The Chris Moeller Archives

The Top 50 TV Shows of All-Time: #s 15-11

Five more classic American prime-time television shows are now revealed. If your favorite for the top spot is among them, keep yourself collected and contact your employers' 24-hour-a-day toll-free stress hotline. The number to call can be found in your health care information package.
NOTE: This will be the last five-at-a-time countdown post. Beginning Wednesday, July 1st, we'll commence unveiling, one-at-a-time, the final 10 shows over ten days, a new one each evening. Store that stress hotline number in your cell phones.


#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- "Always Sunny in Philadelphia"
#35- "Frasier"
#34- "Get a Life"
#33- "St. Elsewhere"
#32- "Everybody Loves Raymond"
#31- "Hill Street Blues"
#30- "King of the Hill"
#29- "All in the Family"
#28- "The Larry Sanders Show"
#27- "The Jack Benny Program"
#26- "The Cosby Show"
#25- "The Golden Girls"
#24- "I Love Lucy"
#23- "The Bob Newhart Show"
#22- "Roseanne"
#21- "Lost"
#20- "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"
#19- "The Wire"
#18- "Mad Men"
#17- "The Simpsons"
#16- "Newsradio"


#15- SEINFELD NBC 1989-1998
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Jerry Seinfeld was one of my favorite stand-up comics on the twice-a-year guest cycle on "Late Night with David Letterman" so I'm proud to say that my brother and I were right there with our attention and our VCR's humming when the little-watched pilot "The Seinfeld Chronicles" debuted during the summer of 1989. Who knew then what an extraordinary blockbuster series this one would become? It went on to help define an entire decade and change the way sitcom stories were told. Earlier half-hour sitcoms may have featured 6 or 7 longer-paced scenes, but "Seinfeld," by the end of its run, had cranked its total up to 20 or 30-- many scenes lasting less than a minute as it bounced back and forth between various plots. It was famously referred to as "a show about nothing," because the plots might be as spare as the group of friends waiting in line to eat at a Chinese restaurant or trying to find their car in a parking garage, but I think it can now be described as a show that was "about everything." A character with no job hired an intern to help him manage his everyday life, in effect, a caddy to his own peculiar persona. Other episodes featured a golf ball hit into the ocean plugging the blowhole of a whale, and the set of "The Merv Griffin Show" getting fished out of a dumpster and being rebuilt in a man's living room. Seinfeld himself defined it as "a show without hugging," and indeed, the banally immoral characters hardly even made physical contact except for the occasional shoving. Much of the humor evolved out of the long Jewish tradition of comic humiliation, and while the show had fun tweaking itself as one filled with trivial happenings, the quiet absurdity of the characters' lives seemed to remind almost everyone who watched it of their own absurd existence.

"Seinfeld" clips are ubiquitous so instead enjoy this impressive poster art from one of the show's fans.


#14- "ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT" FOX 2003-2006
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It takes more than a few twisted minds to tell a story that combined secret fathers with Pop Secret popcorn, two women named Lucille with an aquatic seal on the loose in the Pacific Ocean, and a British spy named Mr F with a mentally-retarded female. At various times, "Arrested Development" presented a David Blaine-wannabe riding a Segway, an aspiring actor who is also a "never-nude" (exactly what it sounds like), a one-arm amputee, the exact plot of "Mrs. Doubtfire," Judge Reinhold as a judge, Liza Minnelli suffering from vertigo, Henry Winkler as a sexual deviant, Carl Weathers as himself, an airport staircar as the family automobile ("You're going to get hop-ons"), a gin-soaked middle-aged mother who ranks her children, a "light treason" business deal between the family and Saddam Hussein (who, in the family's defense, looked a lot like the guy who played "the Soup Nazi"), the Blue Man Group, the classic Peanuts "sad walk song," and a humorless attorney who had once been voted the worst audience member Cirque Du Soleil ever had. The comedy was distinctive, innovative and tasteless. When teenager George-Michael was trying to find out whether his attractive girl cousin was adopted, he asks his uncle Gob (jobe') whether his aunt Lindsey was ever pregnant. Gob responds, "Sure, lots of times."

Here's a trailer for a documentary-in-the-making about the series. It features a number of fans who would surely put "Arrested" even higher on their all-time list than just #14.


#13- "NEWHART" CBS 1982-1990
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I can't think of another TV series besides this one in which every season produced was better than the one before. Bob Newhart's second long-running program started as a modest replicate of his first, installed with the same winning elements, the slightly-off-center characters in orbit around the solar Newhart (the Jack Benny format). It evolved into an absurdist masterpiece featuring a character that spoke increasingly in alliteration, an heiress spoiled to the point of complete disconnection from reality, an amorous librarian, and of course, those three bizarre woodsmen whose parents were so infamously economical with baby names. It's revealed along the way that Johnny Carson (as himself) paid the woodsmen's water bills, Tim Conway (also as himself) was a friend, and in the 184th and final episode of the series, that the entire series had been a dream of Dr. Bob Hartley's, the character Newhart played in his previous series, after the psychologist had consumed a late-evening Japanese meal. The pop reference to Newhart's previous show (as well as to a notorious "just-a-dream" decision made by the producers of "Dallas") helped make the "Newhart" finale one of the most famous and well-regarded of all-time. But lesser understood by both viewers and critics is that the dream development also utterly transformed every action that had become before it during the run of the series, forcing the series to be rewatched again and again. The fact that it was all a dream explained why things were getting increasingly bizarre in this little Vermont Inn. (During the REM phase of sleep, just before awakening, perception of sensory images are at their most stimulated.) The plot-twist was arrived at near the end of production, but in happy retrospect, it explains why Bob's patients and friends (the same actors, like Jack Riley and Bill Quinn) kept running through his dreams; it explained why the inn's handyman looked so much like Bob Hartley's best friend from college (Tom Poston in both roles); and it revealed the hidden fact that even though Bob was married to a gorgeous brunette, played by Suzanne Pleshette, he also had a thing for blondes in tight sweaters. Magnificent, magnificent ending.

Here, Newhart discusses that final scene with a rep from the Archive of American Television.


#12- "The Andy Griffith Show" CBS 1960-1968
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Once upon a time on television, long, long ago, there was a show that didn't play down to rural people, and viewers rewarded it. "The Griffith Show," as its now-elderly star always refers to it in interviews, never finished below 7th place in the Nielsons, and it left the air when it was #1, evidently having lost only the young urban viewers advertisers most desire. My not "playing down" comment is not to imply that many of the characters portrayed as living in tiny, fictional Mayberry, North Carolina were not stereotypical "rubes" or "hicks," in the same way that Jack Benny had been willing to trade on some old Jewish stereotypes on his show, but in Mayberry, there was a nobility that went along with living in this unassuming, genial community. Unpretentious and fair-minded sheriff Andy Taylor, a widower, watched out over not only his son and his live-in aunt, but his self-important and inept deputy, misinformed and slow-to-wit townsfolk, a rock-throwing hillbilly, and even the town drunk, who was allowed access to the prison to lock himself up safe and sound every Saturday night after one of his benders. The show was achingly-funny, and Don Knotts, who played Deputy Barney Fife, made off with four consecutive Emmys for his efforts. It was replaced on CBS (while on top) because the programs being developed behind it were deemed more "relevant" during a time of great change in American culture, but one would have to look long and hard to find, in retrospect, another show ever aired on television that did more to promote peace and tolerance. As one of my former co-worker's bumper sticker stated, "Everything I need to know about life, I learned from watching 'The Andy Griffith Show.'"

Here's a clip of a parrot whistling the show's theme song.


#11- "CHEERS" NBC 1982-1993
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The first 5 seasons of "Cheers," in particular, are right up there with the best any series has ever offered, and to say I grew up with this show would be an understatement. It was like the third Moeller twin. The second twin's favorite show in those days, "Cheers" began when we were seven years old and it left the air the spring we graduated from high school. When the Moeller TV Festival debuted in 2002, "What is... Cliff Clavin?" the one in which Cliff appears on "Jeopardy," was chosen as the first-ever episode screened. During the 11 years the bar stayed open, the show received 26 Emmys and a record 111 nominations, and its leading man became TV's highest-paid star. It was a throwback in a sense to series like "Andy Griffith" that was less ideological and more community-based. The mostly-disfunctional regulars at the fictional bar had families, but we rarely saw them. They liked being at the bar instead. "Cheers" could be likened to "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in that it was a workplace comedy in which co-workers acted as the family. It was, likewise, a show aimed at adults, but the characters on "Cheers" didn't "grow" as human beings, and they were less heroic. In year 11, Sam was still a shallow womanizer unsuccessful in finding love, Carla, angry and resentful, Rebecca, Sam's equal or more in shallowness, Frasier abandoned and alone, Cliff still delusional, and the implication was that Norm, at the end of the bar, had never even ventured out from the comfort of domestic beer. There were 275 "Cheers" episodes produced, and none of them, marvelously, were "very special episodes" dealing with dour subjects such as drug abuse or death. Norm's obvious alcoholism was more in step again with Otis the Town Drunk than any self-improving character model that would have followed in the 1970s. Rare for any show that ran 11 seasons, its format and rhythm became so polished and comfortable, you got the impression that if its stars had wanted it to, "Cheers" would still be producing new episodes today.

I can't tease Cliff on "Jeopardy" and then not show it to you.

posted by CM @ 12:13 PM