There is a lot more crap on TV than ever before - but that’s because there’s a lot more stuff on TV than ever before. I think the 00’s are definitely in the running for both Best and Worst decades with regards to TV shows. They have Deadwood and The Wire (and part of The Sopranos, although that started in the 90’s), but also “Cavemen” and enough reality shows to kill a horse. (“How Many Reality Shows Can Kill a Horse?” - a new reality show on FOX!)
Much of the increase in standards is due to HBO and other premium channels. However, broadcast television has House, Lost, 24, and other shows that I think are pretty solid. (I have a bias against broadcast TV. I don’t think anything on broadcast TV is anywhere as good as the better HBO stuff, except for some PBS documentaries. But some of it’s still pretty damned good.)
I am sometimes surprised at a how good some past shows were. (I’ve been watching “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” on Netflix lately, and it’s terrific.) But I don’t think there has ever been a wider selection of good, bad, terrible, and frackin’ awesome as there is today.
Honestly for Sitcoms, I think the 70s was the golden age. For dramas, the 00s or 90s seem better.
In the 70s we had …
The Odd Couple
Mary Tyler Moore
Bob Newhart
All in the Family
Maud
Taxi
Barney Miller (yes, it was really a 70s show, please check) 1975-1982
MAS*H
WKRP
I will even give honorable mention to the phenom that was the early years of Happy Days and gave us the term “Jumping the Shark”.
The Dramas have only improved with the decades. I cannot recall any dramas from the 70s as good as the good ones from the 90s and 00s.
Some more 00’s (primarily British) TV shows:
[ul]
[li]The League of Gentlemen (sitcom)[/li][li]The Blue Planet (documentary series)[/li][li]Tribe (documentary series)[/li][li]Life on Mars (drama)[/li][li]Prison Break[/li][li]24[/li][/ul]
I think I would agree that there have been more great TV shows in the 2000s than ever before, mostly for the reason enumerated by BlackKnight that there are just plain more TV shows now than ever before.
But any decade that has brought us:
Lost
Heroes
Deadwood
The Sopranos
The Shield
24 (the first five seasons anyway)
Band of Brothers
Joan of Arcadia
Wonderfalls
Firefly
Supernatural
Planet Earth
and a few others I’ve forgotten has to be considered among the best.
I’ve not yet seen The Wire: we’re gonna have to watch the last DVD of Deadwood before we get started on a new series. Other than that, though, I agre entirely with this. I think other shows have had writers, directors, actors, costumers, etc. as good as those on HBO shows, but HBO seems to give shows a lot more freedom to achieve their ambitions. As long as the show fulfills its ENQ*, it doesn’t have to break into between-commercial-length segments, doesn’t have to explain its jokes, doesn’t have to resolve each episode such that nothing is essentially changed, and so on. As a result, the shows are more like chapters in a book than like folk tales about a mythic hero. And I freakin love it.
Showtime seems to be doing something of the same thing, at least with Dead Like Me and Weeds (the only ones I’ve seen there). And they’re good, but IMO not as good as Rome or Deadwood or The Sopranos or even Carnivale.
All good things must end, and I figure that the time will come when HBO gets a new CEO, or goes bankrupt, or gets bought out by Disney, or something similar. I suspect that, while the whole decade won’t be viewed as a golden age, HBO’s work will be remembered for a very long time as among the best television ever made.
Yes, there’s lots of crap on TV, but that doesn’t matter, because I don’t watch it.
I have over a hundred channels on my satellite TV. Most of the shows on them are things I don’t watch - soap operas, sports broadcasts, reality shows, game shows, home improvement shows, foreign language broadcasts, cooking shows that don’t feature Alton Brown, “music” television, etc. I just ignore them because they have nothing to do with me. Maybe other people watch them. Maybe they’re good. Who am I to judge?
What I *have * watched over the past seven years is the West Wing, Angel, BSG, Lost, Firefly, Lost, Dexter, Arrested Development, Scrubs, Deadwood and House. Based on those, I’d say the OP has a very strong case.
Why has no-one mentioned Battlestar Galactica and Six Feet Under? When watching BSG I find myself wondering how something like that could be remade in the future to be even better than it is now - honestly I don’t know how it could be.
So if we’ve reached the zenith of TV production, does that mean it’s all down hill from here?
I enjoy shows from the 00s more than previous decades. I think television is starting to “grow up” in a lot of ways, especially the scripted comedies and dramas. The laugh track is starting to become recognized as the abomination it is, for one. Nothing even close to the format and style of 24 came out in the 90’s or earlier; regardless of what you think about the show personally, it’s groundbreaking in many ways.
The old tried and true tools of earlier decades are being challenged all over the place. One example is that the likeable and sympathetic lead character is starting to make way to people who are deeply flawed (and not just in a comedic buffoonish way, like Home Improvement), like in Rescue Me and House, M.D. TV in the 90s was pretty much the same as TV in the 80s and 70s, which both had some really great shows. The 00s aren’t just making the same format “better” though. We never saw anything close to Arrested Development before. Who would have thought that a disconnected narrator could work so well for a comedy? All of the actors in that show knew they were doing something incredible and extraordinary, too. You can just FEEL the difference in their performances.
The only problem I have with the 2000s is how much saturation reality TV gets. People are just fascinated by this stuff, but they just simply can’t give us any more than they’ve already given. New locations, new people, but the same story, over and over. I gave up on the genre a long time ago.
What, no one has mentioned My Name Is Earl, yet? I also have to add Monk to the list, I’m a Monk-aholic. I think the first season of Damages was also one of the best, I’m glad to see it’s been renewed.
Yes, Hippy Hollow, The Sopranos started in 1999, but the bulk of the episodes have aired this decade. I’d say it’s worthy of being remembered more as a show of the 2000’s.
We had a discussion about this in another thread, which of course I can’t find.
I’ll repeat, though, what I said there; if you DON’T think that today’s TV is best ever, you just don’t remember how bad it used to be. The TV of yesteryear was appalling, with production values and scripts that would be laughed out of any respectable studio today, and in a surprising number of cases remarkably amateurish acting and directing. Today’s worst sitcoms and dramas are paragons of artistic mastery as compared to “The Love Boat,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “Knight Rider,” “The Dukes of Hazzard” and the like. And those were the SUCCESSFUL shows; the real garbage like “Small Wonder” didn’t last. They all seemed cool when I was eight years old, but looking at them today, they’re just atrocious.
Today’s shows are better across the board. The best shows today are beyond comparison to almost anything that existed 20, 30 or 40 years ago, and the worst shows today match up okay with the middle-of-the-road fare of the past.
RickJay, you are wrong about the Sitcoms. They are not as good as the great ones in the past. In addition to the ones I mentioned for the 70s. Name the sitcoms from the 00s that measure up to that standard of writing.
Even in the 60s with successful crap like Gilligan’s, there were still high lights like The Dick Van Dyke Show and Get Smart. I cannot think of one sitcom today that matches some of these classics. What are your examples?
A major advantage we have today is that we have (nearly) the entire history of television at our disposal. If your favorite show dates back to the 50s, you can probably go and buy the DVD set. If you’re lucky, it will have bonus material. Since we all have different taste, there is something now for everyone.
It has been a while since I’ve been blown away by a new show. I could sit down and think of my favorite show from the last three decades, but they each are very different. And, to me, it shows how my taste has changed with age.
The last shows that have swept me off my feet are Dexter, The Closer and Rome. Among the broadcast networks, the most recent I can recall is The Simpsons. That doesn’t speak well at all of the broadcasters.
Well, I won’t argue with that, but what’s not to love about the A-Team? I especially love the episode where they get locked in the warehouse and have to build a tank to escape. It’s the one where Hannibal wears a disguise, Face seduces a woman, Murdock acts weird, and BA Barracus ain’t gonna fly on no plane, fool!
I totally agree about the 70s being the Golden Era. You can add Sanford & Son (possibly my favorite sitcom of all time), SOAP, Good Times, second half of the Carol Burnett show runs (still funny after all these years) and even SNL Not-Ready for Primetime" years. One thing that’s amazing is that the quality 70s sitcoms could get away with so much more regarding race, religion, politics, etc., than today without a week long auto da fa from a thousand different activist groups and the like all screaming bloody murder. Archie yelled about the war in Vietnam with a Gold Star father present (and later had a problem with impotence- to my knowledge the first time it was mentioned on TV), Fred Sanford used the N word in one of the funniest lines every on TV (Lamont’s traffic court appearance- the line is now gone from the repeats), hell- SNL had a recurring comedy skit about Uncle Buddy (Buck Henry) the pedophile babysitter- and it flew. South Park would probably have raised less of an eyebrow then than now, and while viewers may have gotten offended and complained nobody had to go before the CNN Sanhedrin to flog themselves for the next two weeks.
Great additions, though Carol Burnett and SNL weren’t sitcoms of course.
SOAP was a fun show, it had about a 3 year run and was yet another envelope pushing show, daring to do things and go places outside of the standard and the all to predictable formula of almost all the sitcoms on today. (Well to fair, most sitcoms have always been formulaic, the 70s had the most that broke the mold and it was still less than 20.)
Good Times and even the Jeffersons had some really well written season and then a lot of very poorly written seasons. With Good Times it was when JJ moved to the forefront of the show over the parents. The writers gave up, much as the Happy Days writer gave up with the Fronzie advent.
The Jeffersons, took a while to find their voice and I felt only kept it a few years and then went on several more years.
Maude on the other hand had a distinct and strong voice from the beginning. I did not watch or like the show that much, but I appreciate the writing and how it changed TV, pushing at least as many barriers as All in the Family.
MAS*H was really an amazing show and transitioned from it earlier zanier wartime antics to being maybe the first dramedy. SOAP may have been the second.
Sanford and Son was a funny show, it had the edgiest comic on TV and found ways for him to sneak stuff past the heavy censorship of the day. I won’t claim to remember it fondly, but I did watch it. It had some early season as funny and well written as My Name is Earl or the Office today, two of today’s best sitcoms.
All in the Family, should be in consideration for changing TV forever. From the first toilet flushing gag*, to dealing with the rape attempt on Edith, this show changed TV as much as Lucy did. The show really thrive in putting public debate out their in the form of Archie the knee-jerk bigoted Conservative and Meathead the Hyper-Liberal. It added a huge dash of racial reality with the neighbors being the first blacks in the neighborhood. For an example of pure humor it had Edith’s accident with the can of peaches in heavy cream.
Mary Tyler Moore was a really well written and respected show. Mary was considered a strong female role model at the time and deservingly so. The show was well acted and well written. For its pure humor moment, it had Chuckles Bites the Dust. This was in season six of the show, when most sitcoms writers have already given up trying. It is a small handful of shows where writers are still going strong in the sixth season. MTM, Barney Miller, All in the Family, MAS*H are three of the rare examples.
Barney Miller is probably my favorite sitcom ever. It last 8 years and was good to the last show. It was lucky enough to go out under it own conditions and finished with a 3 part story arc, providing excellent closure and a great line. As I recall, Barney starts get maudlin over the old crew and the cops he use to work with and then stops, realizing he sounds like Luger. For pure humor, this show was probably at its best with the Hash Brownie episode that had Fish leaping rooftops and the line Mushy, mushy, mushy from Jack Yemana.
WKRP was a great show that was constantly messed with by CBS. It had the Turkey Drop, the drinking test, the phone police, Jennifer’s haunted house and Les’ moment in the sun winning the softball game by making the catch in the outfield. This show had some unbelievable great writing. It also had about the best music of any show ever.
Taxi, was a killer show, a great ensemble. I had two of the great sitcom characters of all time in Louie and Rev. Jim. It had the “What does a Yellow Light mean” episode to cement its place in TV history, but it also had elegant Iggy when it turns out he is a well-trained pianists. It had Jim burning down Louie’s place and Louie agonizing over how much to ask Jim’s father for. I had the episode with Alex being scared by a girl scout and the big Broadway number and so much more. I was a show filled with genius and many sorts of humor fit together around Alex. Latka’s craziness was a whole different craziness than the rest of the show.
I am ashamed of myself for forgetting Fawlty Towers, a true classic. Though not a sitcom it bears mentioning that “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” is another product of the 70s.
Jim (sorry Sampiro, I seemed to be channeling you on this one, I don’t usually go on this much)
I know, it seems silly and sophomoric today, but in 1971 it was truly ground breaking.
