KLAXON
Minus five points - most of the contestants are comedians, but there’s a sprinkling of actors, journalists and scientists.
And some do double duty:
Ben Miller got his undergraduate degree in the field of Quantum mechanics and was getting a PhD in Physics from Cambridge when he turned to comedy. Here he explains in QI about why there is no such thing as nothing and basing that on the (then) search of the Higgs field / bosom:
For me, I actually have to “turn off my brain” a lot of times when watching this show due to numerous unrealistic and just plain stupid things it does.
My nom: Louie.
Get Smart
Well, D’uh! Of course.
LA Law and St Elsewhere both introduced viewers to the complexity of legal arguments and the ethical dilemmas of medicine.
Hill Street Blues did the same for police.
I agree. Extremely intelligent and tight screenwriting, perhaps the best I’ve seen in TV comedy, but I understand not everyone sees it that way.
Inspector Lewis on Masterpiece Mystery is pretty good.
I thought Boston Legal was surprisingly smart for a silly show. My favorite episode was the one with the Supreme Court.
The Practice for its complexities of law and clever dialogue; House, M.D. for its complexities of science and its clever dialogue; The Newsroom for its complexities of life and clever dialogue.
Really. I’m just finishing the first season on-line, and I quite enjoy it.
I think it is worth making the distinction between shows with smart characters and smart shows.
My two nominees, neither previously mentioned, were chock full of characters who were not the sharpest quills on the porcupine but were very (IMO) smartly written.
**Fernwood 2Night **and The Beverly Hillbillies.
What the hell, throw in **Green Acres **as well.
mmm
I’m a moderately intelligent guy, but my no means a genius. I know people who are smarter/more educated then me, and sometimes they say things that go over my head.
Lots of TV shows have characters who are geniuses, or are at least super-smart. The only time I’ve heard anything on television that went over my head was a joke Hodgins made while talking to Zack in an early episode of Bones. I respected that immensely.
I believe **The Larry Sanders Show **was mostly brilliant. The cast was amazing and the humor was sharp.
Numb3rs, although my husband thinks it could have been “mathier”.
I love Only Connect, although I find myself yelling at the screen during the Connecting Wall round whenever I find the similarities obvious but the contestants are selecting everything at random.
The Missing Vowels round seems out of place for this smart game as it is the easiest of the four rounds by far.
Agreed that this is a very smart program, and puts all American quiz shows to shame.
I agree, and you summed it up much better than I could hope to do so.
IMHO, nah, the show was well written, generally, but to call it smart? Sure, the main character, and his brother were sophisticated, erudite, pompous, etc., but that was just the hook of the show. A show like Roseanne used blue-collar types as the hook, but neither indicates if the show would be considered “smart”. Don’t mistake whether outward intelligence is an attribute of the main characters as indicating if the show is equally intelligent. See: Scorpion as an example.
Frasier wasn’t smart because the characters on it were smart. It was cleverly written. It used a sitcom staple - dramatic irony - in a consistently excellent way. The jokes often built up upon previous jokes organically. The characterization was consistent. There was some subtle humor, although not nearly to the degree of something like arrested development, but they respected your intelligence.
Your criticism would be much more appropriate for something like the Big Bang Theory, where the characters are drawn as highly intelligent types, but the actual humor is on the level of any other low brow sitcom, and somehow people mistake this for intelligent writing.