TV Guide has named its choices for the Top 50
shows of all time. CBS News has the list here.
The sci-fi and fantasy entries include
Sesame Street (#27), The X-Files
(#37), Buffy The Vampire Slayer (#41),
Star Trek: The Next Generation (#46), and
Bewitched (#50).
45: Twin Peaks
Twin Peaks should certainly be relevant in the sci-fi category, though I don’t see why Sesame Street should be.
Re: 45: Twin Peaks
I consider a show with 8 foot tall
walking, talking canaries and wooly mammoths that sing
to be a member of the fantasy genre. :)
Smoking Crack?
Because that’s the only excuse for puttin “Donahue” at number 29. At least TNG beat out Oprah(TM).
Re: Smoking Crack?
Lest I Betray My felow Geeks, I’m Smug At The fact That Buffy Beat The Next Generation.
(Not That I didn’t Like The Next Generation, I Just like Buffy More.)
Top 50 TV Shows of All Time
Here is the recent “TV Guide’s” list of the “50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time”:
1. Seinfeld (I hate it when something really good like this series is so overhyped that it raises expectations higher than is reasonable [see especially their choice #5]; top hundred OK, but not the very top spot)
2. I Love Lucy
3. The Honeymooners
4. All in the Family (one of the most vital historically, but who wants to watch it now? very funny early seasons, the first time around)
5. The Sopranos
6. 60 Minutes
7. Late Show With David Letterman (He was better on “Late Night” on NBC in the eighties)
8. The Simpsons
9. The Andy Griffith Show
10. Saturday Night Live (TV Guide blasphemously groups the original show with what’s on the air now)
11. The Mary Tyler Moore Show
12. The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (They avoided the mistake made with #10)
13. The Dick Van Dyke Show
14. Hill Street Blues
15. The Ed Sullivan Show
16. The Carol Burnett Show
17. Today
18. Cheers
19. Thirtysomething (Ugh!)
20. St. Elsewhere
21. Friends
22. ER
23. Nightline
24. Law & Order
25. M*A*S*H
26. The Twilight Zone
27. Sesame Street
28. The Cosby Show
29. The Phil Donahue Show
30. Your Show of Shows
31. The Defenders
32. An American Family
33. Playhouse 90 (Unfair to count this as a series, considering the many different contributors week to week; “Twilight Zone” had the constant of Rod Serling’s presence and another constant by (Marius) Constant–that recognizable theme music, plus the twist endings)
34. Frasier
35. Roseanne (Ultimate Ugh; imagine placing this above “The Fugitive”–even “Married With Children” would have been a better choice)
36. The Fugitive
37. The X-Files
38. The Larry Sanders Show
39. The Rockford Files
40. Gunsmoke
41. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
42. Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in
43. Bonanza
44. The Bob Newhart Show (70s; Bob had a show of the same title in 1960 that won best comedy series at the Emmys; I’d love to see it)
45. Twin Peaks
46. Star Trek–The Next Generation (I liked both the original and “Deep Space Nine” more)
47. Rocky and His Friends (Bullwinkle)
48. Taxi
49. The Oprah Winfrey Show (I don’t dislike Oprah or her show, but I cringed when she made it into the TV Hall of Fame when so many who deserved to for so long hadn’t yet)
50. Bewitched (Great, but I did enjoy Jeannie more)
The New York Post’s TV editor responded with his own list, putting “Gilligan’s Island” at No. 1 and “Mr. Ed” as No. 2. One thing I was pleased to see on his top ten was “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, which has always been so underrated. But most of his other choices were rather silly.
My own choices:
1. The Twilight Zone (original version; The “Citizen Kane” of TV shows, but with much more interesting subject matter assembling the best guest stars imaginable; here more than in any other series, many of the diverse episodes were distinctively memorable.)
2. Peyton Place (Remember the overrated surprise twist in “The Crying Game”? There really wasn’t much more to the film than that much hyped cheap trick. Living more up to such an expectation, this series had about four or five genuine plot shocks that really blew me away (a totally unexpected revelation about a murder years earlier, Steven Cord’s answer to whether he was related to the Harringtons, and anything having to do with the Chernak family), with great characters represented by some of the best acting I’ve ever seen (Paul Langton, Lee Grant, Tim O’Connor, Christopher Connelly, George Macready, Ed Nelson, Barbara Parkins, Dorothy Malone) and a great TV romance (Ryan O’Neal, Mia Farrow). And I was expecting some dumb soap opera probably like you are now.
3. The Fugitive (The most gripping story progression week to week; every once in a while, Richard Kimble’s involvement with whatever new situation he was in, and his being chased by Lt. Gerard, would cause him, and the viewer, to almost forget about the menacing one-armed man Kimble was pursuing, and then in his rare but sudden appearances that character would shock you back to the reality of the show’s main plotline. Also the best finale of any series.)
4. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Vital to watch this show in sequence, as it constantly refers to things of relevance only to viewers of earlier episodes; many great jokes, and one of the sexiest shows ever while as successfully dramatic as choices 1 to 3.)
5. SCTV (Simply the most hilarious show ever.)
6. Batman (live action)
7. The Avengers
8. The Odd Couple (Randall and Klugman of course, not the black version and not the women’s version, and not the dog-and-cat cartoon; An actual improvement on the film, which was also great)
9. The Dick Van Dyke Show
10. I Dream of Jeannie
11. Xena: Warrior Princess
12. The Honeymooners
13. Star Trek
14. Wild Wild West
15. Mission: Impossible (original)
16. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
17. The Simpsons
18. M*A*S*H
19. Monty Python’s Flying Circus
20. Taxi
21. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Lost World’
22. W.O.W.: Women of Wrestling
23. WSL Rollerjam
24. Alfred Hitchcock Presents (original)
25. Get Smart (60s)
26. The Adventures of Superman
27. F Troop
28. Your Show of Shows
29. The Mary Tyler Moore Show
30. The Jack Benny Program
31. The Flintstones
32. I Love Lucy
33. The Bob Newhart Show (70s)
34. Naked City (60s)
35. Ben Casey
36. The Invaders
37. Bewitched
38. The Night Stalker
39. The Munsters (60s)
40. Sergeant Bilko
41. Saturday Night Live (original cast)
42. The Muppet Show
43. Car 54, Where Are You?
44. Kung Fu
45. Quincy
46. The Practice (current)
47. Lost in Space
48. The Andy Griffith Show
49. Hogan’s Heroes
50. The Addams Family (60s)
An honest list, of course, changes day to day as one’s feelings change. Other shows that may at times displace some of the preceding include “Dark Shadows”, “The Abbott and Costello Show”, “Night Gallery”, the original “The Outer Limits”, “Boris Karloff Presents ‘Thriller'”, the 60s “Spiderman” cartoons, “Mister Ed”, “Angel”, “Charmed”, the “Star Trek” animateds, “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys”, “Lois and Clark”, “The Monkees”, “The Green Hornet” and “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”
If “Fawlty Towers”, “Police Squad”, “Mr. Bean” and “The Prisoner” had more episodes of equivalent quality (all four ran for less than 20 episodes), I might have included them somewhere on my list. If I were to include science shows, Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” and James Burke’s “Connections” and “Day the Universe Changed” would head the list. And I hate omitting some shows that ran for only one season: “Battlestar Galactica”, “Planet of the Apes”, “Tales of the Gold Monkey”, “The Barbary Coast”, “Girl From U.N.C.L.E.”, “Cleopatra 2525” and “My Partner the Ghost”. Also, “Mutant X” is a promising current show.
My next 50 might also include “Sesame Street”, “A&E Biography”, “The Rat Patrol”, “The Six Million Dollar Man”, “Gilligan’s Island”, “Dr. Kildare”, “Seinfeld”, “V.I.P.”, “Barney Miller”, “All in the Family”, “Perry Mason”, “The Saint”, “The Big Valley”, “Search Party”, “Wild On”, “The E! True Hollywood Story”, “Homicide”, “Law and Order”, “Land of the Giants”, “Bonanza”, “Quark”, “Ironside”, “Gunsmoke”, “The Bionic Woman”, “Starsky and Hutch”, “Kojak”, “Columbo”, “The Rockford Files”, “Wonder Woman”, “The Rifleman”, “Lexx” (it takes watching about a half dozen episodes to get this show), “The Mod Squad”, “The Beverly Hillbillies”, “The Time Tunnel”, “Cheers”, “Green Acres”, “Black Scorpion” (just for the best dedication ever to sexy kayo scenes), “Baywatch” (for pushing the envelope for a mainstream show), “Hill Street Blues”, “The Sopranos”, “Frasier”, “Happy Days”, “Charlie’s Angels”, “Longstreet”, “Farscape”, “Stargate SG-1”, “Rocky and His Friends”, “The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show/Peanuts Specials”, “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” and “Maverick”.
I have to be fair to say I only saw the first episode of “Twin Peaks”, which was very good, and “The Sopranos” did have a good first season but not as good as was proclaimed. I need a refresher course on some older shows, such as “The Defenders”, “Here Come the Brides” and “Garrison’s Gorillas”.
“Roseanne” and “Thirtysomething” actually belong on an all-time worst list, along with all trash talk shows, “The Facts of Life”, “Diff’rent Strokes”, “McGurk”, “My Mother the Car” and (worst of all) “First and Ten” (starring Delta Burke and O.J. Simpson).
I know I’m still leaving out something.
Re: Top 50 TV Shows of All Time
Doesn’t this chat page accept line breaks?
Re: Top 50 TV Shows of All Time
That’s what the check box “Insert linebreaks?” is for. Also try out the “Preview” button. It rocks!
Re: Top 50 TV Shows of All Time
Yes, but you have to click the “Insert
Linebreaks” checkbox next to the Preview, Post, and Reset
buttons. Or, alternatively, you could put the HTML tags in
manually.
Re: Top 50 TV Shows of All Time
chat page? that’s a new one for me.
Anyway. The site used to put ’em in automatically, but then people that
did their own would have their text spaced out really funny (with two
linebreaks whenever they wanted one) and people complained. Then I never
did it, but people who expected linebreaks didn’t get ’em and then
they complained. The current system (choose your linebreak
preference, plus the almighty “preview” button) is the best compromise I
could come up with in five minutes’ time. And unless I win that lottery
this weekend (unlikely, as I haven’t even bought a ticket), five minutes
here and there is about all I have most of the time.
Re: Top 50 TV Shows of All Time
here’s the previous comment, only WITH the linebreaks. :)
Re: Top 50 TV Shows of All Time
Thanks for the line breaks.