The Chris Moeller Archives

The Top 50 TV Shows of All-Time: #s 35-31

The Top 50 list continues. This portion of the countdown is sponsored by the 2009 Ford Focus Sedan. Ford. See where we are. Be a part of where we're going.

#50- "Just Shoot Me"
#49- "L.A. Law"
#48- "The Carol Burnett Show"
#47- "That 70s Show"
#46- "The Rockford Files"
#45- "The Big Bang Theory"
#44- "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour"
#43- "Night Court"
#42- "The Dick Van Dyke Show"
#41- "NYPD Blue"
#40- "Barney Miller"
#39- "Frank's Place"
#38- "The King of Queens"
#37- "The Phil Silvers Show"
#36- "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia"


#35- "FRASIER" NBC 1993-2004
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"Frasier," Kelsey Grammer's star-turn on NBC in the years that followed "Cheers," won a record-breaking 37 Emmys during its 11 years on the air, and it did so by never playing down to its audience. The jokes on "Frasier" were smart and exercised with the skill of precision, a blend of high-brow and low-brow gags that would make British artists green with envy. Perhaps that's why officials working in the British TV industry voted it the greatest sitcom of all time. The appeal for me in "Frasier" was watching the evolution of two of the greatest characters ever to appear on television-- Grammer's title character and his younger brother, Niles, portrayed by David Hyde Pierce. The character of Frasier was born of a rib from Diane Chambers on "Cheers," first introduced as the snobby barmaid's psychiatrist and love interest, an elitist intellectual who wound up staying around the bar long enough to become a well-rounded character of endearment, a husband and father. That fully-formed entity then gave birth to Pierce's Niles on the spin-off "Frasier," and Niles was an even more snobbish and fastidious head-shrinker, what Pierce has described as "Frasier, if he had never gone to Boston."

Here are the two men together in one of the series' low-brow scenes.


#34- "GET A LIFE" FOX 1990-1992
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When the FOX television network was a little tiny baby, an imaginative late-night comic blessed it with a surreal and brilliant sitcom that nobody watched. Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic Tom Shales called "Get a Life" "a television classic unlike any other." Creator and star Chris Elliott played Chris Peterson, a 30-year-old "yammering halfwit," as one character described him, who lived in his parents' basement and delivered newspapers by bicycle, the same job he'd had since he was a kid. Peterson was smirky, arrogant, and very dim, and he was one of the few characters on the show who even bothered to change out of his pajamas. The show hung on long enough to produce 35 episodes before cancellation with the Peterson character dying in 12 of the 35 episodes. With only a limited DVD release and its reruns absent from TV today, the show has most often been viewed recently at Moeller Television Festivals. A snippet of the show is essential at this point.


#33- "ST. ELSEWHERE" NBC 1982-1988
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You've got to hand it to Brandon Tartikoff. They don't make network television executives like him anymore. The head of NBC Programming for most of the 1980s kept this quality hospital drama on the air for six seasons despite the fact that it never finished higher than #49 for the year in the Nielsen Ratings. Unlike previous medical dramas on television, the doctors at fictional St. Eligius in Boston enjoyed few happy endings at the "dumping ground" hospital or in their personal lives. Many "St. Elsewhere" cast members went on to even greater fame, most notably Denzel Washington, Howie Mandel, Mark Harmon, Alfre Woodard, Helen Hunt, and Ed Begley, Jr., and behind-the-scenes, TV giants-to-be Joshua Brand, John Falsey, Tom Fontana, and Bruce Paltrow wrote "St. Elsewhere" episodes and/or produced. In the series' memorable finale, the show's happenings were revealed to have been a figment of the imagination of the autistic son of one of the principal characters, then over the closing credits, producers killed off the iconic mascot of the MTM Enterprises production company. Evidently all "meow-ed" out, "Mimsie the cat" flatlines in this clip.


#32- "EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND" CBS 1996-2005
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"Everybody Loves Raymond" was a comedy about discomfort- about awkward family situations, intrusive and manipulative parents and resentful children. In truth, it often wasn't very easy to watch. Ray's brother was a grouch. His parents were alternately coarse (in the case of his father) or viciously passive-aggressive (his mother). His wife was rather shrewish, and Ray himself was certainly the most petulant of them all. And despite the somewhat wholesome reputation that survives today, the show was really obsessed with sex. (Va-va-va-voom!) I've already described several other shows of brilliance in the countdown that feature generally unlikable characters-- "Just Shoot Me" or "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," to name two-- but what made "Raymond" seem even more appalling in its characterizations is that the suburban living room setting could have otherwise been "Ozzie and Harriet." Twenty- and thirty-something wise guys, like me and my friends, groove to the beat of a David Spade or "Always Sunny's" Charlie Kelly, but Ray and Debra Barone have kids. They're supposed to be better than that. Unlike these other hopeless misfits, they need to be about more than just trying to manipulate a family member into doing what you want him or her to do in the next five minutes. How can I trick him into taking out the trash? How can I get her to leave me alone while I watch the game? They're in the car pool, for Christ's sake! This is why "Raymond" just might be the most anti-social and subversive comedy of them all.


#31- "HILL STREET BLUES" NBC 1981-1987
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Mix "Barney Miller" with "St. Elsewhere" and you have "Hill Street Blues." "Hill Street" followed the former, and preceded the latter, but it's the one of the three that became the benchmark. The crime series featured several dramatic stories transpiring at the same time (around an ensemble cast) and stretching sometimes across four or five episodes. It popularized "documentary-style" hand-held camera operation, featured realistic plots and a racially-mixed cast, and was typically presented as a "day-in-the-life" narrative of an urban police station, with a typical episode opening at morning "roll call" and wrapping up at the end of the day shift. Hill Street's heroes were hardened and imperfect (Sgt. Belker to an arrestee: "Do you want to sit down or would you prefer internal injuries?") and the show was Emmy's Outstanding Drama for four straight years beginning in 1982. It's a difficult TV show to get over.

posted by CM @ 9:38 AM