"I apologize. I know I left some of your favorite shows off this list. How do I know that? Because I left some of my favorite shows off this list. The happy and unfortunate fact is that there are far more than 100 great shows, and more created every year. Lists are incredibly important: they are how we define what matters to us, what we want entertainment and art to do, what we expect of our culture." —TIME TV critic James Poniewozik
“Ahead of its time” is a cliche for cult shows, but it may also be an understatement in this case. I’m not sure the time will ever quite come for Norman Lear’s fantastically weird, deadpan parody of soap operas and consumer culture. A nightly comedy-drama, set in a small town in Ohio, its stories involved country music, a murder mystery and the title star, played by Louise Lasser in her iconic pigtails, a housewife obsessed with waxy buildup on her kitchen floors. Following the binge of the ’60s and the purge of Watergate, Lear’s unsettlingly sardonic show captured a hungover America, wandering in a Valium-like haze, morally adrift, and addicted to—you guessed it—television.
When the former Mrs. Rob Petrie made it, after all, onto her own sitcom as a single TV-news producer in Minneapolis, it was liberating for women on TV. But it also liberated TV for adults, of both sexes. Since Mary Richards was neither a wife nor a mom nor (a la That Girl) a single gal defined mainly by her boyfriend, her self-titled sitcom was able to be a sophisticated show about grownups among other grownups, having grownup conversations. Moore made Mary into a fully realized person, iconic but fallible, competent but flappable (“Mr. Gra-a-a-ant!”), practical but romantic. Mary Richards was human and strong enough to be laughed with and laughed at, and that was the kind of liberation that mattered most.