This site has been languishing a bit. This has many reasons:
1) I have been ramping up my remodel painting, sanding, staining and general timesink. Since I already had no time because of twinsapoolza, my blogging time is down to almost nil. I am weeks behind in my main blog, so really shouldn't dally here.
2) The format of my reviews has been fairly stiff. Potter was a bit better, but I am still not feeling it, which is also the feedback I have been getting from its few readers (my site, not Harry Potter).
3) The book I am reading now is epic in length (>1300 pages), so I have literally had nothing new to write about in some time. Almost done so I will review it soon.
However, I stated at the very beginning that this site would not be limited to only books, but would also include movies and TV and whatever the heck else I felt inclined to discuss, media-wise.
So in that spirit, here is a list of the Top Ten Most Influential TV shows of the past 20 years. I am well aware that top ten lists are the last resort of the intellectually lazy and those devoid of ideas. So stipulated.
So in alphabetical order:
CSI - People just like dead bodies. They just do. The up close and personal crime scene investigation taps into the same morbid fascination that has been drawing people to serial killer movies and the like for decades. Sure on some level it is just another procedural spin off of Law&Order (see below) combined with the vague memory of Quincy, but there is no doubt this sub-genre has spawned almost an equal number of spin-offs itself.
Daily Show - When Craig Kilbourn hosted this show it was just a spoof of your nightly news, entertaining, but hardly ground breaking. Then Jon Stewart took up the reins and the show transformed into some of the sharpest, most entertaining political satire on television today. Each night Jon and his cast of correspondents holds a mirror up to our politicians and the media that covers them and the image isn't always pretty. In a time when young Americans have become increasingly detached from politics and current events, the Daily Show manages to not only entertain them, it actually informs. And of course it launched the career of mega-star, Stephen Colbert.
ER - ER barely made my list. On one level it just returned the hospital genre to front and center. On another it really seemed to up the whole level of expected quality for primetime network drama. I am not talking the writing, which was never that amazing, but the production values. Especially as it matured. I almost never watch that show anymore, but occasionally I have been sucked in and I can only imagine what the budget is for that show nowadays.
Law&Order - King of all procedurals. There is not a crime show on TV today that does not borrow heavily from this titan. The formula was so simple: People love cop shows and people love court room dramas. How about we combine them into a single show? The other genius thing the show did was to pare everything down to the essentials, with half the episode feeling almost like a recap from the previous week of a much longer show. Early generations would have hated this, but it was perfect for the attention-deficit, channel surfing society watching TV today.
Seinfeld - How does one define Seinfeld and what it does? "It is a show about nothing" is the common summary. What that actually meant is that it was a show about characters and funny ideas, not about tired sitcom devices. Sure Seinfeld was trying to make a relationship work or George was trying to keep his job, but those plots never mattered. They were just the backdrop to jokes about everything from overbearing soup sellers to muffin tops to masturbation. The characters were not trying to set good examples or teach any moral lessons. Comedy was found in how they were so flawed as people that they would always do the wrong thing in every situation. But more important than how this show broke the comedy mold was how it seeped into the American consciousness. To this day if someone says "Yadda yadda" or "Master of my domain" or "No soup for you" or "Newwwwman", any former show watcher knows exactly to what they are referring.
Simpsons - Longest running primetime comedy ever. Showed how a cartoon could be both wacky and smart, both for kids and adults. Hundreds of characters and biting satire that one could only really get away with in cartoon form. I mean, how does a president fight back against a orange-faced, four-fingered cartoon? And what I said about seeping into the American consciousness in regards to Seinfeld goes tenfold for the Simpsons. In fact seeping seems too mild. I would say American culture is drenched in Simpsons culture, which one can calculate just by adding up the D'ohs and Ha-Ha's one hears in a typical day.
Sopranos - Sopranos changed what people could expect from a TV show, in terms of acting, writing and direction. Seriously, the first season could easily have been the best movie of 1999 (Shakespeare in Love won) if released that way. Not only has it created a whole bunch of daring HBO and Showtime shows, where it changed the way those networks tried to market themselves, but most of the the FX and USA lineups wouldn't exist without it.
Survivor - Survivor really seemed to be something entirely new: Taking a group of people, forcing them into some sort of awkward, new situation and then watching how they react. A reality show. The real American forerunner was The Real World from MTV, but no one over 20 watched it. Internationally, Big Brother was the genre dominator, but it never reached the peak of obsession in the U.S. that Survivor did. One simple yardstick is was there an episode of the show everyone who was anyone watched and then talked about the next day? For Survivor that year one finale was one of those shows.
Twin Peaks - In addition to being an early precursor of the upswing in direction and general production values in network TV, Twin Peaks should be most remembered for bringing quirky to the mainstream. A show could be weird or ambiguous and still succeed (Succeed criticly, anyway. It was never a big ratings grabber). The list of shows that followed included everything from Northern Exposure to Desperate Housewives.
X-Files - The show taught us to believe... that a sci-fi show can succeed and not have a Vulcan, a Klingon, or the word Star in its title. The show eventually wore thin, as the critical tension was whether each week's mystery was a real supernatural event or a hoax, which was not sustainable. Conspiracy theories and paranoia can only take you so far. Still, the first few years were very good and developed a style all its own (sometimes known as flashlights in the dark), as every good horror director knows: what scares you is not what you see but what you can't see. It was also nice to have a male/female partner movie with no real sexual tension between them (I think they played with this a bit near the end of Mulder's run; a mistake).
