ZAZ and company took their act to the movies, where the feature spin-off The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! was a huge hit with the same approach, spawning two sequels in which Leslie Nielsen reprised his role as stoically bumbling cop Frank Drebin. But the six episodes that preceded it were comic marvels, packed with jokes from the first moments (including the on-camera murder of that week’s very special guest star) to the last (those wonderful fake freeze-frames, which were disrupted by a rogue chimp and an overflowing mug of coffee, among other things). They used wordplay, like a “Who’s on first?”–style interrogation that would have impressed Abbott and Costello, slapstick, and spot-on parody of the kind of self-serious police dramas that would have employed Nielsen in a different context even a few years earlier.
With recent shows like Arrested Development and 30 Rock, TV finally made room for the kind of relentless, dense joke-telling style that Police Squad! deployed so well, if not for long. One running gag involved Johnny the shoeshine man, who played dumb about any query until slipped a couple of bucks, after which he could tell Frank everything about the chief suspect in his case, or explain the Cinderella complex to Dr. Joyce Brothers, or teach Dick Clark about ska. If the head of ABC had slipped Johnny a fiver, he might have explained there was a lot of money to be made off of Frank Drebin, if he could just be patient.
—AS
24 (Fox, 2001–2010) Total score: 82
If The West Wing was the defining network drama of the Bill Clinton era, 24 was the defining drama of the George W. Bush years. Debuting just a few weeks after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the series was in the wrong place at the right time, not unlike its stalwart hero, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), a counterterrorist agent tasked with foiling attacks on major cities while continuing to fret over personal relationships with his daughter, wife, and friends. Created by Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran (TV’s La Femme Nikita), the show was conceived as a cross between a James Bond adventure and a Die Hard film, piling temporal constraints (every story took place in twenty-four consecutive hours) on top of geographical ones (most seasons were confined to major metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, New York, London, and Washington, DC). But it soon became a warped mirror of then-current political tensions. Jack represented both the desire to abandon civil liberties and the Geneva Conventions in the name of fighting terrorism, and the left-wing horror at the moral ruin that such behavior brings to people (and nations). Soon Vice President Dick Cheney was citing Bauer to justify the legality of torture, and media outlets were writing think pieces asking if, in presenting Jack’s gruesome handwork as the unavoidable response to ticking-clock threats, the show wasn’t exploiting humankind’s ugliest impulses for ratings. There were also not-unjustified charges that the show’s regular images of murderously fanatical Persian and Arab men were inherently racist, and that by depicting a pulpy United States constantly beset by terrorist threats, the series was rubber-stamping the worst excesses of the War on Terror, even as some of its Pentagon and Washington subplots made corrupt generals, politicians, and CEOs out to be secret architects of much of the mayhem.
Even as critics argued about the show’s sensationalist tendencies, there was no denying its effectiveness as entertainment. Like such civil liberties–averse 1970s cop thrillers as The French Connection and Dirty Harry, 24 was at least partly a Western at heart, with Jack as a snarling commando cousin of The Searchers’ Ethan Edwards: a military-industrial complex attack dog who keeps turning on his masters, uniquely equipped to lead civilization out of the darkness yet unfit to live in it. The best seasons were probably season 1, which featured Dennis Hopper as the Serbian arms-dealer bad guy, and that had one of the biggest out-of-nowhere shocker endings of the aughts; season 2, which eerily anticipated the Bush administration’s WMDs-in-Iraq gambit (but also suffered from silly scenes in which a cougar menaces Jack’s daughter, Kim, played by Elisha Cuthbert); and season 4, which amounts to a collection of mini-seasons built around individual terrorist threats by a single bad guy. Memorable characters strut in and out as needed, played by actors including Leslie Hope, Sarah Clarke, Carlos Bernard, Xander Berkeley, Penny Johnson Jerald, Jean Smart, Mary Lynn Rajskub, James Badge Dale, Gregory Itzin, Regina King, Cherry Jones, and Dennis Haysbert (whose weekly appearances as a fictional African American president might’ve helped pave the way for the first real one). There were no small moments, only big and bigger. Sean Callery’s alternately bombastic and mournful score made the show seem even more expensive than it was, and the split-screen montages and ticking-clock graphics ratcheted up the tension to thumbscrew levels. Torture rarely works in real life, but the version practiced by 24 got results.
—MZS
The Defenders (CBS, 1961–1965) Total score: 82
The tradition of the ripped-from-the-headlines TV show begins with The Defenders, starring E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed as father-son defense attorneys in New York; it continues with East Side/West Side and keeps going and going, through Norman Lear’s blunt-spoken 1970s sitcoms, plus Soap and Hill Street Blues, and L.A. Law and pretty much every drama David E. Kelley was ever associated with, plus every incarnation of Law & Order. Today it is as durable a genre (or, when merged with the cop or detective show, subgenre) as the Western, the domestic comedy, and the science-fiction anthology. This is remarkable enough when you consider that prior to The Defenders, network TV tried to avoid political or social controversies for fear of angering viewers on one side of an issue or another, or else retreated into “We’re just raising questions here” equivocations. This institutional resistance is the reason why writer-producers like Rod Serling got tired of having their ideas for socially conscious live plays rejected by network suits and migrated to places like The Twilight Zone, where they could traffic in metaphor and fable.
The Defenders came out of the same TV-theater era that eventually broke Serling’s spirit. Series creator Reginald Rose, author of the TV and then film classic Twelve Angry Men, introduced his basic concept to audiences on Studio One in a 1957 two-part production titled The Defender, starring Ralph Bellamy and William Shatner in the father and son roles. Like its progenitor, the series (which partnered Rose with Herbert Brodkin, his Studio One writing partner) addressed its hot-button issues in a straightforward way. “The law is the subject of our programs: not crime, not mystery, not the courtroom for its own sake,” he wrote in a 1964 article, rebuking legal series like CBS’s Perry Mason, which concentrated on courtroom tactics and often resolved their stories through coincidence, contrivance, or the sudden appearance of a surprise witness. Episodes of The Defenders examined the morality and legality of capital punishment, the insanity defense, the Cold War blacklist and the denial of visas to suspected Communists, jury tampering, the ethics of using illegally obtained evidence, and, most notoriously, abortion. The latter—examined in a 1962 episode titled “The Benefactor,” in which the lawyers defend a doctor who performs abortions—caused sponsors to desert; it would have been spiked had another sponsor not stepped in at the eleventh hour, a development that would be cleverly folded into a same-titled episode of Mad Men.
Showtime briefly revived the series in 1997, with Beau Bridges and Martha Plimpton playing Marshall’s son and granddaughter, and Marshall, then eighty-four, backing them up in a supporting role as mentor and sounding board. After he died two episodes into the first season, Showtime ended production; the remaining episode aired in 1998 as a TV-movie titled Taking the First. Beyond its success at infusing drama with news and politics, its glamorization of professional problem solvers who did not carry guns or scalpels, and its invigoration of New York–based location shooting, The Defenders was a drama in which nothing happened that could not happen in life. Rose felt free to show his lawyers losing cases sometimes, maybe because every week, The Defenders won a greater victory by existing.
—MZS
Gunsmoke (CBS, 1955–1975) Total score: 82
This Western drama was the longest-running continuously a
ired dramatic series in the history of American TV; its only competition was the original flagship edition of NBC’s Law & Order, which tied it for number of seasons (20) but aired fewer episodes (452 versus Gunsmoke’s 635). It was also one of the most influential series, demonstrating that the Western format, once the province of self-contained escapist adventures and morality plays, could be used to tell human-scaled stories about psychologically credible individuals who just happened to live in a nineteenth-century rural environment, and who aged and changed over time.
James Arness starred as Matt Dillon, the marshal of Dodge City, Kansas, a crossroads of regional commerce so teeming with ambitious and troubled residents and visitors that violent conflicts were inevitable. (An apocryphal story insists that CBS offered the lead role to John Wayne, who was actually too big a star to have accepted, but Wayne did recommend Arness and introduced the pilot.) Although Arness was onscreen throughout the show’s two-decade run, the supporting and recurring cast turned over many times. Like Law & Order, Gunsmoke provided employment to generations of character actors and future stars (some of whom showed up in more than one role, sometimes in the same year). The lineup of deputies included Dennis Weaver as the cranky but reliable Chester B. Goode, whose limp was never explained; Buck Taylor as gunsmith Newly O’Brien; Ken Curtis as the drawling hillbilly Festus Haggen; Roger Ewing as part-timer Clayton Thaddeus “Thad” Greenwood; and Burt Reynolds as a half Native American, half white blacksmith named Quint Asper. Amanda Blake played saloon owner Kathleen “Kitty” Russell, who was clearly the love of Matt’s life, even though they never married and the show was mostly circumspect about what, exactly, they were about. (Curiously, their interactions became more chaste as the series moved through the ’60s and into the ’70s.)
The show began as a CBS radio series in 1952, with roughly the same mission statement: CBS president William Paley tasked his programming chief with creating a Western drama more temperamentally aligned with hard-boiled detective fiction, and populated by characters with some depth, to set the story apart from escapist fare like The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid (both of which migrated to TV and became beloved CBS series). William Conrad, future star of TV’s Cannon, voiced the marshal for radio. The TV version continued in the same ambitious vein, giving viewers the two-fisted action they craved, but in service of stories about lawmen, government employees, bankers, farmers, ranchers, schoolteachers, and other members of the community, all of whom were struggling to carve out peaceful and productive lives for themselves despite being beset by outlaws, maniacs, con men, rapacious capitalists, and other external threats. Gunsmoke regularly dealt with what would later be considered hot-button issues, including bigotry against African Americans and immigrants, the mistreatment of Native Americans, domestic violence, alcoholism, governmental corruption, and economic exploitation in all of its forms. But these subjects were folded into the fabric of life in Dodge City, and rarely came off as sermons delivered by men in Stetsons and women in petticoats.
Gunsmoke was so brutal that “family values” activists cited it as one of the most offensive series of the early 1960s, along with ABC’s weekly tommy-gun festival The Untouchables; it dialed back the bloodshed during the second half of its run and became more about other kinds of personal conflict. The show’s consistently high quality drew high-profile guest stars, including Bette Davis, who played a vengeful woman who blamed Matt for her husband’s death in 1966’s “The Jailer.” As the show wore on, the sight of the main characters aging lent the weekly stories of emotional or physical conflict a poignant quality. We were constantly made aware of the cost of violence, as manifested in the characters’ scars and wounds and in their increasing willingness to talk instead of shoot. In more than one sense, television grew up with Gunsmoke.
—MZS
Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004) Total score: 82
“I’m dating a guy with the funkiest tasting spunk,” Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) announces over brunch to her three best friends during the season 3 Sex and the City episode “Easy Come, Easy Go.”
The women trade stunned looks, and Charlotte York (Kristin Davis)—who fancies herself the most prim and proper of the group, even if her list of sexual partners contains more kinky weirdos than the others combined—simply walks out of the restaurant. Though the other two express their own dismay at the topic—when Samantha asks with whom she can discuss this if not with her girlfriends, SATC’s chief heroine and narrator Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) replies, “Might I suggest no one?”—they eventually try to offer some practical solutions, then laugh wearily while imagining how willing men would be to perform oral sex if some of the physical conditions were reversed.
The funky spunk debate was far from the first time that Sex and the City—adapted by Darren Star from sex columnist Candace Bushnell’s same-titled anthology—had invited its heroines to discuss the social mores and physical complications of sex in such explicit fashion. One of the series’ earliest episodes featured the women piling into the back of a cab to give Charlotte advice on whether to accede to her boyfriend’s desire for anal sex, with Samantha blithely suggesting, “A hole is a hole,” and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) warning her that doing so would fundamentally alter the relationship’s power dynamics. But by the time of “Easy Come, Easy Go,” the show had become such a phenomenon that it was hard not to imagine writer Michael Patrick King (who succeeded Star as SATC showrunner early on) using Charlotte’s walkout as a meta comment on the viewers who objected to the series’ candor not just on sex, but female desire in general—for emotional as well as orgasmic satisfaction. That the other three keep talking about it after Charlotte’s exit was King making clear that he didn’t care who disapproved; if you sat at the table with these women, uncomfortable topics were going to be discussed early and often, and why shouldn’t they be?
Although it was viewed as a light alternative to such frequently grim HBO dramas as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood, Sex was an integral part of the cable channel’s success in the ’90s and early aughts, earning big ratings and sparking op-ed page arguments about whether its main characters were truly feminist and independent or merely materialistic, entitled, and shoe-obsessed, as well as whether they were even women at all, much less “ladies,” as opposed to coded gay men. The latter theory, which was both homophobic and sexist, was advanced under the assumption that women didn’t talk about men sexually the way men often talked about women—that giving sexual partners nicknames like “Mr. Pussy” and “Skidmarks Guy” was unbelievable as well as inappropriate. This was an astonishing notion given the content that routinely appeared on male-driven HBO shows, and how comparatively mild, even sweet, Sex could be. (Miranda: “What’s the big mystery? It’s my clitoris, not the sphinx.” Carrie: “I think you just found the title of your autobiography.”)
No matter: The show’s fans were as loyal to it as the heroines were to one another, treating Sex as a dear friend who deserved unconditional support. They took fashion advice from the characters (frequent images of the women’s bare legs nearly killed the panty-hose industry), argued over who in their own group was the Carrie and/or the Samantha, and tuned in each week to follow the women’s romantic and professional adventures: corporate lawyer Miranda’s difficult single motherhood and her troubles with boyfriend-then-husband Steve Brady, played by David Eigenberg; Samantha’s moving, late-series struggle with cancer; the failure of Charlotte’s marriage to a guy who was perfect on paper but sexually and temperamentally all wrong.
Carrie spent much of the series falling in and out of lust with Chris Noth’s emotionally distant businessman Mr. Big, who simultaneously represented everything romantic comedies had taught women to dream of, and everything self-help books warned them against. But SATC wasn’t interested in hewing to those rules, nor with making Carrie into a victimized good girl. She made her own choices, even if they were often as damaging to herself and others as those of the more celebrated male HBO protagonis
ts of the period. Midway through the show, Carrie dates saintly furniture maker Aidan Shaw (John Corbett), only to ruin things by cheating on him with Big. Later, they reconcile and even get engaged, but things end ugly a second time when she realizes he still doesn’t trust her not to go back to Big, and Aidan realizes that Carrie simply doesn’t want to marry him.
“People fall in love, they get married,” he insists. “That’s what they do.”
“Not necessarily,” she replies, choosing to follow a different path from what societal or narrative convention expected of her.
Carrie and Big eventually do get married in the first of the two Sex and the City films, which in their excesses of plot, conspicuous consumption, and promiscuous punning seemed determined to prove the series’ harshest critics right. But the show itself was never as frothy or superficial as its detractors claimed. It dealt with sexism, relationships (and was often at its strongest when just dealing with the platonic bonds between the four leads), body-image tyranny, mortality, failure, and the lure of fleeing regrets by blowing up your life and starting all over (a favorite Mad Men topic). Other shows, some of them from SATC writers, tried and failed to copy its formula, proving that there was a lot more to it than coy narration, double entendres, and smash cuts to Samantha having orgasms.
Sex and the City’s peak was probably the end of season 5, which aired nine months after the attacks of 9/11 and felt like a bittersweet farewell not just to the pre–War on Terror New York (represented by the Twin Towers glimpsed in Carrie’s snow globe) but the realization that Carrie and her friends were growing out of their extended “single girl” phase. Still, they would entertain Breakfast at Tiffany’s fantasies for the rest of their lives, even after making peace with the fact that they might not come true. The final shot of that season’s finale would have made a perfect series closer: Carrie walking down a West Village street at dawn while the Tiffany’s theme “Moon River” plays. “We’re after the same rainbow’s end,” it sings, “my huckleberry friend.”
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