BEST CLIFF-HANGERS EVER
1. Who shot J.R.?, Dallas: Ground zero for the season-ending cliff-hanger craze, inspiring more than 83 million people to tune in that fall to find out what happened.
2. “I, Ross, take thee Rachel…,” Friends: The Ross/Rachel romantic tempest at its most unexpected.
3. “Kate… WE HAVE TO GO BACK!,” Lost: They were flash-forwards, not flashbacks!
4. “Mr. Worf… fire,”Star Trek: The Next Generation: Captain Picard is a Borg now; will the Enterprise kill him?
5. Kimberly blows up Melrose Place, Melrose Place: The most talked-about cliff-hanger of the watercooler show of the ’90s.
6. The Moldavian Massacre, Dynasty: Pretty much every major player got plugged; if nothing else, the greatest contract renegotiation ploy of all time.
7. It’s one year later, and the Cylons are invading, Battlestar Galactica: Added time jumps to the TV writers’ standard tool kit.
8. Hank figures out Walt is Heisenberg, Breaking Bad: A literal “oh, shit” moment.
9. Sam and Diane kiss for the first time, Cheers: Funny and sexy and inspired The Office and so many other imitators.
10. President Bartlet is shot, The West Wing: The POTUS is actually collateral damage as white supremacists target his African American body man.
APPENDIX
THE FINAL SCORES
(For a description of each category, see The Explanation here.)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Alan Sepinwall: When David Mamet came in to write a late-period Hill Street Blues episode, David Milch asked if he might want to just take the whole show off his hands, telling him, “Do you want it? We’ve been here for seven years; we’re insane. If you want the show, we’ll give it to you.” Looking back on it, Mamet told me years later, “I kinda wish I’d taken him up on it.”
My esteemed coauthor didn’t use Milch’s exact phrasing when he asked if I wanted to take over the Sopranos beat at the Star-Ledger starting with season 4—which, even for the series’ second half, was the TV critic equivalent of covering music for the Liverpool Daily Post in the early ’60s—but the sentiment was the same. And unlike Mamet, I was wise enough in the moment to say yes, which put me in position for nearly every great thing that’s happened in my career since then. So when Matt asked if I wanted to do a TV book with him, I didn’t even need a moment to think about it. When Matt Zoller Seitz suggests I write something, my life tends to improve enormously.
Of course, this book’s roots start in those early Ledger days, to which I owe an enormous debt to Susan Olds (and Peggy McGlone, who walked my résumé into Susan’s office when I was a twenty-two-year-old college grad with no non-internship experience) and Mark Di Ionno for teaming us up, to Wally Stroby, Anne-Marie Cottone, Steve Hedgpeth, Rosemary Parrillo, Jenifer Braun, and everybody else from that golden era of the paper’s feature section who supported and/or indulged us.
Thanks also to all my bosses and colleagues at HitFix, past and present, for giving me the encouragement and flexibility to take on big projects like this even as I’m down in the recapping trenches with them. I also bounced many ideas off TV critic friends like Dan Fienberg, Linda Holmes, Todd VanDerWerff, Maureen Ryan, Rich Heldenfels, and Ed Bark, who provided advice and inspiration throughout the brainstorming and writing phases. I also did most of my writing with my copy of Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh’s The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows handy, just in case I needed reminding on things like who replaced Roger Moore (who had already replaced James Garner) on Maverick.
Thanks to our agent, Amy Williams, for helping put this all together, and our editor, Maddie Caldwell. I apologize if any hairs were lost or recolored by our near-constant revisions very late in the game.
Mainly, though, thanks to my wife, Marian, and our amazing kids, Julia and Ben, for your never-ending love and support. You didn’t see much of me while I was writing this book. I hope you’re proud of the finished product, and not just because we put SpongeBob and Phineas and Ferb in there.
Matt Zoller Seitz: My first thank-you is to Alan. Even though he is, as I have joked too many times, an unstoppable critical machine wrapped around poly-metal alloy, and capable of writing things faster and better than pretty much anyone alive, he’s a compassionate and fair man who carries himself with modesty, which is the only reason that his arrival in the Star-Ledger newsroom in 1996, one year into my own tenure as a twenty-seven-year-old kid-critic wunderkind, didn’t throw me into a doom-spiral of insecurity. Since then, Alan has become a true friend and one of the best collaborators I’ve ever had. He’s both challenging and sensible, inspiring me to work harder and do better and let things go when it’s time. Rock-paper-scissors is our solution to most disagreements and hard choices, and it has always worked fine for us. I recommend it.
Thanks are due to Maddie Caldwell, our editor, who kept this massive project on track, made countless suggestions that improved it, and tolerated my last-minute requests, à la Columbo, to add just one more thing. Thanks are also due to my agent, Amy Williams, who always thinks beyond the next deal, and has had a profound impact on my career; Chaz Ebert of RogerEbert.com and Adam Moss of New York magazine, who made it possible for me to take on projects beyond the scope of my regular duties at their publications; Eric Klopfer, my regular editor at Abrams Books, who didn’t blink when I told him that I would be finishing TV (The Book) at the same time as The Oliver Stone Experience; Stephen T. Neave, Trey Moynihan, Eric Albrecht, Howard and Jill Kirsch, Amy Cook, Leslie Klainberg, Jane Wheeler, and the rest of the circle that helped me out with child care when work moved into the foreground. Thanks also to the experts who let me pick their brains, including Todd VanDerWerff, Maureen Ryan, Margaret Lyons, Ian Grey, Max Winter, Ken Cancelosi, Gazelle Emami, Lane Brown, Gilbert Cruz, Ed Bark, Stephen Bowie, Wallace Stroby, Joe Adalian, and my Twitter followers, who have helped me out at critical junctures.
Thanks, finally, to the Star-Ledger crew, who made a journalist out of me: Susan Olds, Rosemary Parrillo, Wally Stroby, Anne-Marie Cottone, Steve Hedgpeth, Jenifer Braun, Richard Aregood, and editor Jim Willse, who I am convinced hired me mainly because I had the temerity to quote the book of Corinthians at him during my job interview. Thanks especially to Mark Di Ionno, who called me and Alan “Kid and Genius,” paired us on our daily column, “All TV,” and motivated us with a never-ending supply of maxims that I call The Tao of Mark. They include: “Don’t mess around with that topic sentence crap, puke on the page first, then move the pieces around until you’ve got something that works,” “If you write a sentence that you know is good, break it out into its own paragraph to put a spotlight on it,” “Before you file, try cutting paragraphs from the top to see how deep into the piece you can get without losing anything important,” “Push the button, send it in, and go home,” and, “Not every piece has to have a brilliant ending. It’s okay to just stop.”
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
TV (THE BOOK): The Introduction
TV (THE BOOK): The Explanation
THE PANTHEON:
The 100 Greatest Shows Ever The Great Debate: How Do You Pick the Best Show of All Time?
1–10: The Inner Circle
The Simpsons
The Sopranos
The Wire
Cheers
Breaking Bad
Mad Men
Seinfeld
I Love Lucy
Deadwood
All in the Family
11–50: No-Doubt-About-It Classics M*A*S*H
Hill Street Blues
The Shield
The Twilight Zone
> Arrested Development
The Larry Sanders Show
The Honeymooners
Louie
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The X-Files
Curb Your Enthusiasm
SpongeBob SquarePants
The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show
Twin Peaks
Lost
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Freaks and Geeks
My So-Called Life
Oz
The Dick Van Dyke Show
Friday Night Lights
NYPD Blue
Frasier
Homicide: Life on the Street
Battlestar Galactica
In Treatment
South Park
The West Wing
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
It’s Garry Shandling’s Show
The Jack Benny Program
Soap
The Andy Griffith Show
The Cosby Show
Moonlighting
Taxi
East Side/West Side
Hannibal
ER
Parks and Recreation
Roseanne
30 Rock
The Bob Newhart Show
Malcolm in the Middle
51–75: Groundbreakers and Workhorses Miami Vice
The Office
St. Elsewhere
Community
The Golden Girls
Friends
Police Squad!
24
The Defenders
Gunsmoke
Sex and the City
Star Trek
Firefly
Law & Order
Maude
The Rockford Files
China Beach
Enlightened
Everybody Loves Raymond
The Wonder Years
Barney Miller
Frank’s Place
Justified
76–100: Outlier Classics thirtysomething
Columbo
Futurama
The Outer Limits
Northern Exposure
Batman
King of the Hill
Veronica Mars
Cagney & Lacey
EZ Streets
Wiseguy
Gilmore Girls
Six Feet Under
Sports Night
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Batman: The Animated Series
Boardwalk Empire
NewsRadio
Picket Fences
Scrubs
WKRP in Cincinnati
How I Met Your Mother
Terriers
Works in Progress
A Certain Regard
Miniseries
TV-Movies
Live Plays Made for Television
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz
Cover design: Evan Gaffney
Cover photos: CBS Photo Archive / Getty Images (All in the Family, Star Trek, The Andy Griffith Show, Gunsmoke, The Honeymooners, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy); HBO / Getty Images (The Sopranos); NBC / Getty Images (30 Rock, Seinfeld); HBO / Blown Deadline / The Kobal Collection / David Lee (The Wire); ABC Photo Archives / Getty Images (Roots, NYPD Blue, Scandal); Fox / Getty Images (The X-Files, The Simpsons); The Kobal Collection / Radical Media (Mad Men); AMC-TV / The Kobal Collection / Frank Ockenfels (Breaking Bad); Darren Star Productions / The Kobal Collection (Sex in the City); Paramount TV / Courtesy: Everett Collection (Cheers); KRT / Newscom (SpongeBob SquarePants)
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the authors’ rights.
Grand Central Publishing
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First Edition: September 2016
Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Some material contained herein is reproduced in part from articles published in the Star-Ledger, Salon, Slant, movingimage.us, and Hitfix.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sepinwall, Alan, 1973-author. | Zoller Seitz, Matt, author.
Title: TV (the book) : two experts pick the greatest American shows of all time / Alan Sepinwall & Matt Zoller Seitz.
Description: First edition. | New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2016. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016015540 | ISBN 9781455588190 (paperback) | ISBN 9781478912576 (audio download) | ISBN 9781455588206 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Television series—United States—History and criticism. | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Television / Guides & Reviews. | PERFORMING ARTS / Television / History & Criticism.
Classification: LCC PN1992.8.S4 S3985 2016 | DDC 791.45/75—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015540
ISBNs: 978-1-4555-8819-0 (pbk.), 978-1-4555-8820-6 (ebook)
E3-20160722-JV-PC
Table of Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
TV (THE BOOK): The Introduction
TV (THE BOOK): The Explanation
THE PANTHEON:The 100 Greatest Shows Ever
The Great Debate: How Do You Pick the Best Show of All Time?
1–10: The Inner Circle
The Simpsons
The Sopranos
The Wire
Cheers
Breaking Bad
Mad Men
Seinfeld
I Love Lucy
Deadwood
All in the Family
11–50: No-Doubt-About-It Classics
M*A*S*H
Hill Street Blues
The Shield
The Twilight Zone
Arrested Development
The Larry Sanders Show
The Honeymooners
Louie
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The X-Files
Curb Your Enthusiasm
SpongeBob SquarePants
The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show
Twin Peaks
Lost
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Freaks and Geeks
My So-Called Life
Oz
The Dick Van Dyke Show
Friday Night Lights
NYPD Blue
Frasier
Homicide: Life on the Street
Battlestar Galactica
In Treatment
South Park
The West Wing
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
It’s Garry Shandling’s Show
The Jack Benny Program
Soap
The Andy Griffith Show
The Cosby Show
Moonlighting
Taxi
East Side/West Side
Hannibal
ER
Parks and Recreation
Roseanne
30 Rock
The Bob Newhart Show
Malcolm in the Middle
51–75: Groundbreakers and Workhorses
Miami Vice
The Office
St. Elsewhere
Community
The Golden Girls
Friends
Police Squad!
24
The Defenders
Gunsmoke
Sex and the City
Star Trek
Firefly
Law & Order
Maude
The Rockford Files
China Beach
Enlightened
Everybody Loves Raymond
The Wonder Years
Barney Miller
Frank’s Place
Justified
76–100: Outlier Classics
thirtysomething
Columbo
Futurama
The Outer Limits
Northern Exposure
Batman
King of the Hill
Veronica Mars
Cagney & Lacey
EZ Streets
Wiseguy
Gilmore Girls
Six Feet Under
Sports Night
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Batman: The Animated Series
Boardwalk Empire
NewsRadio
Picket Fences
Scrubs
WKRP in Cincinnati
How I Met Your Mother
Terriers
Works in Progress
A Certain Regard
Miniseries
TV-Movies
Live Plays Made for Television
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Newsletters
Copyright
TV (The Book) Page 49