Your Shows Of Shows
Perhaps you saw the Writer's Guild list of the top 101 best-written TV series. Here are the top 30, and a few comments:
2. SEINFELD
3. THE TWILIGHT ZONE
4. ALL IN THE FAMILY
5. M*A*S*H
6. THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW
7. MAD MEN
8. CHEERS
9. THE WIRE
10. THE WEST WING
12. I LOVE LUCY
13. BREAKING BAD
14. THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW
15. HILL STREET BLUES
16. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
17. THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
18. SIX FEET UNDER
19. TAXI
20. THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW
22. FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
23. FRASIER
24. FRIENDS
25. SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
26. THE X-FILES
27. LOST
28. ER
29. THE COSBY SHOW
30. CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM
See the rest yourself.
My first observation is the list is top-heavy with newer shows--over half are from the last twenty years, while there isn't much from the 50s and 60s. This probably reflects the age of the voters more than the quality of the shows. Which makes me wonder how many of these recent shows will stand the test of time? I'm talking about you, Six Feet Under, Friday Night Lights, Downton Abbey, The Good Wife, Everybody Loves Raymond, Dexter, Boardwalk Empire and a fair number of others. And what of current darlings The Daily Show and The Colbert Report--how will people look back at them when they're no longer timely?
A number of British shows made it--Fawlty Towers, Monty Python, Absolutely Fabulous and so on. But perhaps the Writer's Guild of America should stick to American shows, since they only know a smattering of what's been done across the pond.
As for The Sopranos being #1, why not? It has flaws--too many dream sequences, a premise about psychiatry that went on too long, questionable subplots like the gay life in New Hampshire--but at its best, which was often, it offered amazing writing, both tough and humorous. Seinfeld may not be the greatest sitcom ever, but it's top ten, so I won't complain.
The Twilight Zone at #3? It was good, especially for an anthology show, but so many episodes hammered the point home over and over. And when they tried to be funny, ugh.
Then there's the big three from CBS in the 70s--All In The Family, M*A*S*H, Mary Tyler Moore--I'd probably flip the order, but they deserve to be up there.
Mad Men is ongoing, and is certainly special. I wonder what it'll look like when we're looking back at the 2010s as that show looks back at the 1960s. Cheers is another classic, though it may have hung on for too long. The Wire should definitely be up there--if it had been #1 it would have made just as much sense.
The West Wing featured some brilliant writing (though it wasn't the same after Aaron Sorkin left), but it's not the kind of show I imagine I'd ever watch again. Should that count for anything?
The funny thing is 11-20 and 21-30 are just about as good as the top ten (minus a few questionable choices). For comedy, The Simpsons (for the first decade, anyway) was as good a show as there ever was, and Dick Van Dyke practically created the modern, funny, sophisticated sitcom. And dramas like Breaking Bad (ongoing) or Lost (even with its disappointing final season) were as compelling as anything I've ever seen on TV. Then there's Saturday Night Live, which is its own category.
So overall, a worthy, if mostly conventional list.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:03 AM
2 Comments:
I'm a huge fan of Twilight Zone and would certainly put it in a top 10 tv shows of all time, but not because of the writing, which LA Guy quite correctly points out can be iffy. TZ was great because of the whole package. The full technical arsenal of the waning days of the MGM lot was at the disposal of the show, so you had wonderful lighting, editing, camera work, make-up, FX (both optical work, camera tricks and set building), good sets and the back lot. Lots of great actors as well. (Including performances by Bill Shatner that could be described--dare I say it--as restrained.) Music was fabulous--e.g., the Bernard Hermann scored episodes. The whole package could sometimes cover up the relentless "on-the-nose" nature of the writing. To be fair, I'm not sure how Rod Serling could crank out 2/3 of the scripts and not have some quality issues--this back in the day when the std production schedule was 30 or so new episodes a year. Perhaps this is what the guild was responding to: the heroic nature of the writing output--that and the 20 or so episodes that are little masterpieces.
It's true that these days, even with giant staffs, shows have trouble putting out 20 or 22 episodes a year. The Twilight Zone was doing over 30 episodes per season, each with an entirley new cast, setting, etc. No matter how you look at it, Twilight Zone was an impressive feat.
But top ten of all time? A bit high. And let's not forget, these rankings are for the writing.
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