No, I know; but that’s insane. I get that the core of it is classic sitcom fare; but to start a sentence with that, and then finish it by saying “as cartoon characters who hang out with dinosaurs”, that’s not what primetime television was.
Based on the concept “Robin Hoods. Soldiers of fortune. Mr T drives getaway van.”
There are lots but I’ll cast my vote for Miami Vice. Individual stories and longer through story arcs. Introducing loud music to the middle of the show. First tv show that played like a movie. Oh, and fashion was a character.
Worth noting and good article on it: The Queen’s Messenger broadcast in 1928.
All in the Family would have been my choice – daring and groundbreaking for its time, and the Archie Bunker stereotype is still very true today.
Another groundbreaking series from a business standpoint – maybe a bigger one – was I Love Lucy. For practical purposes the series was before the days of videotape – the first commercial videotape recorder was invented just around the time that the series premiered, and the only means of recording TV shows or time-shifting them in different parts of the country was the low-quality kinescope. It was usual back in those days to broadcast shows live, and most of them originated in New York for the biggest east coast markets. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz refused to move from Hollywood to New York and as a compromise offered to have the episodes filmed on high quality 35mm film at their own expense, provided that they retained future rights. CBS executives happily gave them those rights, because, hey, who would ever want to see the same sitcom episode more than once? Lucy and Desi thus invented syndication, which became a billion-dollar industry, and the syndication of the show was a major contribution to their subsequent wealth. Lucille Ball was the exact opposite of the ditzy redhead she played on the show, and was very business-savvy.
That’s the first two I was going to mention, so I’ll have to dig a little deeper.
I Love Lucy - The show just about invented modern filmed television. Three cameras filming simultaneously, a live studio audience, etc. Plus the very idea of an all-American girl being married to a Cuban with fractured English (never mind that they were married in real life) AND getting pregnant and having a kid who grew up in more or less real time, were daring in their time.
Gunsmoke and Bonanza. Adult-oriented, 60-minute westerns with big production budgets.
The Dick Van Dyke Show was the first, for lack of a better word, sophisticated situation comedy.
The Huntley-Brinkley Report. The CBS Evening News had more resources and Walter Cronkite, but H-B seemed less stuffy while being equally serious, and changed the tone of television news forever.
Monday Night Football. Even though the Super Bowl and Wide World of Sports came before it, MNF was the first sports programming that was really entertainment, not just announcers describing what the cameras were showing.
Sesame Street, Ren & Stimpy*, or Ellen.
I figure at least one of the above is good for rounding out the Top 10.
Just as a side note, since I mentioned the groundbreaking syndication innovation of I Love Lucy too (it was entirely Lucy and Desi’s idea – I suspect mostly Lucy’s – and CBS was happy to give them syndication rights because they saw no value in reruns), I was surprised to find that the kid who played “little Ricky” was not their own. I thought it was cute that their own child was on the show with them, but it wasn’t. In early episodes it was a pair of twins who were uncredited, and later it was child actor Keith Thibodeaux.
To a lesser extent, Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners also innovated syndication, perhaps even more ingeniously through the use of the Dumont Electronicam system, which recorded on film while producing a live TV feed at the same time. But The Honeymooners only produced 39 episodes this way, while I Love Lucy spanned six seasons and 180 episodes and became a staple of morning-television syndication.
It’s amazing how much the first Ampex videotape recorder, finally introduced in 1956, completely changed the television industry.
All in the Family
Don’t underestimate Desi - he was a hell of a businessman as well as a powerful producer. While Lucy was mostly focused on ILL, Desi was busy building Desilu Studios into a powerhouse. Lucy herself credited Desi’s business skills and drive.
When he was a guest host on ***SNL ***in the '80s, he got a little testy at constantly being reminded he had to do *this *and *that *because it was “live TV”: “Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m the one who *invented *all these things!”
TWTWTW definitely was. Laugh-In wasn’t all that political. Definitely some.
You can listen to the Tom Lehrer record to get some idea of TWTWTW being political. (American version.)
No love for Ally McBeal?
While the relationship between The Honeymooners and The Flintstones is really obvious (they wanted Mel Blanc to do an Art Carney-like voice for Barney Rubble, but he refused to go that* far), I don’t think that most people are aware that the whole extended Cavemen-Living-Like-Modern-People-But-With Diinosaurs-as-Gadgets I a blatant ripoff of the Stone Age theatrical cartoon series that Fleischer Studios did in 1940-41.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgWUoy1WSCUTo be honest, I never liked TV shows, I watched X-Files as a child, and thanks to the coronavirus I decided to review it all and realized that at that time my imagination was much more receptive. Now, of course, all these plates and reptilians can rather take part in comedy series, but for me the most revolutionary and at the same time useless series has always been and is so this is “Santa Barbara” Just think, 9 years of filming, 2137 episodes, a bloated plot throughout almost the entire series, where the viewer empathized, grew, and also got tired, lost the thread and asked himself every time the question - why am I watching this?
IIRC, Audrey “Alice Kramden” Meadows held out on signing her contract until she was guaranteed residuals for syndicated reruns of The Honeymooners. The powers-that-were gave them to her, thinking they would never amount to anything. They helped make her a wealthy woman.
Whenever I think of the fourth wall being broken, I think of Cleo, the basset hound in Jackie Cooper’s series The People’s Choice. I remember watching it when I was three or four and thinking it was hilarious!
I’ve been watching The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres lately on morning TV. The latter especially borders on the surreal at times.
I was going to mention Moonlighting on this point. But I’ll take your word for it that Hill Street Blues used it. (HSB did hit the airwaves several years earlier.)
I’m embarrassed to admit that I never grasped this. You’re absolutely right.
Then again, I watched this show when I was a kid.
Arguably the Q series predated that with Spike Milligan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hNZAMoBTwA