Sorry.
Yes, it’s another *&%$@ list.
Don’t read it if you don’t feel like it. Really. Having suffered through the year-end plague of them along with you, we would understand. One can devote only so much of one’s life to getting worked up about others’ opinions.
But this one, a kind of ultimate TV schedule, is a little bit different. It was actually fun to make, in a way that many lists — “Shopping,” “To-do,” “Eight Best Wacky Sitcom Neighbors of the Millennium” — are not.
For one thing, we’ve presented it in chart form, a TV-listings style grid, on Page 5. So it rates TV series not in an absolute hierarchy, but in a hierarchy constrained by the time periods in which the series appeared. Yes, “Frasier” is a better comedy than “Happy Days,” but “Frasier” never aired at 7 p.m. Tuesdays. In “Frasier’s” various time periods, 8 p.m. Tuesdays and 8 and 8:30 p.m. Thursdays, it got aced out by other stuff. Ergo, “Happy Days” makes this list; “Frasier” does not.
That kind of selection process makes this exercise not only a neat twist on the way-overdone best-shows-ever idea, but it offers an interesting graphic element, and editors love graphic elements.
For another thing, this list is an efficient way to visit your personal memory lane’s rest stop, the place where the threadbare La-Z-Boy and flickering TV are found. Besides starting arguments, that’s the other main function of lists. They remind you of what you hadn’t thought about in years, like CBS’ incredible 1970s Saturday night lineup or that Tom Hanks was indeed in a sitcom (“Bosom Buddies”), and in drag, to boot. Maybe they even goad you to, say, check out the “Moonlighting” reruns currently showing on cable’s Bravo.
And a third thing (writers love threes just as much as editors love graphics): We can guarantee that no animals were harmed in the making of this list. It is a dolphin-friendly list. In fact, “Flipper” didn’t make it because to enshrine that show would be to endorse the exploitation and anthropomorphization of fellow sentient beings — not to mention to ignore how mediocre “Flipper” was. That goes double for “Lassie.”
“Mr. Ed” was OK, though.
But he still didn’t make it. We said nay to “Mr. Ed.”
After some preliminary discussion and thinking, TV writer Allan Johnson and I (contrary to the mail we get, we are, in fact, two different and unrelated people, more like Hardcastle and McCormick than the Olsen Twins) hashed it out over a long afternoon with the TV listmaker’s bible, “The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows 1946-Present,” and with all sharp objects removed from our persons, should the arguing grow too intense.
I thought about having us doff our shoelaces and belts, too, but I was fairly confident I would not grow suicidally despondent over, say, “Sports Night” or “The Sopranos” being just too new to make it.
The first rule was that we tried to place a show in the time period it was most clearly identified with. Rampant schedule-shifting has been a network problem as long as there have been networks, but in most cases we went with the time where the show had its longest run.
Of course, we also found ways to fudge a bit when it helped our cause. Consider “Seinfeld.” It is best known for running at 8 p.m. Thursdays, of course, but it also did three separate stints at 8:30 p.m., early in its life. “Cheers” had dibs on our 8 p.m. slot — it spent 10 straight seasons there — and we did want to keep “Seinfeld” on Thursday. So Jerry and crew got 8:30 p.m., a technically valid but imperfect solution.
“M*A*S*H” only ran one season at 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, but that season, 1973-74, gave TV its best ever single-network prime-time lineup: “All in the Family,” “M*A*S*H,” “Mary Tyler Moore” and “Bob Newhart,” capped by “Carol Burnett.” We had to keep the military doctor show there to memorialize TV’s answer to the New York Yankees’ Murderer’s Row.
Less defensible is our tinkering with the great “Larry Sanders Show.” It was most closely identified with 9 p.m. Wednesdays, but we had a good show to put there (“St. Elsewhere”) and we had nothing at 9 p.m. Sundays. A phone call to HBO confirmed our memory: “Sanders” did run at 9 o’clock Sundays its last season. Our hope, admittedly fading as I type this sentence, is that no one notices this small liberty.
We tried to be somewhat representative of what TV has been through the years, though it wasn’t easy. With the exception of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” TV comedy now is simply better than it was in the 1950s and ’60s, more sophisticated, more knowing and, frankly, more in keeping with modern sensibilities. Even more than drama, comedy is a product of its era, and both Allan and I had our comedic tastes shaped by Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and “Saturday Night Live,” rather than Lucille Ball, Jack Benny and “Your Show of Shows.”
But “Beverly Hillbillies” makes it because not only did it air in a low-competition time slot, but it was representative of that whole school of high-concept 1960s comedy: boat shipwrecked on desert isle, second marriages blend boy and girl siblings into new family, suburban homemaker is secretly a witch. In the same way, “Father Knows Best” spoke for 1950s comedy.
On the other hand, in bad news for devotees of “Dallas” and “Peyton Place,” no prime-time soap opera made the list. Our desire to be representative has limits, and bodice-ripping is one of them.
Science fiction apparently is another. Unable to vaporize the competition were “Star Trek” (9 p.m. Fridays), “Twin Peaks” (10 p.m. Saturdays), “Twilight Zone” (8 p.m. Thursdays) or “X-Files” (8 p.m. Fridays or Sundays). Address the e-mails of protest (and believe me, with sci-fi fans, there will be e-mail) to: CTC-arts@tribune.com. Those wondering where “The Honeymooners” is (it lost out to “All in the Family” and Archie Bunker, a more complex everyman than Ralph Kramden) can write to: Arts & Entertainment, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.
Looking through our final choices, I see what looks like some bias toward what we know best, TV from the 1980s and ’90s that we have lived with as adults (and that both of us believe to be advancing the medium). Less defensible is some of our evident fondness for TV from the late 1960s and 1970s that struck nostalgic chords in us. That, I think, is why the “NBC Sunday Mystery Movie” — featuring the warmly remembered “Columbo,” “McMillan and Wife” and “McCloud” — gets this schedule’s only 90-minute slot. They may not have been timeless mystery stories, but they etched themselves in memory. The nostalgia thing also partly explains “Happy Days.” So sue us.
The list is nearly all Big Three network programming, though that almost certainly would not be the case were this exercise to be undertaken 20 years hence. Cable right now is a touch too new to have placed more than “Larry Sanders” and “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” and, as a near miss, “South Park.” And Fox, as hard as it was to keep “Melrose Place” out of this, is only represented by “The Simpsons.”
Some terrific stuff got cut out for reasons that have more to do with the ever-changing medium than with the shows themselves. “Batman,” for instance, always aired at 6:30 p.m., which is no longer part of prime time and so is not on our grid. The same is true for most of “Perry Mason’s” run.
Current network programmers, take note: There is only one newsmagazine on this schedule, the obvious choice. (Hint: It is one hour long.)
And there are no game shows, though I began to mount an argument for “Password” before deciding it really is more suitably placed in daytime. (Again, the modern bias asserts itself.)
Long shows got the short end of the stick. “Playhouse 90,” generally regarded as the best of the literate anthology series that distinguished TV’s first decade, was, as the title implies, 90 minutes long. We wouldn’t have minded giving it that much time, necessarily, but it also had the gall to air on Thursday nights, and Thursdays, as two decades of (mostly) quality and popularity confirm, rightly belongs to the NBC lineup of four sitcoms followed by a drama.
Consider us slipping ABC’s “Bosom Buddies” in at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays to be a protest against NBC’s bad late-’90s habit of sneaking an atrocious comedy in there and calling it a hit, just because people who watched “Friends” and “Seinfeld” don’t turn off their sets in between. (The current stinker: “Jesse.”)
“Jesse” did not make the list.
In addition to snubbing “Jesse,” some of the easiest choices were for “The Simpsons,” “60 Minutes” (although that did mean leaving out “Maverick,” the best of the Westerns), “Homicide: Life on the Street” and the CBS Saturday shows.
Some of the hardest were in the key drama slots, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 9 p.m. “The Fugitive” took Tuesday, over “thirtysomething” and “NYPD Blue,” because of its original and allegorical plot. It was easy to let “Blue” go, with two better cop dramas, groundbreakers “Hill St. Blues” and “Homicide,” on the list. And “thirtysomething” was engrossing and all, and even predictive of 1990s Yuppie nesting behavior, but it has that cutesy small first letter, the titular equivalent of a whine.
Giving 9 p.m. Wednesday to “St. Elsewhere” was in one sense a snap. It’s the best medical show in a medium that has seen scores of them. But it did mean leaving the enduring — and still growing in stature — “Law & Order” off. It also meant not making a place for the inspired anarchy of “South Park.”
And at 9 Thursday, it was “Hill Street” over “L.A. Law” because the cop show came first, didn’t devolve into nuttiness at the end and, frankly, we like good cops better than we like good lawyers.
It goes without saying — almost — that none of the TV shows devoted to listmaking, like “World’s Funniest Home Videos” or “Guinness Book of World Records,” made the cut. We do not, after all, want to be seen as in any way encouraging the media practice of periodically issuing arbitrary rankings.
