A Certain Regard is also the place where we honor programs or aspects of programs that are great in pieces but maybe not as a whole, like the outlier second season of Sons of Anarchy and the first seasons of Crime Story and Homeland.
SERIOUSLY, THOUGH: HOW DARE YOU ASSIGN A NUMERICAL VALUE TO ART?
If you treat H. L. Mencken’s statement that “criticism is prejudice made plausible” not as a condemnation but as a set of marching orders, you can see how we can rank some shows above others—all of this is subjective. The fact is, some shows are simply better than others. Assigning ten-point scores across six categories isn’t a perfect solution to the problem, but it’s better than the alternative, which is either (a) a list of one hundred supposedly equally good programs ordered alphabetically, or (b) a list of one hundred programs plucked out of a hat.
Plus, the simple fact of the matter is, when somebody asks you which is better, CHiPs or Barney Miller, you not only answer “Barney Miller,” you know why. Attaching numbers to your feelings only clarifies them.
On top of all that, people ask us all the time, “What’s the best comedy ever?” “What’s the best drama ever?” “What’s the best show of all time?” and “What are the best shows on the air right now?” This is our attempt to finally answer those questions. The results may surprise you, just as they surprised us when we were done.
And now, rather than answer every question individually, we can smile cryptically and hand people copies of this volume from the handcrafted leather TV (The Book) rucksacks we will carry on our person until the end of our days, then jump feetfirst through the nearest open window while playing the SpongeBob SquarePants theme on a slide whistle.
WHY ARE SOME OF THE SHOWS WRITTEN ABOUT IN PAIRS OR GROUPS?
For the most part, each show in the Pantheon gets its own essay, which in bulk tend to decrease in length as we travel further down the list. Every now and then, though, we realized that there was such obvious overlap between the themes of certain essays—say, the changing demographics of sitcom casts, as reflected in The Golden Girls and Friends—that it made more sense to write about them in tandem.
Whenever we did this, the joint essay appears in the position of the highest-ranked show.
WHY AREN’T THERE MORE OLD SHOWS ON THIS LIST?
We don’t believe that TV suddenly became good when The Sopranos debuted. But it would be foolish to disregard the fact that for the first twenty, maybe thirty, years of its existence, television was more of an appliance or advertising delivery mechanism than an artistic medium. We don’t mean to say that it was impossible to produce art on television; clearly it was. We just mean that the commercial constraints were so severe that shows were lucky to show flashes of artistry, and those that did were occasionally overrated for the same reason that one might declare a sip of dirty water to be the finest beverage in the desert. Most shows of the ’50s, ’60s, and even into the ’70s could be great at one or two things, but it was rare for them to be great at lots of things at the same time, much less demonstrate the kind of audacity that was common in literature, theater, cinema, even popular music.
You will find shows from those early decades in this book—The Honeymooners, for instance, and The Twilight Zone, and The Westerner—but it’s fair to say the medium didn’t begin to reach its full artistic potential until the ’80s, because for the most part, the words “full” and “potential” weren’t allowed anywhere near each other. We can’t stress enough that much of the fault for this must be laid at the feet of the networks, indeed, the system as a whole, rather than individual artists’. Too often the artists’ will to create was thwarted by the networks saying, “No way.” There were too many words you couldn’t utter, too many topics you couldn’t address even obliquely, too many stylistic choices you weren’t allowed to make, because executives feared turning off viewers and scaring off advertisers. Once the range of expression expanded—thanks to the advent of cable as well as the broadcast networks’ desire to compete with feature films aimed at grown-ups—you were more likely to see expressive and sophisticated and even daring shows amid the usual crud.
Brilliant individual artists played a part in driving the medium’s evolution forward, too. There were great gymnasts before Nadia Comăneci, and great boxers before Muhammad Ali, but their greatness was so distinctive, of such a higher order of magnitude than anything that had come before, that it kicked open the doors of possibility to all who came after, and showed there was more to their sports than even the most ardent spectators thought possible. In the same vein, many TV writers, directors, and actors are on record saying they were spurred to innovation by shows from many different eras, everything from The Ernie Kovacs Show and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman through The Larry Sanders Show and True Detective. We’ve tried to honor TV’s pioneers here, in the context of the shows they helped create and sometimes in self-contained entries.
ARE THERE SPOILERS IN THIS BOOK?
Hell yes.
There’s no way to properly express the greatness of these shows without giving away many of the things that happened on them, sometimes all the way to the end. If you haven’t seen a particular show and don’t want any surprises spoiled, jump to the next entry.
IF MY FAVORITE SHOW ISN’T IN THE BOOK, DOES THAT MEAN IT’S NOT GOOD?
Absolutely not, unless your favorite show is Work It!
As we said, there’s a lot of TV, past and present. Even if we tried to confine the Pantheon to shows of the twenty-first century, we’d still be leaving a lot of good stuff out. These are just the ones we felt were most impressive artistically, or that we had a soft spot for, or thought were underappreciated or misunderstood.
THE PANTHEON
The 100 Greatest Shows Ever
THE GREAT DEBATE
How Do You Pick the Best Show of All Time?
(The authors conducted the following conversation over several days via GChat after their initial attempt to rank the greatest shows of all time resulted in a five-way tie for the top spot.)
Alan Sepinwall: Okay, so we have a five-way tie for first: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Cheers, The Simpsons, and The Wire.
Matt Zoller Seitz: The question is, what do we do about it? They’re all excellent in one way or another, they got to their positions on merit, and they’re all very different. Maybe we should argue this out.
Alan Sepinwall: Yes. The first thing to do is maybe figure out if any of them should be eliminated from contention straightaway. We started out with this ranking system, where we were assigning scores independently of other shows, but now that we have these five neck and neck, are there any that clearly shouldn’t be above the others?
Matt Zoller Seitz: Well, my knee-jerk reaction, which is not necessarily to be trusted, is to prize the most aesthetically daring shows over the others, because that’s how I usually roll. That would mean that the greatest show of all time cannot be Cheers, which is the summation of everything that had been done in the three-camera sitcom format up until that point, and arguably the greatest thing ever to be done in that format, since no other sitcom has quite matched it since.
But as I describe Cheers, I find myself appreciating that achievement. And it is an achievement. To be the best at something that other shows were doing quite well for three decades before your show came down the road: That’s nothing to sneeze at.
At the same time, my gut tells me Breaking Bad cannot be the greatest TV show of all time. But I don’t know why I feel that.
Alan Sepinwall: I was thinking of Breaking Bad, too. It’s an extraordinary show, and deserving of a high position here. But I can’t see myself putting it above The Sopranos, and not just because The Sopranos was first. Breaking Bad is the more consistent show, and the more narratively satisfying one, and yet The Sopranos feels like the greater artistic achievement, if that makes sense.
Matt Zoller Seitz: There is something to be said for consistency over time, and “perfection”—defined here, perhaps, by the absence of
episodes or seasons that didn’t quite work. Breaking Bad and Cheers have no bad seasons and, I would contend, no bad episodes, only good and great. You can’t say that for The Sopranos or The Simpsons or even The Wire.
But I think if I am being true to myself, I have to value the more extravagant, even grandiose achievements of The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Simpsons, even though the downside is that you sometimes end up with stuff like the Columbus Day episode or Vito in New Hampshire, or some of the newspaper stuff in season 5 of The Wire that didn’t go anywhere.
And The Simpsons, as I am sure we’ll get into, has a whole other problem, which is that it is still on the air as we write this. That means that, as inventive as it is, it cannot help but repeat itself in some ways, and do variations of things it’s done before. We don’t want to run the risk of confusing the artists’ unwillingness to quit while they’re ahead, or their inability to recognize a promising idea that cannot be properly executed, with boldness. Sometimes a part of art is deciding not to do a thing because it’s not worth doing, or might not work. You know: judgment.
I’m seesawing here, I know, I know.
Alan Sepinwall: I have a whole elaborate argument about The Simpsons that we will, indeed, get to. As for Cheers, I would argue that achieving perfection in your form—even if it’s ultimately a less artistically challenging form—is just as powerful a statement as aiming higher and mostly hitting the target.
As you say, Cheers was the sum total of decades of the medium’s most beloved type of series, and the best example of it. I can understand the arguments for why The Simpsons and the two HBO shows are simply more important, and might make them myself, but there’s nothing wrong with being the best there ever was at something that many people—including Ball, Gleason, Reiner, Lear, et cetera—took a crack at over the decades.
Matt Zoller Seitz: Okay, so since we both seem to feel like the greatest show of all time cannot be Breaking Bad, maybe we should dig into that one first and see if we change our minds.
For me it comes down to Breaking Bad’s very clearly being a descendant of The Sopranos. It is more consistently clever, and just more consistent than The Sopranos, over nearly the same span of storytelling acreage, and it’s funny and entertaining, but I don’t feel awed by it in the way I do The Sopranos.
Alan Sepinwall: If you were to ask me what is the best hour of dramatic television ever, I would say Breaking Bad’s “Ozymandias” and not think twice about it. In terms of consistency, visual flair, and use of the serialized nature of the medium to build narrative, suspense, and character, Breaking Bad is better than The Sopranos.
But, like you, I feel ever so slightly more pulled in by the emotion and the thematic scope of The Sopranos, even as it is much easier to point out story lines, characters, and even entire seasons that are less strong. It’s not just that it was first (otherwise, I Love Lucy would be here over Cheers) but that it was reaching for something much grander.
Which, of course, is the exact opposite of the argument I just made for Cheers. This is hard!
Matt Zoller Seitz: Here’s what it comes down to for me: If The Sopranos and Breaking Bad are treading similar thematic terrain, and I believe they are, I then have to ask myself which show explored it more thoughtfully and in a more challenging or surprising way. The answer is The Sopranos. No drama in the history of television was more surprising. And I don’t just mean reversal of expectations. I count infuriating the audience as a form of surprise. Anticlimax can create surprise, too. So can what I call “double-bluffing”: where you think you know what a typical TV series would do, and assume The Sopranos won’t do it because it’s The Sopranos, and then they do it, and you’re surprised.
I feel like David Chase and his writers and directors had the entire history of television in the backs of their minds as they made that show, and were determined never to do the obvious thing, even if the obvious thing would be the crowd-pleasing thing. There were times when Breaking Bad did the obvious, crowd-pleasing thing, in a way that very slightly cheapened the rest of the show’s extraordinary achievements for me.
If you compare, say, the way that Walt dealt with the threat from Gus Fring—which was awesome in an action-movie sense—versus the way that Tony dealt with Ralphie Cifaretto on The Sopranos, you can see what I mean. The former is a very elegantly laid-out protagonist-versus-antagonist, cat-and-mouse game, which is wonderful on its own terms. But Tony versus Ralphie is about something other than crime or gangsterism. It’s about having to work with somebody you hate, and how an organization or business forces you to eat dirt sometimes, and how money talks (Ralphie’s a good earner, so the higher-ups keep excusing his loathsomeness). When the end finally comes for Ralphie at the hands of Tony, the context is surprising, and the timing is surprising. You almost assumed it wasn’t going to happen, and it happens because Tony’s suppressed rage and despair over Ralphie’s murder of the stripper Tracee erupts in a different context, over Ralphie burning down the stable where the horse Pie-O-My sleeps. Psychologically, dramatically, thematically, it’s five times more complex than anything Breaking Bad has done, and the fact that Breaking Bad is simply more fun, more exciting, and equally humorous can’t quite counter that for me.
And then compare the endings: The finale of Breaking Bad is satisfying, in a fan-service way, but people are still arguing about the meaning and intent of the end of The Sopranos. Really actively arguing. It makes people angry, still.
So in a head-to-head between Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, Breaking Bad loses. That doesn’t mean Breaking Bad is a bad show; it just means it is one of the greatest shows of all time, but not the greatest. And we’re left with the rest.
Alan Sepinwall: I agree. So let’s set that one aside and talk about The Simpsons.
Matt Zoller Seitz: Please do.
Alan Sepinwall: I feel like the thing that’s holding us back from just naming it as the best show of all time is the show’s continued existence past its first dozen years or so. I happen to like the later years better than you, but I also think that it’s not necessarily fair to hold those years against it.
I’ll put it in baseball terms: When Hall of Fame voting time comes around, players who were very obvious Hall of Famers at the peaks of their careers (say, Tim Raines) sometimes get perceived by the voters to be less than that because they stuck around forever, hitting for less power and average, eventually becoming a designated hitter or a platoon player. Because those later years are fresher in the voters’ minds, the players get dismissed by some as compilers, who are under consideration in the first place only because they played so long.
Just as a hypothetical, let’s pretend that the series ended with “Behind the Laughter,” the season 11 finale. No episodes were made after that, and we’re thus considering only the years of “Homer the Heretic,” “Marge vs. the Monorail,” “Last Exit to Springfield,” and so on. Is The Simpsons your number one show in that case?
Matt Zoller Seitz: I’m not sure. And I say that as somebody who believes, and has argued, that The Simpsons was excellent, or at least consistently entertaining with flashes of greatness, through at least season 13, which is incredible when you stop and think about what that entailed, and all the changeovers of writers and producers.
But I want to hold The Simpsons in our pocket for now because we need to ask, why not The Wire? Why not Cheers?
Alan Sepinwall: Well, since I just contradicted myself about my earlier Cheers defense with what I wrote about Breaking Bad, I’m tempted to set that one aside.
Also, frankly, if you’re asking me what the best comedy in TV history is, I’m saying The Simpsons. The only way Cheers wins that is if there’s some kind of “live-action only” qualifier, which we obviously aren’t using.
Would you agree that The Simpsons is ahead of Cheers, and thus Sam and Diane should be watching the rest of this from the sidelines with Walt and Jesse?
Matt Zoller Seitz: I’m torn on that, because there is a case to be made
for Cheers’ near perfection over the long haul, its exquisitely timed moments of human interaction. That sort of thing is often devalued. But we’re not making a case here for Cheers as a great show. We already did that. That’s why it ended up in the top 5.
I think of all the categories we’ve established as criteria for judging, the one I have to keep coming back to here is “peak.” As you put it, at its peak, how good was The Simpsons? When it was magnificent, how magnificent was it in relation to other shows on this list?
And here we get into the issue of “better” versus “greater.” “Better” is something that can be judged in an almost mathematical way, as weird as that sounds. You can look at a show and go, “Well, it was consistently excellent more often than this other show.”
But “peak” is all about greatness, and greatness for me transcends issues of consistency or craft. Greatness suggests magnitude. Awesomeness. Surprise. Delight. And if we’re measuring “peak” here, which I’m doing in this final tiebreaker discussion, The Simpsons beats Cheers. Cheers was more consistently entertaining over a longer period of time but under more rigidly circumscribed parameters, which was part of the point of Cheers. And that’s great. But The Simpsons had hundreds of transcendent, awesome, delightful moments, maybe thousands, during half of its run, which was longer than Cheers’, and when it did something that you’d never seen before, which was often, it would feel so new, so odd, so right, that you might gasp.
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