TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

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  To Susan Olds and Mark Di Ionno, who had the very good idea to put these two loud kids on the TV beat together

  TV (THE BOOK)

  The Introduction

  We wanted to write about movies, not TV.

  Sure, we watched TV—watched it so religiously that we can identify a particular Brady Bunch or Little House on the Prairie episode in under ten seconds—but growing up, we always expected to be film critics. Movies were an adventure; TV was the thing that everyone said was going to rot our brains. Movies were art; TV was the vast wasteland. There was even a TV show where a couple of film critics talked about the latest releases; good luck trying to get the local multiplex to screen a discussion of whether The A-Team was better than The Dukes of Hazzard.

  For us, the glamour of movie criticism went well beyond Siskel’s and Ebert’s thumbs. It was in the film reviews we read in magazines while our mothers were shopping. More important, it was in the books about movies. There were so many of them at the library, or the local B. Dalton. Some were about a particular movie, or the works of just one actor or director, but the books that always drew us in were those voluminous guides to the world of cinema at large, whether the endless capsules of Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide and Halliwell’s Film Guide, or the longer essays found in collections of Pauline Kael’s and Roger Ebert’s best reviews. We devoured those, and many more, carrying them in cardboard boxes from childhood homes to college dorms to adult apartments. There was a permanence to them, and a sense of authority. Western literature had its own canon, and, increasingly, so did Western cinema. And we couldn’t wait to weigh in on it.

  Somehow, though, we both wound up covering television, in what turned out to be the best possible era—and, for multiple reasons, the best possible place—to do so. In the late ’90s, we were assigned to share the TV beat for the Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s biggest daily, and soon to become famous as the paper at the end of Tony Soprano’s driveway. It was still a boom time in newspapers, where the Ledger could have a half dozen writers and editors primarily focusing on TV, and it was the start of a creative explosion in television—one we had a front seat to watch and write about—that ended the medium’s second-class citizenship.

  For ten years of the revolution that gave us The Sopranos, The Wire, and more—which made watching TV from the couch every bit the adventure going to the multiplex had once been—we sat at adjacent desks, shared a column with a logo that made us look like twins conjoined at the shoulder, and each had frequent debates about TV so passionate (or, at least, loud) that nearby copy editors would frequently have to ask us to shut up about Deadwood, already.

  It’s been another decade since we worked together regularly, even though we still talk about TV (at a volume that continues to annoy passersby) constantly, arguing over which shows are the best (and worst) ever, and trying to convince the other to give a second chance to our own pet shows, like Matt’s beloved K Street.

  Our careers have gone in different directions. Alan went to HitFix.com. Matt landed at New York magazine and, in a full-circle move, RogerEbert.com, after fifteen years of writing about movies and TV for different outlets simultaneously. Meanwhile, TV’s creative and commercial growth continued. In the summer of 2015, the head of FX, the cable channel that’s given us new classics like The Shield and Louie, noted that by the end of that year, more than four hundred original scripted series—many of them good—would have aired in prime time, and suggested we still hadn’t reached “Peak TV in America” yet.

  Television is better than ever, and yet there have been very few attempts (David Bianculli’s Teleliteracy, and its companion Dictionary of Teleliteracy, to name a couple) to create a TV canon in book form in the spirit of all the good ones about movies, such as Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema, David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, and Ebert’s The Great Movies series.

  TV (The Book) is our attempt to rectify that, and to capture the spirit of some of our old Star-Ledger bull sessions in printed form.

  In the ensuing pages, we will identify the one hundred greatest scripted shows in American TV history, explain their greatness in a series of essays, and almost certainly make everyone very angry by ranking some above others and omitting many dozens or hundreds more.

  Because there are more hours of good present-day TV to watch during any given year—never mind all the great older shows that you may want to catch up on at some point—than there are hours in which to watch them, this book also tries to boil sixty-plus years of the medium’s history down to an essential viewing list, so people can experience some version of a canon without killing themselves.

  We knew it was presumptuous to think that any two critics could identify TV’s best shows ever, then rank them. Nevertheless, we wanted to see a book like this exist. And with our four combined decades of professional TV knowledge (plus close to that again, if you count our misspent youths), we feel that we know the medium thoroughly enough to make informed judgments.

  That said, this project was undertaken with a spirit of humility and invitation. TV (The Book) is Matt and Alan’s canon at this particular moment; no more, no less. We don’t want, much less expect, for it to be treated as the canon for all time (not that it would be) or as an attempt to shut down discussion rather than open it up. We still crack open the Thomsons and Eberts and Maltins on our bookshelves, and every few years we read and argue about canonical film lists published by Sight & Sound, The Village Voice, Cahiers du Cinéma, and other august publications; just as none of those necessarily trump any others, we hope that our TV equivalent will eventually be seen as merely one survey among many.

  This is our canon; we look forward to yours.

  TV (THE BOOK)

  The Explanation

  HOW DOES THIS WORK?

  The heart of the book is the Pantheon: a list of the one hundred greatest comedies and dramas.

  To create it, we made a list of several hundred candidates for the best shows of all time, allowing for various caveats explained in the following pages.

  Then we set about the sensible and not-at-all-controversial task of assigning numerical values to art.

  We decided on five categories, to which we eventually added a sixth. Each of us was assigned 10 points per category, for a possible maximum score of 120 if both of us gave a particular series perfect scores. (No show got perfect scores across the board.)

  Those categories are:

  Innovation. Was the show trying something—in terms of form, subject matter, or both—that felt new, or was it following or embellishing upon tradition? Shows like All in the Family and 24 scored highly here because they did things no one in American television had really tried before, whereas an otherwise great show like Parks and Recreation had a comparatively low Innovation rating because it largely duplicated a stylistic template its creators had used for The Office.

  Influence. How much of an impact did the show have either on the medium of television or on the culture at large? Shows like Hill Street Blues and Friends were copied by many other TV series. Freaks and Geeks, a short-lived show that had few
obvious imitators, scored highly because of the impact its cast and creators had on the entire comedy business during the past fifteen years. Will & Grace (which finished outside the top 100) scored highly here because of the role it played in helping to reshape public attitudes about homosexuality.

  Consistency. How much did the quality fluctuate from episode to episode, or season to season? That said, consistency isn’t a mark just of smooth sailing from start to finish but of how well a series weathered storms beyond its control, like Nancy Marchand’s death after only two seasons of The Sopranos, or the constant cast turnover on Law & Order.

  Performance. This deals not only with how great the actors on the show were but how well-crafted their characters were. So The Sopranos did better in this category than 24, because even if you feel that James Gandolfini and Kiefer Sutherland were giving performances of equal quality, Tony Soprano was just a richer, more complex character than Jack Bauer, and the same was true of supporting characters on each series.

  Storytelling. Here we come to the parts of writing beyond characterization, such as tone and structure, not to mention such filmmaking elements as direction, production design, editing, and music. Among the seeming intangibles that come into play are comic timing, suspense, surprise, formal audacity, and its obverse, perfectly executed classicism. Hannibal, Twin Peaks, and The Simpsons prided themselves on doing something different every week, whereas Cheers and The Honeymooners did more or less the same thing every week. All five scored well in this category because what matters in storytelling isn’t just what you’re doing but how well you’re doing it.

  Peak. A late addition, factoring in how great each show was at its absolute best, using a full season, more or less, as our unit of measurement. Other categories were judged against the entirety of television; this was graded on a curve against the rest of the Pantheon: only a few 10s, lots of middling scores, and a few low ones reflecting how that show’s best compares to, say, the fourth seasons of The Wire or Seinfeld.

  The breakdown of each show’s score can be found in the appendix in the back of the book. You may notice that occasionally, a show was scored by only one of us. That’s because we knew certain shows clearly had to be considered, but only one of us had enough history with it to score it with authority. Rather than dismiss these shows from contention, or require the other guy to binge-watch thirty or sixty hours in the space of a few days, we decided to double Matt’s or Alan’s score for that show and get on with it.

  WHAT SHOWS WERE CONSIDERED?

  We made the following rules:

  1. US television shows only.

  Fawlty Towers, Prime Suspect, Space Battleship Yamato (Star Blazers), Les Revenants (The Returned), both Kingdom miniseries, and other beloved imports would rank highly if we opened this book to international series. Ultimately, though, we felt that while there were a few blind spots here and there in our knowledge of TV originating in the States, the gaps became much wider when we factored in shows from other countries. We didn’t want to be so foolish as to mistake our knowledge of the relatively paltry handful of British, Mexican, Japanese, Danish, and other foreign shows that have made it to the United States for the totality of international TV. Given US programs’ global reach, this might not be as much of an issue for critics in other countries, but there would still be knowledge constraints. If French critics were doing their version of this book and trying to include American series, they’d surely know of The Sopranos and I Love Lucy, but would they know Terriers or Frank’s Place?

  The line between what is and isn’t a US-made show can be blurry, and we made what are sure to be considered debatable calls. To use three current examples: Game of Thrones is shot all over the world and has an international cast, but it originates on and is funded by HBO, so we counted it as a US series. Top of the Lake was shot in New Zealand and cofunded by several international sources, but a good chunk of that money came from Sundance Channel, so we counted it as US. And Catastrophe is a hilarious comedy cocreated by and costarring American comedian Rob Delaney, but he and Sharon Horgan made it for the United Kingdom’s Channel 4; that it’s available to stream here on Amazon makes it no more American than Sherlock, which is produced in the UK but airs here on PBS.

  Of course there are going to be some borderline cases that we will cop to having included because we liked them and felt confident in writing about them. We might get dinged for inconsistency there, but we’re willing to live with it.

  2. Completed shows only. Mostly.

  If we were writing this book in early 2012, and Homeland had been canceled after its first, outstanding season, it might have earned itself a spot somewhere in the top 100. The ensuing seasons, unfortunately, dragged its average down far enough that it finished well outside the running. TV shows can vary wildly in quality from season to season—just look at the roller-coaster ride that was Friday Night Lights seasons 1–3—and it felt unfair to make final judgments if a show wasn’t complete. You never know when a series is going to pull a Roseanne and do something absolutely dire in a later year, or make like Frasier or Scrubs and return to former glory before the end.

  That said, we made exceptions. The Simpsons has been on the air for almost thirty seasons, which feels like a large enough sample size to make a judgment about, no matter how good or bad the next few decades of the show may be. (Ditto South Park as it finishes its second decade.) We also made space for a few shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, and Louie, which could theoretically return at some point but which were on prolonged hiatuses at the time of this book’s creation. If more seasons or episodes get produced, great: We’ll happily watch and evaluate them. If not, we’re comfortable judging them as if they were complete.

  We decided to consider Twin Peaks and The X-Files complete despite the existence of recent or upcoming seasons that were announced while we were writing the book. We felt that because so much time has elapsed since the presumed “end” of each series—fourteen years for The X-Files; twenty-five-plus years for Twin Peaks—that any additional seasons should be considered the beginnings of separate series (or miniseries) that have the same names.

  3. Narrative fiction only.

  As it is, comparing comedies and dramas—let alone shows from different eras, like trying to decide whether The Fugitive is greater than 30 Rock—was onerous enough without also trying to figure out variables for sketch comedy, talk shows, documentary and news programs, reality TV, sports, and so on. Comedy versus drama is already apples and oranges; to add plantains, tangelos, and star fruit would have been foolish indeed.

  We considered anthology shows on a case-by-case basis, deciding that series such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits fit the larger idea of what we were trying to do, because the episodes each week were linked by style and theme and, often, a common creative team, while something like Playhouse 90 should be looked at more as an umbrella title for a collection of filmed plays, some of which are cited individually elsewhere in the book. (Ditto the brilliant Mystery Science Theater 3000, which consists of maybe 90 percent annotated film-watching and 10 percent character-based comedy.)

  We steered away from children’s programming because, like international programming, the subject seemed vast enough to merit a second book, and too prone to glaring omissions to consider here. (Our own children protested this choice.) A few series that could be considered kids’ shows are cited in the Pantheon and on other lists; they made it in because if, by some chance, you were not in the company of kids when you first stumbled upon them, you might have considered them sophisticated enough to pass muster as grown-up entertainment. SpongeBob SquarePants is an absurdist masterpiece that Salvador Dalí and Groucho Marx would have watched together in their smoking jackets, Samurai Jack is the greatest action movie that John Woo never made, and Recess is Lord of the Flies plus One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, minus murder.

  4. One-season shows are eligible, but with some penalties.

  This was the
subject of a lot of debate. Is it fair to judge a show like My So-Called Life—which made nineteen more or less perfect episodes, then ended before it could enter the kind of decline phase that afflicted Homeland—against long-running series that were subjected to the indignities and compromises that come with age? Yes, for the same reason that one could compare the acting virtues of James Dean, who appeared in only three films, and Paul Newman, who appeared in almost sixty.

  But once you decide to do that, you need to establish parameters. In an effort to consider one-season wonders while being fair to shows that stuck around longer, we artificially limited their point totals, which means they had to be extra-impressive in their one season to make it into the Pantheon. The most a one-season show could score in each category was a 9, except for consistency—the easiest task to accomplish over only a year—where the highest possible score was a 7.

  WHAT’S IN THE BOOK BESIDES THE PANTHEON?

  There’s a section on some of our favorite current shows—including several that would have been Pantheon contenders if the timing had been a little different—titled “Works in Progress.” There are also essays accompanying lists of TV’s best miniseries, movies, and televised plays, and terse lists covering such topics as great theme songs, memorable deaths, and the best houses and apartments.

  (Some of these other sections and lists feature rankings, while others are just alphabetical. But any rankings done outside the Pantheon were done with less rigor: gut feeling, occasionally augmented by Rock Paper Scissors and cursing contests.)

  We also have a separate section called “A Certain Regard,” named after Prize Un Certain Regard, a category outside of the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival, established in 1978 to draw the international film community’s attention to works of diverse subject matter and style. (In 1998, a prize was attached to it.) This is the section in which we wrote about shows we loved and wanted to praise in the book, even if we couldn’t justify goosing their scores enough to move them into the Pantheon, or if they were lacking in key categories (such as Storytelling or Influence), or never had much interest in them to start with.