I told you I had something big planned for you after my summer vacation, and here it is: another freaking list! Some time ago, time.com conscripted me to come up with a list of the top 100 shows in TV history. (We’d already covered movies, music and novels, but let’s be glad they got around to TV before the 100 All-TIME quiltmakers’ list.)
The results are here. You can read my explanation of my criteria for the list–and why I left your favorite show off it–or just watch the video of me discussing the same in my office, which, though you will not believe this, I actually cleaned before the videotaping. (Watching it now, I am chagrinned to see one of my stacks of DVDs includes Adam Sandler’s Click. I was going to write a column on it once, I swear! Also, yes, I did leave those top shirt buttons open on purpose. Tim Gunn, call me.) Or just jump into the list itself, complete with dandy video samples.
The list was the product of a vast amount of time going through old recordings at the Paley Center and watching DVDs of shows I hadn’t seen in years. It was also the product of several weeks spent not writing for the print TIME magazine, and for that I want to thank my editor Belinda Luscombe for her patience, as well as Josh Tyrangiel and the other editors at time.com for making/letting me have this fascinating experience, and Vanessa Kaneshiro for culling the video clips and trying to capture footage of me looking half-decent.
Anyway, the list. I suspect I’ll post some discussion threads about it in the days to come, because if there’s one thing more fun than compiling a list, it’s inviting the public to flog you over it! In the meantime, I’ll leave this as the first open discussion thread on it. While I don’t promise to answer every “Why’d you pick _____?” or “Why not ____?” it should be the start of the real fun part–the picking apart–which is really what lists are about. I’ve spent enough time poring over this that I have a list of reasons, theories and rationalizations that I’m sure you will get tired of reading before I get tired of writing them.
My list isn’t inherently any better than yours, but by gum, it’s mine and I’m sticking with it. (Pretty much. I already wish I’d included Cosmos.) Hopefully taken as a whole, it gives a sense of what I think is best and most important in TV overall. When I told friends that I was doing the list, the question I was asked most often was, “How did you ever come up with that many?” In fact, the maddening problem was limiting it to that few. Bottom line, I hope the list shows that by now there has been so much good TV that there’s no excuse for watching lousy TV.
Now go forth and read some television!
[Update: You can also go to the talkback page and post your choices of shows that I should have included. I’m keeping a personal list of shows people complain that I left off the list that are already on the list. As of 12:45 Eastern, we’re already up to four.]