Season 2–early season 3: Cerreta/Logan/Cragen/Stone/Robinette/Schiff
Note: I slightly prefer Greevey’s dour personality to the more laid-back Cerreta, but both partnerships were being carried by Logan anyway.
Seasons 13–14: Briscoe/Green/Van Buren/McCoy/Southerlyn/Branch
Note: The writers at least knew what to do with Fred Dalton Thompson as Branch, whose conservative ideology put him in frequent conflict with McCoy.
Season 12: Briscoe/Green/Van Buren/McCoy/Southerlyn/Lewin
Note: The show’s worst DA and its worst deputy DA together in the same cast! And yet the cops were so good that it still keeps this bunch out of last place.
Season 17: Green/Cassady/Van Buren/McCoy/Rubirosa/Branch
Note: Cassady (the show’s only regular female detective) was forgettable, but Rubirosa was one of the better ADAs.
Season 16: Fontana/Green/Van Buren/McCoy/Borgia/Branch
Note: As Jerry Orbach’s replacement, Dennis Farina was another piece of casting that surprisingly didn’t work, while Borgia’s most memorable contribution to the franchise was dying by choking on her own vomit, almost Spinal Tap–style.
Season 15: Fontana/Green (and briefly Falco)/Van Buren/McCoy/Southerlyn (and then Borgia)/Branch
Note: When you put Joe Fontana and Serena Southerlyn in the same cast for thirteen episodes, then fire Serena and have her ask Branch, in a hilarious non sequitur with no foreshadowing in any previous episode, “Is this because I’m a lesbian?” you’ve pretty well screwed the pooch in terms of figuring out your cast for the year.
—AS
Maude (CBS, 1972–1978) Total score: 80
The best of the many spin-offs descended from Norman Lear’s All in the Family, Maude focused on the brash, imperious Maude Findlay (Bea Arthur), the cousin of Family’s Edith Bunker. It was nearly as controversial as its progenitor because it dealt with the day’s political and social controversies in a more head-on way. Sexism, gay rights, abortion, draconian drug laws, racism, class anxiety, and the hypocrisies of white liberalism were all subjects of spirited argument in Maude’s house. Those last three were combined via conversations between Maude and her domestics, starting with Florida Evans (future Good Times star Esther Rolle), whom Maude urged to enter through the front door even though the back was more convenient for her, and Florida’s second replacement, Victoria Butterfield (Marlene Wakefield), whom Maude falsely accused of stealing. (In one episode, Maude introduced Florida as “My dear, dear friend, probably the best friend I have in the whole world,” and Florida clarifies: “I’m the maid.”)
Like a more educated and liberal mirror of Archie Bunker, Maude bickered with everybody in earshot, including her third husband, Walter (Bill Macy). The show made space for plotlines revolving around Carol Traynor (played by Adrienne Barbeau, followed by Marcia Rodd), Maude’s daughter by her second husband; her staunchly Republican neighbor Dr. Arthur Harmon (future Diff’rent Strokes star Conrad Bain); and other recurring characters. Some scripts departed from the usual ensemble format, concentrating exclusively on Arthur and Maude or spending the entire half hour with Maude in therapy.
The show often went darker than even the darkest All in the Familys. Maude was dependent on tranquilizers. Arthur’s evening drinking devolved into alcoholism in season 2, leading to an incident where he struck Maude for trying to stop him from reaching for the bottle again, then a nervous breakdown. In season 5, Arthur had a second breakdown, lost his business, and tried to kill himself. A legendary two-part episode found Maude deciding to abort an unexpected pregnancy after consulting with Arthur about it. The episode was scheduled to air in November 1972, two months before Roe vs. Wade declared state-level antiabortion laws unconstitutional; CBS delayed broadcast until the dead months of August.
—MZS
The Rockford Files (NBC, 1974–1980) Total score: 80
Created by Roy Huggins (The Fugitive) and Stephen J. Cannell, then a writer on cop and mystery shows like Adam-12 and Columbo, this series about Los Angeles private eye Jim Rockford gave its star, James Garner, the role he was put on earth to play. Rockford, a former Seabee and wrongfully convicted ex-convict, fused bits of three of Garner’s best early roles: the scrounger from The Great Escape, the eloquent coward from The Americanization of Emily, and one-half of the fast-talking, poker-playing brothers from Maverick (also created by Huggins). The character was a principled antihero who would rather talk than fight. When a magazine writer (Joan Van Ark) in season 2’s “Resurrection in Black and White” sees him loading a gun and says, “I thought you didn’t shoot people,” he replies, “I don’t shoot it, I just point it!” The most memorable scenes hung back and watched Rockford as he chatted up eccentrics, crawled through weeds and into windows in search of evidence, and begged for his life.
The show’s directors luxuriated in seedy but sun-drenched Southern California vistas and doted on the endlessly enjoyable supporting cast. Stuart Margolin played Rockford’s old prison cellmate, Angel Martin, who never stopped scheming even when it got Rockford in trouble. Noah Beery Jr. played the hero’s father, Rocky, a retired truck driver and sometime partner in investigations who wished his son would get a respectable job like truck driving. Vividly etched guest characters floated in and out, including would-be private eye Richie Brockelman (Dennis Dugan), an overconfident, patronizing young college graduate who thought he could talk his way to success. “Look, this guy actually lives in a trailer,” says Richie in season 4’s “The House on Willis Avenue,” trash-talking a dead detective’s living quarters. “It just seems to me that living in a trailer is at the bottom.” “I live in a trailer!” Rockford whines. Much of Cannell’s subsequent career drew on The Rockford Files: Hardcastle and McCormick, The Greatest American Hero, Baretta, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and the superb but very short-lived Tenspeed and Brown Shoe (starring Ben Vereen and Jeff Goldblum as chatterbox detectives who seemed to get beaten up every ten minutes) all had that Garner-esque mix of battered idealism and been-there exasperation. Rockford’s writing staff included future Sopranos creator David Chase; he wrote sixteen episodes, two of which concerned mobsters: His characters included a couple of wiseguys who did business from the back of a deli, and characters named Artie, Carmela, Tony, and Anthony Jr.
The cold opening of each episode was a slow pan that moved across Rockford’s cluttered office while his answering machine played messages that drove home the poignant smallness of his life: “Jimmy, this is Manny down at Ralph’s and Marla’s. Some guy named Angel Martin just ran up a fifty-buck bar tab, and now he wants to charge it to you. You gonna pay?” The opening credits, scored to Mike Post and Pete Carpenter’s harmonica-driven, faintly Western theme music, consisted of a series of slightly blurry photographs that looked as if they’d been taken by a private eye who had the hero under surveillance. The unseen watcher stood in for viewers who never tired of following Jim Rockford.
—MZS
China Beach (ABC, 1988–1991) Total score: 79
An Army nurse, ordered to recall the night a particular soldier died, weaves a tapestry filled with gruesome details—of sticks and Zippo lighters embedded into the skin of the wounded, of floors covered with detached limbs that she hopes she placed next to the correct bodies, of the way she’s grown accustomed to the smell of burned flesh but still pukes at the scent of maggots found in wounds—before admitting that she remembers absolutely nothing about the soldier in question.
“You seem to remember that night pretty well,” the officer in charge tells Lt. Colleen McMurphy.
“I don’t,” she confesses. “They’re all like that. I just picked one at random.”
I didn’t have to choose that scene from China Beach to help illustrate why it’s the greatest forgotten drama of its era. They’re all like that. But pick pretty much any episode at random and you’ll find gorgeous acting, evocative writing, and an enormous sense of empathy for every man, woman, and child—many of that last group handed a rifle and helmet and ask
ed to grow up much too quickly—whose life was forever changed by their time in Vietnam.
China Beach arrived in the midst of a Vietnam drama boom in the movies and on TV, and a general boomer fascination with the ’60s. For much of its run, it overlapped at ABC with The Wonder Years, which covered the same years and had a sound track from the same record collections. But if China Beach’s period was familiar, its approach was anything but.
Its Army base was dominated by women, none more than Dana Delany’s laconic McMurphy, who somehow carried herself like the hero of a Clint Eastwood movie while also plausibly (and without it ever feeling annoying or like star-flattery, because Delany was that jaw-droppingly great) making every man on the show fall in love with her. Over the years, it learned to weave remembrances of real combat nurses in with its scripted stories—and in so doing, to make clear how little needed to be embellished for the demands of a fictional drama. It played around with structure (an episode that moved backward to explain why a character got an abortion) and location (finding just as much discomfort for characters who returned home as those who stayed). It had little use for the antihero types who were so prevalent in Vietnam movies of the era (and would become de rigueur on TV a decade later), with only Marg Helgenberger’s calculating prostitute K.C. remotely qualifying, but it was unflinching in the way it showed how war causes even the best-intentioned people to do things they would have once found unimaginable.
And in its spectacular final season, it cut loose the shackles of conventional TV narrative altogether, bouncing back and forth through the decades to show what happened to McMurphy and friends for the rest of their time in country, as well as their difficult readjustments to civilian life.
In the series finale, McMurphy—middle-aged, a recovering alcoholic, never having been as sure of herself back in the real world as she was over there—attends a China Beach reunion, where she’s interviewed by K.C.’s teenage daughter, Karen (Christine Elise). Again, she’s asked to recall the death of a soldier, and again the details are too horrible for anyone to have to hear, let alone actually experience.
“I couldn’t save them all,” she says, smiling through tears. “But I saved some.”
—AS
Enlightened (HBO, 2011–2013) Total score: 79
Cocreated and executive-produced by Laura Dern and actor-writer Mike White, Enlightened is about an office drone named Amy Jellicoe (Dern) who suffered a nervous breakdown, went away to a New Age detox and spiritual healing colony in Hawaii, then returned home to try to put her life back together. It ran just two seasons and was canceled before audiences got a chance to see whether its story could sustain over the long haul, but the eighteen episodes it did produce were close to perfect, demonstrating an appreciation of human complexity and a mastery of narrative voice rarely seen outside of the best short fiction. On top of all that, Enlightened might be the sharpest satire of modern white-collar work since the original British version of The Office; its skewering of that world intertwines with its portrait of individual personalities so deftly that you can’t really separate them.
Amy is our heroine and surrogate. She narrates parts of the show in voice-over often accompanied by subjective camerawork, including first-person point-of-view shots and Expressionist slow motion that draws out her perceptions and amplifies her feelings. The bits that Amy narrates are first-person subjective: They’re colored by her experience at the colony and by the supplemental reading she’s been doing since she returned to Los Angeles, went back to work with a demotion, and moved in with her aging mom, Helen (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mother). The rest of the show, though, could be described as third-person limited. We’re seeing Amy—and all the other characters, including her mother; her still-drug-addled ex, Levi Callow (Luke Wilson); and her new boss, the socially inept, profane, hot-tempered Dougie Daniels (Timm Sharp)—from a more detached point of view, one that conveys the fullness of the characters’ self-flattering delusions even as it looks through them and sees something like the truth about them.
White and Dern have a social satirist’s keen ear and eye. They capture the unsettling blandness of office protocol, politics, and jargon, from the chill that workers feel when Human Resources calls them out of the blue to the impressive-sounding word-salad labels that the company gives to its projects. (The experimental department to which the newly demoted Amy is assigned goes by the hopeful and curious name “Cogentiva,” but it’s pushing the dehumanizing aspects of work to new depths.) At the end of the first season, executives invite Amy to present evidence of the company’s misdeeds at a board meeting, then mock her as a nutcase Pollyanna; she overhears them and becomes so enraged that she fantasizes about burning the place to the ground. In season 2, she attempts to lure a hunky journalist (Dermot Mulroney) into writing a muckraking piece about her employer. He tells her the company’s behavior is “unethical, it’s immoral, I know that, but it’s not illegal.” He won’t write about Abaddon because its heinousness is sadly typical. It’s a scene more chilling than any of Walter White’s mustache-twirling antics on Breaking Bad because it depicts a banal kind of evil, born of moral exhaustion.
There’s an opportunistic spaciness to Amy that’s appalling at times. You understand why her former assistant Krista Jacobs (Sarah Burns) wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her, why Dougie finds her exasperating, and why most of her coworkers look slightly panicked when she tries to talk to them. Amy always wants something. As far as she’s concerned, other people exist to make her life easier and bail her out when she fails; when other characters call her on this, she seems baffled, as if they’ve begun describing someone Amy’s never met. But the show never reduces Amy to a caricature. She’s hard to hate because she means well. As irritating and often clueless as she is, she really is trying to be a better person—and her self-serving tirades about her workplace contain germs of truth. Enlightened doesn’t adopt a morally superior tone to any of this. Things are never either-or. They’re always both-and. Amy is a deeply damaged and irritating woman. Her voice-over reveries are filled with rehab platitudes and portentous images that suggest a Los Angeles tourism ad directed by Terrence Malick. She’s so narcissistic that when she grins at the targets of her goodness, she seems to be admiring her reflection in their pupils. But she’s right about Abaddon, and she’s right to be mad that no one cares. “I’m just tired of feeling small,” she says. Isn’t everyone?
—MZS
Everybody Loves Raymond (CBS, 1996–2005) Total score: 79
The first few years of Raymond overlapped with the last few of Seinfeld, and the two shows built around comedians with skimpy acting résumés—and that grew into huge hits from humble, low-rated beginnings—often felt like funhouse-mirror versions of each other.
Seinfeld was pointing the way forward in sitcom storytelling, with its interwoven plot threads and loathing of sentiment; Raymond was a throwback that proudly told only one story per episode and found a way for the absurdity and yelling to lead to a sincere moment between the characters. Jerry Seinfeld never showed much interest in growing as an actor; Ray Romano won an Emmy for this show and later did acclaimed dramatic work on other series. Larry David wound up at HBO, while Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal liked to brag that while they were making Raymond for CBS, “in the back of my mind, it’s for Nick at Nite.”
Both were, superficially, shows about nothing, but Raymond used its minutiae—Ray Barone buying the wrong brand of tissues, or wife, Debra (Patricia Heaton), waging a cold war with Ray over putting away a suitcase from a trip, or Ray’s overbearing mother, Marie (Doris Roberts), refusing to divulge the recipe for her famous meatballs—in service of greater emotional truths about the characters. It was loud and broad, bordering on vaudevillian at times, yet again and again, Romano, Heaton, Roberts, Peter Boyle, and Brad Garrett switched effortlessly from farce to pathos.
Not every show needs hugging and learning, but this one sure did well with it.
—AS
The W
onder Years (ABC, 1988–1993) Total score: 79
It’s funny, if unsurprising, how nostalgic TV shows can take on an added retro layer as they age. Seventies’ sitcoms Happy Days and M*A*S*H both took place in the 1950s, but today Fonzie’s thumbs-up and Hawkeye’s sensitivity seem more evocative of the decade in which they were made than the one in which both were set.
The Wonder Years, though, doesn’t so much evoke the late ’80s as it does a time when baby boomer nostalgia hadn’t turned into insufferably ubiquitous navel-gazing. In 1988, it still seemed novel, and powerful, to open a show set twenty years earlier with a montage of Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., urban riots, soldiers in Vietnam, and Apollo astronauts in orbit, all scored to the Byrds’ version of “Turn! Turn! Turn!” There was still a freshness and innocence to looking at one of the most tumultuous periods in American history through the eyes of rising middle schooler Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) and his best friends Paul Pfeiffer (Josh Saviano) and Winnie Cooper (Danica McKellar). When Winnie’s brother was killed in combat or when Kevin’s sister horrified her parents by moving in with her boyfriend without marrying him, the emotions still felt fresh and raw, rather than boxes to be checked in our obligatory journey through pop culture’s favorite decade.
The series’ greatness wasn’t just a result of timing but of the way that creators Neal Marlens and Carol Black, and later writers like Bob Brush, made Kevin’s coming-of-age feel simultaneously so rich and universal that it could have been set in many different eras. He was Everykid in Everytown, and the specificity came as much from the natural, appealing performances of Savage and his costars (including Dan Lauria and Alley Mills as Kevin’s parents, who came from the same generation but saw the new one very differently) as it did from the classic-rock sound track and references to Nixon and the moon landing.
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