Empire Magazine's 50 Greatest TV Shows

I love talking and thinking about lists, and I very much love this one in particular. First of all, I think Empire is much more fun to read than any other entertainment magazine because they say whatever the hell they feel like saying. Second of all, this list is overflowing with fandom favorites. The folks at Empire have taste, and are much more concerned with what makes a television show "great" (one would hope, for their "greatest" list) than with what makes a television show "popular". Those *can* be the same things, or can overlap, but very often aren't and don't. And while fandom can definitely be a place for people to have Really Good Fun with Really Bad Shows, it's also a place that has long borne the standard of the smart, the complex, the substantive over the easy, the formulaic, the flashy. (Yes, I know, we can be just as shallow for the pretty as anyone else. Grant me that you know what I'm talking about here.)

I have some problems with the ordering of the list, but almost no problems with the content. Even though I was never a big fan of, say, ER, I do not argue against its place on the list. There's nothing I'd kick off without hesitation. However, I do think the list is *missing* a few significant shows. The Prisoner, anyone? Wiseguy? Hill Street Blues? Homicide? Uh, Dick Van Dyke Show for crying out loud? Oh, and apparently, no great television existed before 1988, unless it was a British sit-com.

Anywho, here's my version of ye olde meme: ( bold those you followed, italics for those you've seen at least an episode of )

I think rational, intelligent viewers of these shows can agree that a Top Ten, in order of greatness, is pretty much impossible to set down, if for no other reason than the pure breadth of the genres and styles of the choices prohibits a universal measure. I could spend FOREVER playing with this, but for every point I could make about why Life on Mars deserves to be much much higher on the list, and that no matter how much I adore and revere Buffy it is not better, at a holistic level, than The Wire or The Sopranos, someone else could argue equally strongly for why Monty Python will be remembered, and still be influential, long after 24 is handwaved as "dated".

Still, this list is wall-to-wall fannish goodness, which we so rarely see in a mainstream magazine. So yay Empire!