Critiquing Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz's Top 100 TV Shows of All Time

As someone who's written listicles, I know it's annoying to
have people on the comment section going "what about this?" but my
hope is to explain theories for the context of choices, suggest alternatives,
and entertain. I also hope to make history as the first person to critique
their work while bubble bathing.

I tried very hard to get it under 20 minutes before
giving up but you have my permission to click around as I count down from 100.
Around 2:00 is when I get to the inherent challenges of a TV canon and I
actually start the list at 4:48.

Alan and Matt's book is:

TV (The Book): Two Experts Pick the Greatest American Shows of All Time.

The authors of this book and I would likely agree that there isn't as established of a TV canon as there is in moviedom because most of the writing about television has generally been by TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly and it has been narrowed around "What to Watch This Week" until the past decade or so. In contrast, film has been seriously analyzed and different decades and auteurs have been matched up against each other since the days of Pauline Kael and the French New Wave.

One downside to this is that TV best-of lists have a lot less variation (everyone loves MASH, I Love Lucy, Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cosby Show, etc) and a lot more reliance on ratings to establish what has been the canon (this book's list of shows matches up very closely to how well those shows dominated over their rivals in their ratings).

Another funny thing about a TV best-of list is that to get anything resembling a popular consensus, you need the public to have had some sort of accessibility to the list and entire generations have gone without seeing some of the classics of this list. I for one have never seen All in the Family or Moonlighting because it wasn't on in syndication when I was growing up (I'm generally in the school of thought that good art has to find its way to you and not the other way around).

Even then the socio-economic factors that make a show popular is more pronounced in this meeting because a lot of these shows weren't designed to appeal to broad audiences in the present and film (a director-driven medium) is somewhat more aimed at timelessness. Others might disagree but I'd argue that many shows like Roseanne, Family Ties, and Golden Girls don't particularly age well when watching them in the present day. The clips I've seen of All in the Family seem like a show about a very whiny and shrill family.

My suggestions for classic work that should be considered are: Looney Tunes, Threes Company, Get Smart and Beverly Hillbillies

Contemporary Shows which could have been interesting choices include: Homeland, Better off Ted, Party Down, The Good Wife, Modern Family, Orange is the New Black, Cougar Town, Scandal, Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Man in High Castle, American Horror Story, and Empire

Lastly, shows that took off after the book was released that could be worthy include: Lodge 49, BoJack Horseman, The Americans, Black Mirror, Lady Dynamite, Crashing, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Last Man on Earth, The Good Place, Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Derry Girls, Glow, Silicon Valley, and Review

The best TV show ever

This was originally posted on September 30th

I watched the Office tonight and was kind of weary to do so, because I didn’t want to mess with a good thing, but it was actually pretty good tonight. There was a really touching moment where Jim called Michael a friend. I also didn’t even catch the season premiere. And I just watched a two minute clip of the season premiere, and now i'm inclined to download itunes just to get the season premiere. The last season of the Office was like the best season of any TV show in TV history. From the season’s first episode where Pam saved Michael from an akward moment at the annual Dundie Awards, the show went such a long way since last season towards bringing everyone to life, and keeping Michael hilariously akward but still endearing. I looked forward to Thursday nights last year for The Office and asked to be dropped off from ski practice at my apartment early to catch the show because it was just such a great show and uplifting experience, and hey, it’s 5 dollars cheaper than Highlawn (the local club which has college night on Thursday nights). And the season finale did something that few shows could do. It resolved the long-standing sexual tension between Michael and Pam without making it seem corny or anticlimactic, and if you have anything invested in its characters (secret to a good comedy: make the audience care about the characters) than you absolutely had to tune into the season premiere. I don’t know if this is the best show ever made, but I think that was one of the best seasons of any TV show ever.

It’s funny because every few years someone proclaims a TV show to be the best thing ever. People have said that about Arrested Development (which actually was the best show ever made), The Sopranos, Sienfeld, the Simpsons, etc. I remember that annoying sports show Around the Horn, where people get points for disagreeing with each other even if it violates common sense (it gets tricky in the first round where you have to simultaneously disagree with 3 people), they were debating what was the best show ever made: The Simpsons or Sienfeld. First of all, Simpsons shouldn’t even be in the debate. Just because a show has been on the air for 20 years, doesn’t mean it’s been producing anything remotely original material for 20 years. And does anyone remember how little the Fox network had to offer 20 or even 10 years ago? It wasn’t particularly hard to survive on the Fox network 20 years ago when the next best shows were Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, In Living Color and Married with Children. The Simpsons might be something good to watch at 6 p.m. if you’re not in the mood to watch the news, but the best ever is overstating it. Like movies, I’m sure that TV’s only good shows aren’t limited to the last 10-15 years. I think Cheers is really great. I thought that was better than Sienfeld. I really like the Beverly Hillbillies. It’s pretty much the same plot over and over again: stick 4 hicks in a Beverly Hillbillies and watch cultural disaster ensue, and each time, it’s hillarious. I think the 4 actors were really good, that was part of it. And I’m not even going that far back, we haven’t even covered the ‘50s or ‘60s with I Love Lucy and stuff like that but my point, though, is that most people just have short-term memory and make bodacious claims about shows like Sienfeld and Simpsons without an appreciation of or knowledge of more than the last 15 years.