The Chris Moeller Archives

The Top 50 TV Shows of All-Time: #s 20-16

Sorry for the delay in the publishing of this latest installment. I was hospitalized with a severe case of "acute countdown fever."

Now, where was I?

#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"
#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" CBS 1970-1977
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Everywhere you look these days, there's "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." No, I'm not talking about Cloris Leachman on "Dancing With the Stars," "The Office," and Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," coming in August. I'm not talking about Betty White on "My Name is Earl" and the #1 movie in the country last weekend, "The Proposal," with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. And I'm not talking about Ed Asner, the lead voice on Pixar's blockbuster film "Up." I'm talking about all of the office-centered sitcoms that are still television's standard form and all ripoffs of a sort of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." On Mary's revolutionary program, characters were not static. They grew as people. Her boss, Lou Grant, got divorced. Not only was Mary Richards the first single female character on television who didn't define herself by her current relationship, but it's time we acknowledge that she was really the first single person of any gender on television to assert herself as single and well-adjusted. The series anchored one of the great lineups of television of all-time-- CBS Saturday nights during the 1970s, and it was the anchor as well for perhaps the greatest television production company of all-time, owned by and named for its star-- "MTM." That's reason enough right there to throw your hat up in the air.


#19- "THE WIRE" HBO 2002-2008
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This HBO drama series addressed nearly all aspects of American life-- social, political, and economic. The police procedural elements were largely familiar, but what wasn't was the investigation of inner-city public schools, the portrayal of the day-to-day realities of the urban underclass, and the exploration of the kind of government bureacracy that crushes souls. A whole city has been created on premium cable television (where only it could) that mirrors the real Baltimore, Maryland, where the series is filmed. The canvas included what must have been one hundred recurring characters, and it attempted to show us at least a little of how each of them lives, while being unconcerned with distracting us with "edgy" violence. Never before has there been a TV show, or even a movie that I can think of, that is principally about a city. "The Wire" creator David Simon likes to say of his hometown that "it falls down beautifully." "The Wire" is not a morality tale, but it has an expressed morality. It indicts the war on drugs, our political hypocrisies, and our broken economic system. It takes sides, which lends it its power. Sheeeeeeeet, it's got it all.

Sample this offering.


#18- "MAD MEN" AMC 2007-PRESENT
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"Mad Men" is about a time and place in which social mores and attitudes are about to radically change. The pending revolution is palpable, although perhaps only to the viewer, not the characters. The series is about a Manhattan advertising firm beginning in 1960. The "Mad" in "Mad Men" refers to Madison Avenue, and the nickname is one they gave themselves. According to Entertainment Weekly, the series opens when "play is part of work, sexual banter isn't yet harassment, and America is free of self-doubt, guilt, and countercultural confusion." The country is prosperous and bubbling with optimism, but the storm is brewing. There are more than a dozen fully-formed, intoxicating characters on "Mad Men," but the North and South Poles of the series are surely creative director Don Draper and his secretary-then-copy girl Peggy Olson, who seem to stand in respectively for the self-made man, who may or may not be mythical, and the determined new guard, sharply aware of the culture's double-standards. "Mad Men" is really a revisionist history-- many confident-seeming executives (perhaps our fathers or grandfathers) were really unfulfilled, sometimes frighteningly so, and not all was well behind the picket fence at home. The show's logo features the Draper character in silhouette and repose, with his arm over a couch, clearly watching and evaluating. "Mad Men" is a show about watching people play roles.

Here's the program's cinematic and compelling opening title sequence.


#17- "THE SIMPSONS" FOX 1989-PRESENT
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I think the most-lasting legacy of "The Simpsons" is that it changed the pace of television. The shows on this countdown that preceeded it now seem much more deliberate and casual than we remember them from their time. The rate of jokes on "The Simpsons" was sped up. It may be that there are double the amount of gags in a half-hour "Simpsons" episode than there were in another James L. Brooks' offering, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" described above. Nothing on "The Simpsons," not characterization, not plot, not a semblance of reality, takes priority over the joke, and so it's a hell of good thing that the animated classic is hilarious. On the flip side, "The Simpsons" has a gentleness, a heart beat, which to me separates it from the even more extreme examples of joke-driven animated shows that are the most popular today, even as "The Simpsons" continues to churn out new episodes two decades after its start. There are plenty of one-note peripheral characters to be employed in the arsenal of a "Simpsons" writer, from personal favorites Gill Gunderson, a befuddled and unsuccessful salesman, to unfit attorney-at-law Lionel Hutz, but in the main valve-- and here my heart and brain metaphors clumsily mix-- Bart is the Id, Homer is the Ego, and Lisa is the Superego. The show has a center provided by the Simpson family itself, feeding both the heart and the mind.

Here's "The Simpsons"' take on "Mad Men's" cinematic and compelling opening title sequence.


#16- "NEWSRADIO" NBC 1995-1999
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Already two years before it ended production, "Newsradio" was the lowest-rated sitcom on its network. It was becoming symbolic of one of television programmers most common faults in logic. Though the show had a great cast and great writers, it had no stars, so the network lost faith and changed its time slot seven times in five years. But "Newsradio" also avoided popularity by refusing to cater to popular tastes. Jokes seemed to have been aimed only at viewers who would get the joke. Writer Adrian Foo has called the series "the only morally-expressive screwball comedy with a physical-verbal comedy style in television history." The richness of the comedy and the comic characterizations require watching more than one episode to fully appreciate. It gathers strength. This is why the show is much more popular in syndication, where it can be seen day after day, than it ever was in prime-time. It's hard to imagine a comedy show that combined more styles-- slapstick physical humor, sophisticated wordplay, absurdist storylines (episodes set in space and on the Titanic), and social satire. Effusive funnyman Phil Hartman had a field day as self-absorbed radio newsman Bill McNeal, who I really shouldn't attempt to summarize simply with the phrase "self-absorbed," for he was simultaneously manipulative, vulnerable, belligerent, theatrical, cowardly, and competent. A real piece of work.

Now, the man in action.

posted by CM @ 7:21 PM