Mad Men
Futurama
30 Rock
Community
The Office
The Daily Show
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Firefly
I think smart writing (except CYE which is highly extemperaneous) and uniqueness in a standard format appeal to me.
My own list, made up extemporaneously as I type this and in no particular order:
- Mad Men
- The West Wing
- Angel
- Gilmore girls
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- NCIS
- Girlfriends
- The Closer
- Sports Night
- NYPD Blue (which I only caught in reruns, so it counts by my criteria)
- Firefly.
My criterion was shows I would, for an extended period in the run, go out of my way to watch every episode of. (I specified extended period in the run because I couldn’t see leaving out GG for the first several seasons but checked out with prejudice for the last.)
I see these commonalities:
- Clever dialogue intensive. These are alll shows that benefit from listening to simply because I like the way the characters talk; except for some bits of Angel & Buffy, none of them work if you’re trying to talk to someone else at the same time.
- Half-arcs. That is, just about all these have season-long stories to tell, but not every episode is part of the arc. In short they benefit from being watched in order, but you don’t absolutely have to. The exception here is Firefly, which I almost didn’t list because it was with us so briefly. It didn’t have time to develop an arc.
- Definite main characters. This isn’t an absolute, as it doesn’t apply to the two Sorkin shows or Girlfriends, but generally I like shows that are definitely about X and his/her friends, such that the show is hard to imagine without the central character. (Okay, GG is equally about both Lorelai and Rory, but it still applies.) NYPD BLUE I mostly like during the Sipowicz years and is similar.
- Strong creator signature. Except for The Closer, I can name the driving force behind each of these series off the top of my head and go out of my way to see other shows they create.
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Morally ambiguous main character. Also not an absolute. But I like MAD MEN much more than any of the other shows on the list, and Don Draper is, at best, an asshole with good qualities.
Scrolled right to the bottom so I’m not influenced by others’ lists. In no particular order…
Arrested Development
30 Rock
Modern Family
The Wire
Lost
Battlestar Galactica
Friday Night Lights
Mad Men
Six Feet Under
House
If South Park and Family Guy had started a few years later than they did, they’d both be on here (I watched both regularly from episode 1). If Community finishes its second season strong (and it’s off to a great start), then I’d probably have to bump off Six Feet Under (HA!).
So this list pretty much screams “CITY-DWELLLING WHITE LIBERAL MALE!!” but it also shows I don’t generally care for “three-camera sitcoms” (How I Met Your Mother is the only one I watch, but I’d give that up before any of the above shows) and don’t have much use for procedurals (House being the exception, but I think it’s more a character study disguised as a procedural).
Also, I was only considering scripted, weekly shows. Had I opened it up more, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Mythbusters would be in heavy contention.
- Black Books
- Still Game
- Battlestar Galactica
- The Wire
- Supernatural
- Breaking Bad
- Malcolm in the Middle
- Arrested Development
- Teachers
- Dexter
Trends: comedy, witty dialogue, hot guys, violence.
Malcolm in The Middle
The Wire
House
Sex and The City
So You Think You Can Dance
Isidingo (South African soap on The Africa Channel)
Mad Men
Raising Hope
Beauty and The Geek
The Big Bang Theory
My list is odd - the common theme seems to be “and now for something completely different”.
The Shield
30 Rock
Breaking Bad
Rome
Big Bang Theory
The West Wing
Arrested Development
Flight of the Conchords
The Daily Show
(the show I have forgotten to list but will remember later)
One interesting thing is that four of them are hour-long dramas and three of those are pretty intense. If I done this 10 or 20 years ago, there would have been eight or nine sitcoms and nothing more intense than ST:TNG.
That’s what does it for me too.
The Wire
Deadwood
Buffy/Angel
Mad Men
Breaking Bad
Band of Brothers
And two new shows, one a sitcom:
Terriers
Raising Hope
I’m not going to count reality shows (The Amazing Race, Survivor, Project Runway, Top Chef, etc) cause while I really like and watch every episode of all of those, I don’t think they’re “great” shows like the following list as they don’t really have any replay value.
I guess I would consider my favorites to be what I either have already or would buy on DVD, so they are:
Arrested Development
Coupling
CSI
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Dexter
Doctor Who (the new series)
Firefly
Pushing Daisies
Six Feet Under
The Big Bang Theory
Hmm, they all have strong characters and weird or dark humor. A lot of witty writing and multi-story arcs.
My favorite tv shows are mostly broadcasts of football games. I don’t really pay much attention to which network carries the games, don’t care at all about the announcers or any of that stuff. Do know that FOX carries the NFC games–where my Saints are usually shown. Also watch the Sunday night game, which I think may be on NBC? Think CBS has the AFC, but it may be the other way around. Also usually watch Monday Night Football on ESPN.
Other than football, I watched BSG all the way through to the bitter end (and boy was it bitter).
Watched the first half season of Warehouse 13, but then it went on hiatus for so long I lost interest.
Same deal with Caprica.
Think I’ve now seen all of That 70’s Show.
Pawn Stars.
Any number of highly forgettable “OH NOES! Nostrodamus sez the Mayans say Giant Asteroids will kill us all!” type shows on the now ironically named “History Channel”.
Band of Brothers–truly excellent mini series about WWII from Normandy to Berlin.
Not really seeing much in the way of a common theme there though…other than I like sports/combat/fantasy and hot women.
Well, for some of these shows, I only liked part of the run, but since I’m fairly picky and I didn’t watch much television for a big chunk of 2003-2006, here’s my list:
Mad Men
Community
30 Rock
Scrubs (for about the first 5 seasons)
Alias (for the first two seasons)
Party Down
Flight of the Conchords
Arrested Development
Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations
Good Eats
If I could find a commonality in all 10 shows, it’ll probably be that I really enjoy visually interesting shows.
Eliminating sporting events, and being frankly unclear as to when a lot of these shows started and so possibly being cavalier about the time frame:
The Wire
Rome
Battlestar Galactica
House
SpongeBob Squarepants
Family Guy
The Sopranos
Scrubs
Dexter
CSI
There’s no common theme I see there aside from the fact that all of them are scripted fiction. I don’t like reality shows, they’re just not my thing.
I do notice that most of those shows could not possibly have been made 30 years ago in a way that would be recognizable today, the exceptions being House, Scrubs, and SpongeBob. All are too violent, sexy, edgy or modern for the audience of the rabbit ears generation, even the audience that had already seen some of the more modern stuff in All in the Family or MASH. You could take the basic idea and tone it down but you’d have to tone it down a lot, to the point that the shows would be substantially different. And even Scrubs and Spongebob, taken straight up, would have been exceedingly modern by 1980 standards. House would have translated okay to 1980, if you’d removed the odd sex reference of the sort that wouldn’t have been kosher on network TV back then.
Chuck
Weeds
BSG
Buffy
Firefly
Fringe
Veronica Mars
Burn Notice
The Big Bang Theory
Eureka
Supernatural
The Mentalist
True Blood
hhmm Lots of Sci-Fi/ Fantasy shows. Big surprise since 90% of my book collection is Sci-Fi/ Fantasy too. I also like shows featuring smart or clever characters.
Band of Brothers
Generation Kill
Firefly
Deadwood
The Shield
24
Lost
CSI
Supernatural
South Park
Survivor
Commonalities: only half were on the big 4 networks. The only comedy was a cartoon. The only reality show was pretty much the original one.
I can’t really remember what I watched more than five years ago. Presumably I entertained myself somehow, but since discovering the online method of gathering TV series that otherwise don’t screen locally, I have tripled my TV-watching-multitasking.
US shows
Chuck
Psych
Pushing Daisies
Scrubs
Better Off Ted
UK Shows
QI
Midsomer Murders
Lark Rise to Candleford
new Doctor Who
Time Team
I think the common elements in the US shows are absurd humour and lightness.
The common element in the UK shows is the simplicity and a pining for halcyon days.
Interestingly, I can’t think of any local, Australian and New Zealand, shows that I care about at all. They’re all rubbish.
-
Big Bang Theory
-
Red Dwarf (started watching it in mid-1999)
-
Barney Miller (started watching it when the first DVD came out)
-
The Muppet Show (started watching it when the first DVD came out)
-
Babylon 5 (started watching it around 1999-2000)
-
Battlestar Galactica (the good one. Starbuck is not a friggen woman! started watching it around 1999-2000)
-
Arrested Development
-
MST3K (started watching it around 1999-2000)
-
NCIS
-
Bones
-
Primeval
I know you said 10 but I had to include Primeval and I couldn’t remove any of the others.
Common themes:
-
I’m a total nerd.
-
I met my boyfriend in mid-1999. The ONLY shows on that list that didn’t originate with him were Bones and Primeval.
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New sitcoms are shit.
In order of how much I like them:
- The Wire
- Modern Family
- Summer Heights High
- 30 Rock
- The Golden Girls
- Law And Order: Special Victims Unit
- The New Adventures Of Old Christine
- We Can Be Heroes
- Little Britain
- The Catherine Tate Show
Two dramas, both crime-based with subject matter more disturbing than your average crime show, especially on The Wire.
Two British sketch shows heavy on catchphrases, both of them feel very “early-mid 2000s” to me, not necessarily shows I would still watch but I still find them funny and quote them when the occasion calls for it.
Four American sitcoms, one of them classic, one of them a bit of an underrated gem (Old Christine) and two of them highly praised “modern” type sitcoms that mix classic sitcom scenarios with new millennium humour.
Two Australian mockumentary comedies, both created by Chris Lilley.
The themes that I can see are that I really prefer TV comedy to TV drama, even though I’m the opposite when it comes to films. The dramas that I do like have to challenge the viewer and push them to consider things and feel things than normal TV drama wouldn’t do (I realise SVU has become sillier and sillier over the years but it did really do this in it’s earlier years, at least in my opinion).
Of the comedies, the American ones are all pretty “classic” in approach, none of them are out-of-the-box or needlessly abstract, which is what I like. The same can be said of the two British ones, really - not much to them except constant funny and great characterisation. The Australian ones are different and very distinctly Australian, but manage to be 1000 times better than 99% of all other comedy to come out of this country - they’re different to the other shows I’ve chosen because there is a bit of social commentary there and it does make you think but it does this simulatenously with the constant jokes and never interrupts the flow to push a point or a message in your face.
So I guess I want my dramas to make me think and I want my comedies to do nothing but make me laugh, at actual jokes and not at how clever the writers think they are.
(The shows that I have actually loved and watched most this decade - Seinfeld, The Simpsons, etc. I discovered well before the year 2000.)
Deadwood
True Blood
Sapranos
CSI
Daily Show
South Park
Frontline
Nova
Real Sports
The Wire
I need cable
Arrested Development
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Firefly
True Blood
Dexter
Breaking Bad
Futurama
Buffy
Angel
Sex and The City
I think they all have good writing.
Are you an “Asshole?”
The Pretender (possibly too old, but I’m including it)
Prison Break
Joan of Arcadia
Battlestar Galactica
Gilmore Girls
Gossip Girl
Psych
Veronica Mars
Sonny with a Chance
Project Runway
I don’t know if I can come up with anything that all these shows has in common, but a lot of them have interesting concepts (The Pretender, Prison Break, Joan of Arcadia, Psych), several have genius protagonists developing elaborate plans (The Pretender, Prison Break, Gossip Girl, Veronica Mars), most of them have introduced me to something or another that I was interested in researching or learning more about (The Pretender, Prison Break, Project Runway, etc.), a few I find extremely funny (Gilmore Girls, Psych, Sonny with a Chance – though I don’t know if their style of humour is similar or not).