In addition to the many great suggestions listed above, I give you:
Saturday Night Live.
While certainly not the first sketch-comedy show nor certainly not the first live show, it brought back a format that was considered dead and revived it with biting topical satire unseen anywhere else on television. It is often touted as the first show made especially for the Television Generation, which was rather ironic at the time because most of that generation weren’t watching any television. SNL not only became a hit in its timeslot – no easy feat – it actually increased sets-in-use for that time. Unprecedented.
The Sopranos has already been mentioned a few times, but I’ll just add that I’m pretty sure The Sopranos was also the first or at least one of the first shows to produce fairly short seasons of only 10-12 episodes, allowing for much higher production values. The norm at the time was to crank out more like 24 or so episodes per season, enough to show new episodes every week for approximately half the year, and reruns for the other half. The short seasons / high production values format was later utilized by other highly acclaimed shows like Breaking Bad. It’s almost become the norm now for a show to only have maybe 10 episodes per season.
Things might have changed over time, but the early seasons looked far too cheezy to have been “big budget”. The only aspect of that show’s first season that can hold my attention is Marina Sirtis in her scanty skirts.
I have been crazy about The Prisoner since I caught episodes of it during its original US run. However, I don’t think it truly qualifies since it was originally conceived to be a mini-series of about 7 episodes. ITC’s Lew Grade persuaded McGoohan to flesh it out to 17. That is about half a regular season’s worth of shows.
You beat me too it. “Twin Peaks” was revolutionary. It spawned shows like the ones you mentioned and you can draw a straight line from it to “The X-Files” (a quirky FBI agent and his skeptical pathologist partner investigating aliens and supernatural beings) and from there to “Breaking Bad”.
Vince Gilligan wrote for “The X-Files” and has said that when he created “Breaking Bad” he was determined to do right what they tried and failed to do with X-Files - create a consistent story where all the parts fit together and made sense as a whole.
So without “Twin Peaks” there would be no “Breaking Bad”.
From what I’ve read, Harry O was successful with critics and was developing a respectable audience; however, ABC’s then head of programming, Fred Silverman wanted more dramatic results and decided to have a show built around Harry’s secretary, played by Farah Fawcett.
i watched TWTWTW when it was on originally, and have seen some of the British clips, and those saying it is similar to Laugh In are missing the point. Laugh In didn’t even do that much politics. The revolution was the pacing, which set my head spinning, in a good way. It changed what was acceptable in terms of bit lengths, and influenced most of what came after.
People who say old TV is slow and boring probably grew up after Laugh In.
I found a CD ages ago that had highlights of the American version of That Was the Week That Was, edited together to sound like two distinct episodes. That gave me an interest in the show, so one time when I was in New York City I went to the Museum of Television and Radio and watched a couple episodes from their collection. I’ve seen a bit of the British version on youtube. Both were very political, and neither pulled its punches.
The early episodes were definitely cheesy, but they were big-budget cheesy. TNG’s first season production budget was around $1.5 million an episode; not the biggest at the time but well up there.
What about NYPD Blue with nudity and language on broadcast television? I can remember getting the first season on VCR tapes from a friend in Tampa because the Tallahassee affiliate wouldn’t show it. My first taste of binge watching because we would watch the whole tape of 4-5 episodes the day it arrived.
From the hype, I expected that show to be wall-to-wall nudity. It wasn’t. Someone from the MPAA even weighed in and said that if it were a movie, it would be rated PG. It was a wonderful series, though.
Rocky and Bullwinkle
Jay Ward’s staff of off-the-wall writers had to cope with the fact that they had poor animation (provided by a Mexican team by Gamma Productions), so they compensated with incredibly witty writing that worked for both adults and kids (who missed a lot of the more intellectual references – the Kirwood Derby, The Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam). When the network disapproved of one particular death scenario that Boris and Natasha had cooked up for Rocky and Bullwinkle, the writers substituted being burned at the stake, which apparently wasn’t an objectionable way to die. So narrator William Conrad enthuse “…as the network-approved flames rose higher and higher…”
Great stuff. I have all the episodes on DVD.
Ward’s staff had done Crusader Rabbit earlier, but Crusader and his sidekick Ragland T. Tiger didn’t capture the humor and dynamic that Rocky and Bullwinkle would, and the humor wasn’t as adult, or biting. A lot of the background and characters in Rocky and Bullwinkle were actually originally created for Crusader Rabbit, but not used. And, of course, Ward went on to do lots of other cartoons. But Rocky and Bullwinkle was the revolutionary show, which ran in prime time, and was light years removed from Hanna-Barbera or even Disney.
Long arcs with characters that were flawed, funny and yet somehow you could feel for them. In my eyes it was almost a comedic Hill Street Blues
It drew out comedy from dysfunctional types where you would not expect some situations to be funny at all - in some places it was almost comedy noir - I think fed in to all sorts of other comedy shows including Rosanne and the Simpsons, and Cheers.
The McLaughlin Group. First of the political talk shows where conservatives and liberals shouted at one another. Obviously, 60 Minutes’ Point/Counterpoint was the inspiration, but I think McLaughlin was the first to build the whole show around the gimmick.
I always felt that Barney Miller owed a lot to Sidney Kingsley’s play (and later movie) Detective Story – both involved occurrences in the police station, with a lot of emphasis on the oddball comic stuff that went on there, rather than on police procedurals and shoot-'em-ups. (Although Detective Story had a serious side to it). In one episode of Barney Miller they even acknowledged the debt, with one character saying “Get out of here, you Detective Story rejects.”
I’ll bet most people didn’t catch the reference, not realizing he was using “Detective Story” as a title.
Me too. The Pacific is excellent, and has a completely different feeling from BoB that took some getting used to. Maybe this opinion is better off in a different thread, but to me, The Pacific is one of the (vanishingly) few shows / movies that didn’t fall into the typical trap of almost all media about the Pacific war, and there are so many:
Cartoonish Japanese bad guys, or
Overly-sensitive portrayal of the Japanese at war, as if they were somehow victims, maybe to soothe Japanese audiences
Bad production values that manage to miss the spectacular…well, spectacle of the war: meteoric dogfights, apocalyptic ship battles, the environment as a “character” i.e. the ocean, the weather, etc.
The sheer brutality of the combat, foxhole to foxhole, often at night, with a particular nastiness (racially fueled on both sides) that was often lacking in the fighting between the US vs Germany.
I’ve read literally dozens of books on the war in the Pacific, and this miniseries seemed to have done them all justice like no other work. (So, in one sense, this series is revolutionary in that anything on that topic that doesn’t meet its standards will be seen as crappy by me )