft-maligned second season is much better than most dramas' worst seasons. What I really love most, what I think of first with Friday Night Lights, is the atmosphere. The acting and the cinematography and the music and the settings all work together to form a beautiful image, a visual masterpiece. I fell for Parenthood before watching Friday Night Lights, and Jason Katims has matured in some ways with Parenthood. But his characters and setting were better, deeper and more interesting with Friday Night Lights.

6. Community
This is one of those shows I started watching on its first episode and never stopped and never will stop. It's the most creative sitcom I have seen, raising the bar with every episode. I get that it's not for everyone, that it seems more gimmicky than human at times. It draws on all sorts of inspirations, but I think the format is a unique mix of Seinfeld, Cheers and The Simpsons, the three masterpieces of half-hour comedy. Anyone who wants to know when Jeff and Annie finally are going to hook up for real or when Pierce will make everyone hate him probably doesn't grasp what this show is trying to do. Sure, those are plot points. But the show uses those plot points as references for what it's doing with its characters. Community is the biggest-thinking comedy out there. I've never done a true Community marathon, watching 10 in a day or something, but I imagine that would be exhausting. I watch it faithfully and will mourn it when NBC inevitably kills it. I never built much of a connection to Arrested Development, finally tuning in years after the show had become a cult hit. It's a great show, but Community fills that role for me, the show that's just too wonderful and awesome and absurd for other people, the show whose fans I can bond instantly with.

7. Chappelle's Show
Not including the bullshit three-episode third season, Chappelle's Show ran for 25 episodes. Pound-for-pound, it's the funniest thing I have seen. Nearly every sketch is memorable, even the ones lasting 30 seconds. The musical guests were great, and the show has unbelievable rewatch value. I've seen every episode five or six times, most more than 10. I'm sure if you put together the best 550 minutes of Saturday Night Live sketches, you could come up with a show about this good. But those were spread over decades, with huge casts. Chappelle's Show came out right when I was the target audience, stuck around for just long enough to imprint itself in my mind and became the basis for dozens of inside jokes with my friends. It drops a few spots because of its lack of longevity, but it's too good to omit.

8. The Wonder Years
When I first watched this show, I knew Fred Savage as Ben Savage's older brother. That's ridiculous. Boy Meets World targeted my age group, and it was a great show for preteens. The Wonder Years had staying power. The best thing about The Wonder Years was its unflinching adherence to real life. That's what gained it praise and viewers while the characters were cute middle-schoolers and cost it those things when the characters were nondescript high-schoolers. But most people are nondescript. Most people are Kevin Arnold, out of the limelight, doing well but not as well as that one friend, looking for a good time and a nice girl. That's the real high school experience. The Daniel Stern voiceovers could be heavy-handed, but they also conveyed the awkwardness of male adolescence. If I wrote a book, it would be like this show. It's TV's Catcher in the Rye. People lacked patience for The Wonder Years then because there wasn't much sex or drugs or other soap-operatic intrigue. It seemed soft with its period-piece setting and virgin characters and happy endings, but that's what life would have been like for a family like the Arnolds. And there was always more drama and social consciousness to the show than the critics gave it credit for. If I could go back and add one fully developed season (with the rewriting necessary to make it logical) to any show in the history of television, it might be this one. It's absurd this great show was stopped after Kevin's junior year, especially since we all know Kevin and Winnie had sex in that barn.

9. House
What to do with the show that gave me perhaps my favorite fictional character across all media but also one of the most miserable rides to the finish ever? House started three great seasons, followed with two good seasons, then finished with two bad seasons and one awful season (which actually was Season 7, not Season 8). Then it had one of the worst finales I've ever seen. So the taste in my mouth is not particularly fresh with House. But I loved it. Even many of the bad episodes could be saved because so many of the characters were so good, starting with Dr. Gregory House. House is the only procedural show I ever watched with anything resembling regularity. Mostly, I don't like plot-of-the-week shows. Cops shows do nothing for me. But House had these characters who were fascinating and inspiring. It's probably not healthy for me that I look up to a sociopath genius with few friends and no real hope at love. But I admire the hell out of House, not just for the way Hugh Laurie played him. (Have I mentioned the acting in this series? The original cast was amazing, and several of the later additions were great, too.) House had a penchant for big episodes, but many of my favorites were the run-of-the mill, random October Monday episodes. They could give you a particularly memorable case or patient and bring out the best in that cast and that star. I haven't watched many reruns since the show ended, and I'm not sure why. I used to watch them all the time. But I need to go back and relive the better days, when this show was one of the smartest and best on TV. Still, fuck the writers for those last three seasons.

10. Mad Men
I didn't expect to like this show when I first started watching, sometime after Season 2. A friend told me it was the best thing on TV, and I still haven't even seen The Wire, but he said it only was two short seasons and he had them both on DVD, so I had no excuses. I don't care for the period-piece aspect of this show, but much like The Wonder Years, the realism transcends time. There's a lot going on in Mad Men, and this last season was the best, in my opinion. Before it, I wouldn't have given it this spot in the top 10. I think sometimes the show loses its focus or goes up avenues I don't care much about. The Don Draper identity saga was loaded with false existentialism that got praised more than it deserved. But then I watch Peggy Olson. Peggy's the reason I watch this show, the best female TV character around, maybe ever. The writers do their best work with her, and they do their best work exploring her insecurities and ambitions. The show operates best when its focused on work, though Sally emerged as a viable lead last season. The dynamics are real and easy to attach yourself to. I did that. Sure, the initial hook was how awesome Don is, with his whiskey swilling and womanizing. But I've stayed for the mundane and the real depictions of these people trying to cut it in a cutthroat world.

Could make it soon: Louie, Parenthood, Parks and Recreation (I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think the show has taken a few bad turns since Season 3; getting back on track is a very realistic possibility, though)

Didn't do enough: Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, My So-Called Life, Sports Night

Outlived their welcomes: The Simpsons, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, M*A*S*H

 

Damn, that's dead on. Every last word.

 

The Rockford Files
The Sopranos
Law & Order
The Andy Griffith Show
Seinfeld

 

A lot more mentions for 'Seinfeld' than 'The Simpsons.'


'Seinfeld' wins again.