Your popGeezer’s Top 10 TV Shows of the 2000’s
Recently, I came across Cynthia Littleton’s Variety article on the best American 10 shows of the decade, 2000-2009, and Heather Havrilesky’s Salon Top 15 of the same stretch of time. While I agreed with much of their list, it immediately inspired me to create a popGeezer version of the same. My rules for making the list were, as you might expect, a bit different.
First, if a show debuted in the 1990’s, they were automatically out. So regardless of the inescapable impact of The Sopranos on the TV of the 21st century, David Chase will have to settle for his show being an icon of the 20th. The same goes for Friends and The Daily Show, despite the fact that the Most Valuable TV Player of the 2000’s – Jon Stewart – made it part of the fabric of the now-passing decade.
Secondly, besides being good, the show had to have some larger resonance in the pop culture. Did this show do something that created waves beyond simply being a water-cooler TV show? And though Rome, Friday Night Lights, Breaking Bad and are very nice and most deserving, 10 is JUST 10. And, finally, did the shows on this list have a legitimate impact on their own medium? Did they change TV in some way? If they did, they made the list. And here they are:
10. Project Runway -It had a major impact on bothmoving audiences to cable, to the detriment of network TV’s ratings, made Bravo a real cable network, was a key part of making Bravo the most gay-friendly mainstream network, and moved reality competition shows to another level. And to this day, it has the key element that no other competition show has or can duplicate – Tim Gunn. Mentor, mensch, the gay uncle I never had, and the runner-up for Most Valuable TV Player of the 2000’s.
9. Firefly- The biggest ”swing for the fence” failure on this list, Joss Whedon’s Fox series stands as one of traditional broadcast network TV’sboldest storytelling experiments. A sci-fi western, which used post-Civil War America and the corporatization of the U.S. it spawned as a metaphor, that was still far more concerned withthe relationships between its beautifully realized characters, it was quite simply doomed from the start. Nothing illustrates this better than the watershed episode, “Shindig“, which is more concerned with a young girl’s desire to wear a pretty dress and dance with a handsome fella, than it is withthe mechanics of the smuggling plotline our lovable rogues have stumbled into. And that shaky special-effects camera? You saw it here first. (See #5 below.)
In the bigger picture, Firefly also represents other shows that were labors of love for their creatives and casts - Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, Kings, John From Cincinnati and Dollhouse to name a few - that proved that 21st Century network TV really was no longer a welcome place for the fiercely imaginative.
8. The Shield - HBO’s The Sopranos established two critical themes that 21st Century dramas hewed to most closely. First, premium cable was the new home of great TV drama, and second, the anti-hero could be acceptable to a mass audience if he wore the guise of a family man. FX’s The Shield proved the second rule, and blew up the first. In doing that, it expanded the delivery system for great drama. If ”cable TV ” isn’t the home of all the drama that matters today, it is the home of most of them. Creator Shawn Ryan, alumnus of the Whedon Academy of TV Writing (Angel, Class of ‘01) put as much violence, rage, and nihilism into L.A. Detective Vic Mackey as audiences had ever seen in a lead character, outside of HBO.
But Michael Chiklis’ performance of Mackey was much more than a cop clone of Tony Soprano. Mackey’s far more volatile love for his children, when married to his complete absence of a moral center, made for an eerily relatable father-figure. Also critical to The Shield’s success was a terrific supporting cast, like Jay Karnes as Det. “Dutch” Wagenbach, Walton Goggins as Mackey’s protege turned nemesis Det. Shane Vendrell, and Benito Martinez as Capt. David Aceveda. Among the show’sfiery key moments was the truly stunning depiction of a sexual assault on Aceveda, how far Wagenbach would go to hone his skills as a profiler of killers, and the magnitude of Vendrell’s descent over the last two seasons of the show. But the show truly belonged to Chiklis’ Mackey, who suffered the most cleverly fitting fate in the finale one could imagine.
7. American Idol - Love it or hate it, you cannot ignore it. It was, for a moment, the last bastion of “variety” in prime-time broadcast network TV. Its success revived that genre by grafting it onto a competition reality show. This once cheap-to-make summer replacement show appeared in 2002, and it grew into the consistently most-watched show on American TV. And this show’s success fueled the explosion of reality competition shows in its, and Survivor’s, wake. And did it save the record industry, too? Well, with 30 million units between them, Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood would say “yes”. And where would popular culture be without Lord Blackshirt himself, and surely future “Sir”, Simon Cowell.
6. The Office (U.K.) - History might possibly make this BBC comedy the most financially profitable TV series ever created. The format – a “mockumentary” being shot about a pedestrian paper company witha jaw-dropping”boss from hell” – has been franchised to at least five other countries, includingthe hit NBC version starring Steve Carell. The concept of the documentary-style look at everyday life has been appropriated by many other shows, Arrested Development and Modern Family to name a few. And the “improvised” spirit of the show, which actually was totally scripted, made its way into an entirely new sub-genre of sitcoms, best represented by Larry David’s HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The original version is powered by Gervais’ unrivaled performance as David Brent, the most horrifying and least self-aware boob ever to run a paper company’s branch office. If you’ve seen this, or Carell’s American re-interpretation, you know that “cringe worthy” just doesn’t do Brent justice. Sexist, racist, ageist, or any kind of “ist” you have, David Brent offends all the bases while seeing himself as a skillful comedian with a heart big enough for all people. He’s not. Gervais, and the show itself, have no shame in exposing the idiocy and hippocracy of societal norms, all while making us cry with laughter.
5. Battlestar Galactica- Sorry “Trekkers”, but the greatest outer space sci-fi show in the history of the medium is this 21st Century, post-September 11thre-imagining of thefondly remembered late 1970’s camp-fest. Written at a level requiring viewers to understand literary concepts like subtext, metaphor, foreshadowing, parallelism, and then never stopping to explain them to you, Ron Moore’s dark epic was even more satisfying. By transforming the Cylon baddies into humanoids, and giving them a stringent monotheism that felt just a bit Muslim, Moore challenged the audience to have to consider that even though their methods were genocidal, the Cylons just might be sort of… right?
With a cast of relative unknowns, save for leads Edward Olmos and Mary McDonnell, the show took a risk that paid off generously. It’s had to believe there was ever an outcry about a female “Starbuck”, when she was played by the luminous and convincingly butch Katee Sackhoff. And the complexity of James Callis‘ Gaius Baltar was radically different from the 1978 portrayal by John Colicos. While the end of the series took a few lumens of luster off the chassis, this was still sci-fi for the ages.
4. Mad Men – One element that connects all the long-running drama series on our list is the novelistic element of their storytelling. Each of them tell a story of significant length, and though the focus is often on one or a handful of main characters, there is a broad tapestry of stories and characters that make for complex and densely rich narratives. Such is the case here, a loving but pragmatic view of the 1960’s from the perspective of now. The story of Don Draper, Madison Avenue Man of Mystery, is the most realistic and astringent portrait of our anti-hero family men. Living a lie, in so very many ways, this flesh and blood “Arrow Shirt man” both craves and repels significant human interaction. And as the world he’s so carefully constructed and invested in is eaten away by the daily advancing of the revolutions of the late 60’s and 70’s, Draper still attempts to inflict his alpha-male will to preserve the American dream he fictionalizes with his ad work.
Creator Matthew Weiner also uses the skills and techniques of a novelist, rather than a screenwriter, in telling this story. Like BSG’s Ron Moore, he’s not going to define any of them for you, but he’s very much interested in having you gasp with impressed shock at his gifts for story construction. Again, this cast was built with very few easily recognizable faces, which makes Jon Hamm’s Don Draper or January Jones’ Betty Draper all the more believable and devastating to the emotions of the viewer.
3. Deadwood – And then there’s David Milch. The tortured writing genius who made NYPD Blue one of the greatest cop shows ever, came to the freedom of premium cable on HBO… and redefined the limits of what that freedom could mean. An immaculately researched historical drama about the wildest days of the Dakota territories and Deadwood, the cow-town where civilization would finally overwrite the old west, it was as filthy as it had to be. And boy was it ever filthy.
With elements of classical Greek tragedy and a florid Shakespearian-styled language, Milch made Deadwood a true original. This one was not simply a novel for television, but a deep exploration of character, performance, and a grand stageworthy theatricality. The challenge of having to deliver such specifically tailored dialogue was massive, but Milch found an amazing troupe of actors to deliver it. At the center of it all was Ian McShane as Al Swearengen, saloon-keeper, whore-monger and lord of all he surveys from the office balcony on the second floor of his Gem Theatre. Turning a river of obscenities into stunning soliloquies, McShane gave a Shakespearean master class every week for three seasons on HBO. The only thing missing from this cowboy opera was all the singing.
2. The Wire – The quintessential television novel, creator David Simon’s documentary-meets-Dickens look at urban American life in Baltimore, Maryland was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. With his background as a newspaper reporter, and author of the non-fiction book that was the basis for NBC’s Homicide, Simon held up a series of social institutions to a harsh spotlight and found them all wanting. Each of the season turned a scarred, cynical, and all-too-realistic eye on a different aspect of Baltimore life – cops, the drug trade, organized labor and organized crime (same diff?), urban renewal, politics, prison, education, and newspapers and the media. They failed us all, far more concerned with matters of budget, personal status, developing another block or harbor, or the next election cycle to care about the individuals left behind to drown. But those drowning souls, and their daily fight to survive, even perchance to dream, was the pumping heart and soul of this epic work. And it would totally be number one for the 2000’s, save for a polar bear and an endless montage of of one eye opening…
1. Lost – Are there a rules to telling a story on TV? Are there compromises that clever writers and showrunners have to make to get their show over to a mass TV audience? Well, the answer to both questions is “yes”. But not for the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. Lost, as created by J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelhof from a development-abandoned script by Jeffrey Lieber, is the boldest and most courageous narrative experiment in the history of the medium. At its most basic, this is simply a crass attempt to fictionalize the success CBS had with Survivor with a serious Gilligan’s Island. That’ll run for six seasons easy, huh? But the creators went… in another direction, let’s say.
Starting with the insane idea, credited to Abrams, of splitting each hour into one story line set with the plane crash survivors marooned on the island (“present day”) and a second story exploring the past of one of the characters (“the flashback”) to explain why they ended up on that doomed airplane, the show challenged the viewers to simply keep up. With the addition of veteran TV cop-show showrunner (and creator of the charmingly ambitious Brisco Counry Jr. for Fox) Carlton Cuse, the show moved to series without the day-to-day involvement of Abrams and just amped up the crazy. Knowing full well they were creating an entertainment for a post-DVD, DVR-owning, net-surfing viewer, Lost became a show filled with such a mass of minutia (or “Easter Eggs”), that the audience shortly became dissected. One group watched the show as a very good character drama, featuring a half-hour of prime emotional value and a half hour of mystery and suspense loaded with fantasy trappings. But the other group committed to going through the mirror, or own the rabbit hole, risking their own sanity as they sought to decode a multi-year TV sudoku that out-crypticed DaVinci. Numbers recurred, characters passed through each other’s flashbacks, secrets were hidden on the internet, symbols and hieroglyphics foreshadowed tomorrow and reframed the past. And we loved it all.
As these challenges stacked up, the conventions of broadcast TV itself began to take a toll on the production of the show. Viewers revolted against the simple mechanics of the need for repeats to fill out 40 weeks of an annual time slot, where only 22 new hours are produced. The producers began to damage the quality of the show, since a sucessful TV series often has an open-ended run. So Lost changed more TV rules. First, the show moved to being back-loaded into the winter of each season, after the first of the calendar year, to run in a straight uninterrupted block of shows. This began in season three, which ended with the announcement of an end-date for the hit show. Seasons four, five and six would have a finite number of episodes each year, well under the 22 show per-year norm, and Lost would end after season six. Oh, and if we do run repeats – which they did – we’ll add an on-screen graphic “commentary” to enhace the viewing of the re-run and enhance the clues to the overall mystery of the island.
And what of Dharma, Hanso, the “others”, the frozen donkey wheel, the “flash-forward”, the Temple, the four-toed statue, Jacob or the 108 minutes? Not to mention the enitrety of the fifth season taking place in multiple points in time? Yes, Lost is byzanitne in its complexity. But that complexity, and the zealous accolytes who study it, are part of why it is the overriding TV acheivment of the past decade. And while the nine seasons of The X-Files on Fox make it the longest running sci-fi show on network TV, Lost’s second place run will be the first to end without [expletive deleted]ing on its fans at the end.
At least they better not. I can pull this number one rank next summer if I need to. Hey, Bubs… you got a number where I can reach you in case I need to get this trophy to David Simon next summer?
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December 23rd, 2009 at 1:41 pm
[...] http://www.popgeezer.com/?p=17252The producers began to damage the quality of the show, since a sucessful TV series often has an open-ended run. So Lost changed more TV rules. First, the show moved to being back-loaded into the winter of each season, after the first of … [...]
December 23rd, 2009 at 3:37 pm
[...] http://www.popgeezer.com/?p=17252Recently, I came across Cynthia Littleton’s Variety article on the best American 10 shows of the decade, 2000-2009, and Heather Havrilesky’s Salon Top. [...]