IIn my 50+ years on this mortal coil I have watched a fair share of TV. And thus there have been a lot of shows that I have enjoyed over those years. Now it’s time to countdown the 101 shows I have enjoyed the most.
How do I determine such a thing? Through a series of rigorously logical tests and evaluative rubrics, of course.
No, just kidding. Obviously, it’s all instinct and preference, of course, but also heavily influenced by how recently I have watched a show, how much of it I have actually seen, and how well I remember it. Any genre or style or length is eligible, as long as it’s a scripted television show, and I have seen some of it and enjoyed doing so.
Check out the previous posts by clicking on the links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 and Part 7.
And then read on for Part 8, the very top of this list…
7. Community
(2009-2015, NBC / Yahoo! Screen)
My friend Rod told me about this show long before I’d seen it, saying I reminded him of some degree of Abed, arguably the show’s breakout character, as played by Danny Pudi. I can see the resemblance in some ways, with Abed’s active imagination and high level of awareness of TV shows and other forms of fiction (I mean, just look at the series of blog posts that this paragraph is part of). But I’m a lot less likely to lose myself in the world of make-believe as Abed, or to equate everything happening around me with a movie or series.
But still, I like Abed a lot, and though he’s not top-billed in the cast of Community, he is a key figure for the show, which regularly presents us with different pop-culture concepts (be it a film genre, or a familiar plot structure, or a general storytelling trope), and then simultaneously laughs at it and also highlights how awesome it can be. In all of this the show avoids just being a spoof or a parody–it’s a classic sit-com with an enjoyable ensemble of characters, but which uses its weekly structure and general premise to tell lots of different types of stories. And thanks to the presence of a guy like Abed, the show can easily and openly comment on what it is doing in a way that just adds to the enjoyment.
And Abed is not the only good character, of course. I enjoy them all, but especially loved Troy, as played by Donald Glover.
He and Abed had an amazing friendship dynamic which provided lots of laughs and lots of heart. The rest of the ensemble, including Joel McHale (the show’s ostensible lead), Gillian Jacobs, Allison Brie, Ken Jeong and more were all also good. Together with the behind-the-scenes talent like creator Dan Harmon, directors Joe & Anthony Russo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier and a bunch of other Marvel movies) and Justin Lin (Star Trek Beyond, etc), they produced a lot of great and exceedingly clever episodes.
There are too many to list but one that I’ll highlight is called Remedial Chaos Theory, which posits that when one of the characters rolls a die, it creates a bunch of different timelines depending on the outcome. In its brief runtime of 21 minutes, the episode actually shows how each of those timelines work out (they are very different), while also telling one consistent overall plot across the entire episode. It’s really an amazing piece of work.
In later seasons, the cast changed a fair bit, and the show was never really the same, even though it was still really enjoyable. It was canceled by NBC after 5 seasons, and then had one more on Yahoo! Screen. Now there is serious talk of a Community movie being produced in the near future, which if it comes to pass will fulfil the show’s own internal rallying cry of “six seasons and a movie”–here’s hoping!
6. Battlestar Galactica
(2003-2009, Sci-Fi)
I’ve never really watched the original Battlestar Galactica, maybe just a bit here and half an episode there. But it was not that long ago that I finally gave the revival series of the 2000s a go, and boy am I glad that I did!
Developed by Star Trek veteran Ronald D. Moore, the show has the same basic premise as the original, but obviously modernised a great deal for a later audience. The general idea is that there are several tribes of human beings, who suffer a devastating attack from an old enemy known as the Cylons, an artificial intelligence species bent on wiping out humanity completely. The Battlestar “Galactica” (think a big space aircraft carrier / battleship) is the only such vessel to survive, and they gather a small flotilla of civilian vessels around them, struggling against impossible odds to figure out a way to survive. Specifically, they find themselves on a quest to find earth, the ancient and mythological homeward of their species.
The show uses this premise to deal with just about every aspect of human society, including politics, family, death, sex, religion, war, terrorism, labor relations, criminal justice, class struggles, the media, and lots of different aspects of personal identity, making it one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking science fiction series that I have ever seen.
But it’s also full of tons of fun military action, with many a cool aerial dogfight sequence and a lot of good stuff showing us the details of the operations of a ship like Galactica.
All of this is brought to life with a great cast, led by Edward James Olmos as Commander Adama, the senior officer on board Galactica who was due to retire when the attack took place; and Mary McDonnell as Laura Roslin, the only surviving member of the president’s cabinet and thus the de facto president of the colonies (at least until elections are held). You also get Katee Sackhoff, Jamie Bamber, Michael Hogan and more as various officers who end up as part of Galactica’s crew, and Tricia Helfer playing multiple copies of Number Six, one of the humanoid Cylons who orchestrated the attack. All these guys and more are just amazing in their roles, populating the complex world of Battlestar Galactica with a lot of compelling and interesting characters.
Over the four seasons of the show there was a lot of exploration to the characters and to the mythology of the series. In some cases, some of these developments felt a little awkward. There’s a big reveal about the Cylons at the end of the third season in particular which was clearly not planned from the beginning. But even so the show managed to pull it off well enough to make it still feel like it made sense.
There are some elements of the end Battlestar Galactica which don’t seem to sit well with some fans, but for my money almost all of it worked. I thought the ending, and the show overall, were incredibly satisfying.
5. Monty Python’s Flying Circus
(1969-1974, BBC1 / BBC2)
Monty Python was a comedy sketch group formed in 1969 in England by John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam (the only American of the group), who went on to all sorts of success in a variety of media. They did films, they did record albums, they did stage shows, but for my money, far and away their best work was where they first found widespread fame, on television.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a roughly 30 minute sketch comedy show which featured the talents of the ensemble. Each episode was a combination of live-action sketches performed in a studio edited together with on-location film sequences and surreal animations produced by Terry Gilliam. The show had lots of recurring bits and characters, but no regular format. Some episodes were taken up almost entirely with a single extended storyline, while others would flow from scenario to scenario with only the most ludicrous and stream-of-consciousness connections. In all things, the show was in equal parts absurd and intellectual, and it’s the blending of these tones in the incredibly tight structure of an individual episode that I think the series find its distinct identity.
In the days when my access to non-American TV content was pretty limited, Monty Python just stood out as something incredibly different. I’d catch it on my local PBS station, and you just never knew exactly what you were going to get. Some favourites of mine include the extended sketch about the alien blancmanges who invade earth and turn everyone in England into Scotsmen so they can win Wimbledon, another extended film about a joke so funny that it is lethal which then gets used as a weapon in World War II, a sketch about a guy doing a sadistic job interview, a sketch about a cheese shop which doesn’t seem to have any cheese in it, a film about gangsters called the Piranha brothers, one of whom regularly saw a giant invisible hedgehog called Spiny Norman, and the other of which assaulted his enemies using sarcasm, and many many more.
All the Pythons were really talented, and a lot of fun to watch. But there was always something extra special about John Cleese, who is probably the most recognisable of the bunch. The group were in many ways writers first and performers second, which I think contributed positively to how dense and layered the series was. Not everything about it worked, but much of it did, and when it did it was amazing.
4. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
(1993-1999, Syndication)
Deep Space Nine is not the Star Trek that is going to rank the highest on this list, but it may be the best actual Star Trek show, quality-wise. When this series was doing well, the concepts were compelling, the characters dynamic and surprising, and the actual drama as engaging as the franchise ever was.
Deep Space Nine was the third live-action Star Trek show. It was produced at the same time as the popular Star Trek: The Next Generation, and purposely did a lot of things to give itself an individual identity. It was the first show to not be set on a starship, shifting things so it was on a station instead. This meant that there was less exploration in this iteration of Star Trek, and a lot more on local culture, religion and politics. The show also leaned much more heavily than its predecessors on serialised storytelling, particularly in later seasons. But unlike some modern iterations of Star Trek, it did so without forgetting how to craft engaging individual episodes. It really was the best of both worlds.
The station was situated in the midst of a complex political situation–orbiting the planet Bajor who had just overthrown a decades-long military occupation with an alien oppressor who remains an ongoing potential threat–which then gets escalated when it turns out it’s right next to a newly discovered stable wormhole that opens up access to a completely new part of the galaxy.
It also turns out that there is a race of timeless aliens living inside the wormhole that the Bajorans consider to be their deities, and that they have chosen the Federation commander of the station, Benjamin Sisko, as their “Emissary”, turning him into a local religious figure as well as a Starlet officer.
And that’s just the start–basically, it’s the set-up in the first episode. After that, things develop in all sorts of interesting ways, which is a big part of why I’d argue that this might be the most dramatically rich of all the Star Trek series.
The cast was led by Avery Brooks as Ben Sisko, who along with the rest of the creative team managed to make Sisko into one of the most complex of all Star Trek regulars. The rest of the cast were enjoyable too, including a really large stable of recurring characters, many of whom became as important to the show as the regulars. I am a particular fan of a lot of the ensemble, including Colm Meaney (Chief O’Brien), Armin Shimerman (Quark), Max Grodénchik (Rom), Marc Alaimo (Gul Dukat), Andrew Robinson (Garak), Casey Biggs (Damar), and Jeffrey Combs (a variety of characters, but most notably the obsequiously evil middle manager, Weyoun). I also like the pairing of Worf (Michael Dorn) when he joined the show with Dax (Terry Farrell)–possibly the most believable and interesting romantic pairing of any regular characters in the franchise.
Deep Space Nine was not perfect, not by a long shot. Any show with 170+ episodes is going to have some bad ones, and the conclusion to the Sisko-Dukat-Kai Winn storyline in the series finale was particularly underwhelming. But on the whole it was still really good, and a series that offers a lot of enjoyment.
3. The Office
(2005-2013, NBC)
There are a lot of people who love the US version of The Office, who have spent many hours getting many laughs out of its story and characters. There are also people who look down on the show, recognising it is a remake of an original British series, and thus see it as derivative and less sophisticated. I am part of the first group, and not part of the second. I’ve seen the British Office a bit and enjoyed it to an extent, but I haven’t watched the whole thing and certainly didn’t find it to be the obviously superior version of the concept. I appreciate it came first and probably is a much tighter viewing experience (14 episodes as opposed to 201).
But still, I’m a big fan of the Greg Daniels-developed US sitcom. I think the cast is great, and that Steve Carrell managed to pull off something really special with Michael Scott, at least after the first season when the character was made deliberately more sympathetic. Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) was outstanding and hilarious, and Jim and Pam (John Krasinki and Jenna Fischer) made for one of the couples that I’ve been most invested in in all of television.
There were a whole lot of supporting characters as well, who all brought good things to the table, and made for many hours of enjoyable viewing.
Steve Carrell left the series maybe 2/3 the way through the run, which definitely threatened to derail the show’s momentum. Some people say the show jumped the shark at that point, but I disagree. Even though I missed Michael Scott, I thought they did a (perhaps surprisingly) good job rolling with the punches and keeping things meaningful and funny.
The finale of The Office is one of the more satisfying that I’ve seen, and includes a perfectly timed and executed cameo by Carrell which provides a nice moment, but doesn’t overstay its welcome.
2. Star Trek: The Next Generation
(1987 -1994, Syndication)
After a very shaky start, the first real expansion of the Star Trek mythos since the original series began to strongly find its footing and its voice, ultimately surpassing the original series in almost every way. And I say that as a big fan of the original Star Trek. But I’d say that Next Generation had the best crop of episodes out of of any Star Trek series.
Of course, Next Generation, also had some of the worst Trek episodes ever, and unlike the original series, which became hilariously laughable when it was bad, Next Generation just became pretentious and boring. But generally speaking there was way more good than bad, especially in the 3rd-6th seasons of the show (out of 7).
Some of the best episodes were those that really leaned into the talents of series lead Patrick Stewart, who could bring to the character of Jean-Luc Picard a commanding dignity, but also a great emotional depth. In fact, many of my highlights from the series are the ones that showed how vulnerable Picard could be–things like Chain of Command, Sarek, Q Who?, and Family come to mind.
But Picard wasn’t the show’s only strength. Data rightly became one of the franchise’s most beloved characters. Data was a character who managed to almost always be right, but was nearly never obnoxious, which is no mean feat by the writers and by actor Brent Spiner. Spiner was able to give Data just enough humanity to be relatable, without ever losing sight of the character’s android nature. Episodes like The Most Toys, Data’s Day, and The Offspring come to mind as examples of this.
And then there was Michael Dorn, who opened the door through his portrayal of Worf to arguably Star Trek‘s most important alien species. He anchored a whole range of Klingon-centric stories both here and in Deep Space Nine, and in so doing became one of the Trek‘s most iconic characters. Just check out Sins of the Father, Reunion and the Redemption two-parter for lots of this.
The rest of the cast was also good, but I have to give a shout-out to Jonathan Frakes as Riker. My appreciation for him has grown a lot over the years–he was an underrated but solid linchpin to a lot of what was going on for the show’s run.
And there were lots of other good episodes beyond the ones I’ve mentioned. I loved the debate over whether Data has rights in Measure of a Man, the alternate-universe return of Tasha Yar in Yesterday’s Enterprise, the “It’s a Wonderful Life”-riff in Tapestry, the scandal that Wesley Crusher faces at Starlet Academy in The First Duty, the encounter with an alien who only speaks in metaphors in Darmok, the struggle of the nigh-omnipotent alien Q when he loses his abilities in Deja Q, the glimpse we get into the lives of the show’s junior officers in Lower Decks, and the show’s outstanding series finale in All Good Things…
And oh, before I forget, the introduction and major conflict with a little thing called the Borg–probably the most iconic adversary in any Star Trek iteration since the Klingons. Their debut in Q Who, the major battle in The Best of Both Worlds, and the follow up in I, Borg all make for outstanding episodes.
Again, the show was far from perfect, but when it was great, it was really really great, and remains the most easily rewatchable of all Star Trek series for me.
1. Doctor Who
(1963-1989, 1996, 2005-present, BBC1 / Fox / BBC One / Disney+)
Ok, technically this is at least two shows, plus one TV movie in the 1990s. But I realized that if I ranked it as two different shows, it was going to just take the number #1 and number #2 spots, and that would just be a bit boring.
I discovered Doctor Who in the early 80s, when the show was in its early 20s. I was quickly drawn to the great sense of a long-form story that you had with a show that had been running for so long–different characters had come and gone over the years, and the Doctor himself had gone through a complete overall on four different occasions. It wasn’t long before I had a reasonably encyclopaedic knowledge of the actors, the characters, the monsters and the overall lore.
If you don’t know, the series is about an alien who wanders through time and space exploring, saving people and fighting monsters, usually with one or more (mostly human) companions in tow. The format gives the show the ability to reinvent itself as necessary, which has been necessary because of its longevity (or its longevity has been possible because of its ability to reinvent itself, you take your pick). Basically, the setting for every adventure can be different (even if a disproportionate number of them take place in modern day London), the supporting cast is always rotating, and even the main character was given the ability to “regenerate”, which has not only provided a way for different actors to take the series lead, it’s actually become a feature of the show.
Thus it’s not uncommon for fans to have wildly varying opinions on which Doctors are the best, which companions are the best, which monsters are the scariest, which stories are good and which are total garbage, and so on. For me and my money, my favorite Doctors are generally #s 11 (Matt Smith, 12 (Peter Capaldi) and #2 (Patrick Troughton).
But there are always things I enjoy about the show, even in the eras that are not my personal favorite.
A little similar to the original series of Star Trek, Doctor Who has often been derided for its bad special effects, and rightly so. During the show’s original run (1963-1989), even at the best of times the series required a lot of suspension of disbelief to become immersed. But for me along with a whole bunch of other people, that somehow was just not a problem.
At its core, I guess what I like is that it’s a show about decent guy (usually it’s been a guy) who along with his friends does what he can to fight against cruelty and evil and to prevent suffering, and who isn’t afraid to be a bit terrified or scatterbrained as he does it. He usually wins not by being more powerful than his enemies, but by being smart and resourceful and by overcoming fear. All this makes the Doctor my all-time favorite fictional hero (see here for evidence of that), and Doctor Who my favorite series. It’s dramatic, it’s imaginative, it’s regularly quite frightening and frequently hilarious
If we were going to count Doctor Who as two series and not one (which is indeed how I usually think of it–I’ll distinguish them Classic Who and Revived Who when necessary), then I’d probably give the Number One spot to the revived show, which kicked off in 2005. I love the classic series, and that’s how I discovered it, but in the “modern” era, not only were the visuals more spectacular, but the stories tended to be more emotionally grounded and to have tighter pacing. But the truth is that I love ’em both.
And that’s the list. Any shows I have put you onto? Any that I need to go check out? Let me know!
