My favorite lines from that episode:
Nick: Barney… Barney… Barney… was your mother from Killarney?
&
Fish: It was the first time in twenty years I felt good. And it was illegal.
If Devito never filmed another movie or TV show, that scene alone would have proven he was a comic genius. “The number is out there… enough to make him go ‘ooh’ but small enough to make him say ‘eh’…”
Oh man, you folks are makin’ me feel all mushy, mushy, mushy even without the brownies.
If we’re talking just about standard of writing, just from the 2000s, I would nominate “Arrested Development,” “Scrubs,” “Futurama,” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” as being the equal or better of those programs - easily - and obviously they’re way past them in every aspect of production value, although that’s (mostly) an unfair comparison. If I can dip back into shows that had most of their run in the 90s, you’ve got “The Simpsons,” “Murphy Brown,” “Frasier” and more.
“30 Rock” seems to get mad props as well but I haven’t watched it enough to say.
I’m not denying that the shows you’ve cited were fine shows, nor am I denying that a lot of today’s sitcoms are insipid crud, like “According to Jim.” Nonetheless, I maintain that the overall quality of today’s shows is vastly higher. We’re finally getting sitcoms without laugh tracks, thank Christ - MASH is 65% better if you get rid of the laugh track - and getting shows that do more than just a three-camera set.
Well of course the era from the mid 70’s to 1990 was the best – for me. DrFidelius is on the right track. With few exceptions, television is created to appeal to people in the 18-35 demographic. Most people are going to find the shows from the era when they were that age to be the best ever. I have a newspaper article in my scrapbook from around 1985 which talks about television being in a golden age, and for me it was. Of my top 10 shows of all time (which incidentally include both Barney Miller and Soap), only one premiered after 1985, and that’s Law & Order, which started in 1990. Of the series listed in the OP, the only one that has held my interest is Sex and the City, and that’s only been in the recent reruns.
Now I’m sure some people over 35 will come along to say that they love today’s television, but my point stands – since the best decade for T.V. shows is entirely in the eye of the remote-holder, any decade can be the best if it’s right for you.
Well, I can’t let you dip back to the 90s as this Op was about the 00s and I chose only 70s shows. This is coming down to a lot of opinion of course, however …
AD was well written and failed to capture an audience, but I don’t see where it is better written than SOAP and that would not be in my top 10 examples of well written shows from the 70s. It also suffered from too much inspired silliness.
Futurama was a great show, really well written, but the characters, were largely cartoon characters. No seriously, the characters were never as well developed as Taxi. The writing as not as witty and they fell back on sight gags and culture references far more than the shows I brought up. I love Futurama; I would take it over many shows, but not over several of the ones I have been going on about. Scrubs is a great show, zany, not like most other sitcoms, clever, creative, adult and silly at the same time. I would rate it very highly. Not better than Barney Miller, WKRP or All in the Family. I will also add the Dick Van Dyke show as a better written show and Get Smart as better at being zany and as well written.
Curb your enthusiasm? Really, well written? I still think of the as a one-joke show, told over and over again every week. You might find it funny, but how hard was it to write that? I don’t know if it was really any better written than Bewitched. (Which I bring up as it was a silly lazily written show I enjoyed).
Did you really want to bring up Murphy Brown? That show was putridly puerile after 5 seasons and had it best season in 1988 to 1991.
BTW: I was not 18 until 1984, so I guess I shoot apart SpoilerVirgin’s post immediately as a single piece of data.
Sampiro, Devito in that scene and his epiphany scene converted me to a lifetime lover of his work.
Jim
The problem with comparisons is that every era of television builds on what came before. You can’t compare production values , of course, because techniques that are taken for granted today literally didn’t exist 10 or 20 years ago.
It’s even difficult to compare writing, because styles have changed so much over the years. Up into the 1960s, if a writer wanted to make a point, the standard technique was to have a character deliver a long monologue. Relationships between men and women, people of different races, gays and straights, etc. have changed so much over the years that a “groundbreaking” show of another decade seems hopelessly outdated now. Even the oldest staple of comedy – physical humor (slapstick) – goes in and out of style.
The best decade of television is whatever decade you happen to identify with.
If you’re talking about shows in general and not just sitcoms, the 1950’s/60’s dramatic shows(GE Theater, Playhouse 90, US Steel Hour,Kraft, Lux, Armstrong/Ford, Philco, Goodyear/ etc.) produced things that were superb.
As others have offered, it was what was appealing to your demographic at the time.
Twilight Zone need I say more.
Back in the 70s, I couldn’t imagine TV getting any better than MASH or All in the Family; today, I find both those shows completely unwatchable. In the 90s, I thought Homicide was some kind of cultural zenith; today I don’t want to lose an hour watching G shark Bayliss at Hearts, and there are entire seasons I deem “not canon.” I need another 10-20 years to decide how amazing 30 Rock and Ugly Betty are.
The best decade to date for TV was the 90s when they had all those great action-adventure series: Hercules, Xena, Tales of the Gold Monkey, Adventure, Inc., Cleopatra 2525, Relic Hunter, Beastmaster and about a gazillion others I can’t think of offhand.
That’s because I like action adventure series better than other genres, especially if they incorporate SF and fantasy themes, as they often do. I know the shows I like weren’t especially well written for the most part and badly written in the large part, I know thier proeduction values could be weak, I know the acting was wooden in places (a lot of places) but they were still fun to watch, which I can’t say is true for a lot of other genres.
Here’s one TV critic’s list of what he considers the 100 best (American) TV shows which premiered in 2005 or earlier:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/completelist/0,,1651341,00.html
I think good TV shows are spread out over the past six decades fairly evenly.
I’ll mention some standouts for me from different decades:
The Twilight Zone
Mary Hartman Mary Hartman
Zoom"C’mon and Zoom-zoom-zooma-zoom"
The Wire
Mash
Oz
The Cosby Show
In Living Color
Soap
Cop Rock - this will make my list every time.
Specials:
Roots
V
Upstairs/Downstairs
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman
Scared Straight
That reality show about the Loud family in the 70s. I can’t recall the name of the show.
Eight years ago James Cameron gave us a vision of the future, our world today, in the show Dark Angel. It was cancelled after two seasons. Eight years later, the people are ready for The Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The `00 decade will be defined by the reality of Dark Angel, The Terminator and by the reality of the Governor of California being the Terminator.
It was “An American Family.” See the IMDB entry here.
I definitely think TV today is better than people give it credit for. For instance, in threads about Battlestar Galactica, people are constantly saying “…and this show has all these gray areas and gritty tough ethical choices and flawed characters… it’s so much better than 99% of what’s out there on TV…”, as if 35 other shows already mentioned in this thread didn’t already exist and have those same characteristics.
There are a surprisingly large number of absolutely top notch shows that have been on in the past 10 years (highlighted, imho, by The Wire, Deadwood, The Office (US), Firefly and The West Wing), and also quite a few more quite high quality just-good-fun shows such as 24 and Heroes.
(Oh, and another truly great show from this decade, at least for its first season, is Veronica Mars.)
Spoons,
Thanks for the name and the link.