If there is one thing that the internet loves, besides cats, it is lists. And often sites (such as Screen Rant) will produce dozens of lists with titles like The 25 Best Films on Netflix Right Now or 25 Classic Pokémon Characters Reimagined As Villains. Of course, many of these lists seem to suggest that a subjective listing of best things is somehow validated by the fact that the list writer wrote it. Usually this is not the case, and the top 100 faulty lists of best things on the internet could probably be easily filled. Which is why the following is not a list of best things, but rather a list of favorite things, an admittedly subjective judgement of the whole of scripted television.
Scripted television as a medium was much maligned during the 2nd half of the 20th century, mostly due to comparisons with the more legitimate artistic forms such as film or literature. Never mind that the world is full of really lousy movies and badly written novels, it was all of television that was inferior due to the general widespread low quality of the medium. Of course, all of that changed in the current century. The emergence of prestige television, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones and dozens of other high-quality programs shattered the old stigma of television as a lesser art form. And as the current superhero saturation in the cinemas exacerbates the decline of film, prestige television starts to look all the more prestigious.
My own relationship to television has been simple, I watch too much of it. I’m sure that it is literary sacrilege to suggest that a writer can learn anything from the medium, but television taught me a great deal about plot, pacing and dialogue. The universal truths of storytelling tend to be universal, a relatable protagonist faces a conflict in order to achieve a desired goal or avoid an unpleasant fate. Television explores this essence of story as well as Hamlet does. Well, maybe not as well, but as essentially.
The following then is a list of my favorite television shows, a definitive list of the top ten, followed by a secondary list of five runners up and a list of thirty contenders that I felt deserved consideration. There are several shows missing that would probably have been mentioned (The Sopranos, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, Deadwood), but I never watched them, and am hesitant to add them now to an already overloaded watch list. So again, this is my list, and is not intended to be representative of anyone else’s experience of television. My intention is to follow-up on this list in future posts, explaining why each particular program was chosen for each of the top ten spots. Until then, the top ten are:
Star Trek (the original, The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine)*
MASH
Breaking Bad (and Better Call Saul)*
The Twilight Zone
Battlestar Galactica (2004)
Stargate SG1 (and Atlantis)*
The Simpsons (Seasons 1 through 12)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The Six Million Dollar Man
WKRP in Cincinnati
Runners up:
11. Firefly
12. Fargo
13. Grimm
14. The Good Place
15. The Orville
Thirty Contenders: The Americans, The Andy Griffith Show, Babylon 5, Barney Miller, Batman: The Animated Series, Black Mirror, Cheers, Community, Dark Shadows, Dead Like Me, Dexter, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Dr. Who, Game of Thrones, Hannibal, House of Cards, I Claudius, I Love Lucy, Land of the Lost, Lost, Mad Men, The Man in the High Castle, The News Room, Orange is the New Black, Orphan Black, Rome, Smallville, South Park, Stranger Things, and The Walking Dead.
*Including spinoff and prequel series on the list with the original allows for more series to be recognized.
On September 23rd, the first episodes of a new Star Trek series, subtitled Discovery, were released via CBS’ All Access streaming service, placing the latest incarnation of the series that has often defined our vision of the future on the most advanced technology available. Of course, the pay-to-play nature of the streaming option has alienated some fans, who may have little interest in the other programming offered on the service. Then there is the series itself, a tortured product of post-911 American popular culture filtered through the producer’s ambitions to compete with high-status anti-heroic series such as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones. The result is a visually stunning series, deeply immersed in the lore of Star Trek, that fails miserably to be anything that Star Trek ever was. In many ways, it works as a TV series, especially when it isn’t trying too hard, but it lacks the optimistic and humanistic core that defined every other (genuine) incarnation of the series.
Some may argue that since this series is set in a time of war, optimism and humanism might just be natural causalities of the setting. But Star Trek: Deep Space Nine dragged us through several seasons of the Dominion war without compromising the heart of the series. The episode In the Pale Moonlight explored how war can lead a person to the compromise their principles. It worked because Avery Brooks’ character, Captain Benjamin Sisko, remained committed to those principles even as he was led to violate them. He was anguished by his choices, and the consequences of those choices. Captain Lorca on Discovery feels no anguish. He’s just a soulless bully bent on victory. Bullshit post-911 thinking tells us that we want soulless bullies standing between us and our enemies, but I’d rather have a man of principle like Captain Sisko. Ultimately, what the arrival of Discovery, and the series of big-budget reboot movies that have been released since 2009, reveals, is that it is no longer possible for America, as a culture, to produce the thing called Star Trek.
When Star Trek was created in the 1960’s, the United States of America was at the zenith of its military, economic and scientific power. Vietnam was becoming a quagmire, but only a few at that time realized that it was an unwinnable war. By the mid-50’s, Japan and Europe had recovered enough to begin competing economically with the US, but a vast portion of the world’s industrial and financial base remained in America. And the space race with the Soviet Union was definitely turning in America’s favor, as NASA worked to put men on the moon. This was also a time when American society started to move toward greater racial and gender equality. Yes, these social changes and the growing antiwar movement created turmoil, but in spite of that turmoil, and the continuing threats of the Cold War, it was a time of unparalleled optimism, an American optimism that formed the core of Star Trek.
Of course Star Trek, in its first incarnation, was cancelled the same year as the moon landing. Its optimism was not profitable enough to keep it going past three seasons on network television. It would live on in syndication, and briefly as a Saturday Morning cartoon, but as far as anyone knew, even the growing cadre of hardcore fans, Star Trek was finished. Then Star Wars happened, and even though the two properties had little more in common than the word Star in their titles, the potential profitability of a science fiction film series led Paramount Pictures to produce Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Of course, between 1969 and the December 1979 premiere of the movie, Americans had been forced to abandon Vietnam, had lived through Watergate, the OPEC oil embargo, and Three-Mile-Island, and were still over a year away from the end of the Iranian Hostage Crisis. American optimism was limping around on crutches.
But Star Trek remained optimistic. Sure, The Motion Picture told us a cautionary tale about the emptiness of technology, its follow-up The Wrath of Khan warned us that the past can catch up with you (with fatal consequences), we got an environmental scolding via whale song in The Voyage Home, and saw the end of the Cold War paralleled in The Undiscovered Country, but for the most part, the future was still so bright that we had to wear shades. These movies, featuring the cast from the 1960s, remained grounded in the spirit of the original series. Their relative success, and the continued success of Star Trek in syndication, led to something else, a new Star Trek TV series.
Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) was set 87 years after the original, and featured a new crew of diverse characters exploring the final frontier. There was a Klingon on the bridge, because just as we would overcome the enmity we had with the Russians to put Chekov on the bridge in the original series, so would we overcome whatever enmity we had with our interstellar adversaries. Optimism. The first two seasons of TNG alternated between atrocious and acceptable. As George Lucas would prove a decade later, the original creator of a pop culture phenomenon was often the least qualified to reinterpret it for new audiences. But as Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s influence over the new series waned, it grew into something better, and eventually spawned 2 spinoff series and a dubious prequel.
The 90’s proved almost as good for American optimism as the 60’s. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left the US as the only superpower on the world stage, and the American economy appeared healthy enough if you didn’t look too deeply at the foundations. Enough people were just prosperous enough for the public to feel somewhat hopeful for the future. As the philosophical conflict of the time shifted from competing economic ideologies (communism vs. capitalism) to competing religious/cultural ideologies (Islamic fundamentalism vs. Western technocracy), Star Trek adapted its storylines to respond, creating in Deep Space Nine (DS9) the franchise’s first serious look at faith (no, Star Trek V doesn’t count as serious). In addition to religion and the war story, DS9 would examine other deep and dark topics (including the Holocaust in an episode titled Duet), but it remained quintessentially Star Trek. As did the next spinoff, Voyager, which stranded its crew in another quadrant of the galaxy so they could meet new aliens that were essentially like the old aliens with different makeup. Voyager didn’t really cover any new ground, though they did make good use of one of TNG’s best antagonist species, the Borg. But by the end of that series, Star Trek was suffering from a severe case of franchise fatigue. Unfortunately, for its future, American optimism was about to be dealt a fatal blow.
On September 26, 2001, two weeks and one day after the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania, a TV series called Enterprise premiered on UPN. Lacking the title Star Trek, and indulging in the unfortunate prequelism that was all the rage at the time, Enterprise dropped a hammer through decades of Star Trek continuity to tell a story about an Enterprise crew from 100 years before the original series. Also premiering that fall was a series about a teenage Clark Kent called Smallville. That these more vulnerable versions of modern American myths, the pre-Starfleet starship crew and the adolescent Superman, should both appear within a few weeks of 911 is an interesting coincidence. Maybe the event defined a vulnerability that pop-culture was already in the process of exploring. The name of Enterprise’s first season villains, the Suliban, was only two letters away from the name of real-life villains, the al-Qaeda harboring Taliban, a conscious decision on the part of the show’s producers. They would double down on the war stories by creating the Xindi, a collection of alien races bent on destroying the Earth. Although Enterprise was the least Star Treky of all the Star Trek series, it still echoed the humanism and optimism of the original.
A last underwritten and overwrought movie with The Next Generation cast and a couple more seasons of Enterprise saw the end of professionally produced Star Trek. The nascent fan film industry would certainly seek to fill that void, but the results were mixed at best. Back when it had been a mere 79 episodes and four movies, I couldn’t imagine ever getting tired of the franchise. But after six more films, 178 episodes of TNG, 176 episodes of DS9, 172 episodes of Voyager and 98 episodes of Enterprise, I had finally had enough of the final frontier. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t have watched more, only that if I never got the chance it wouldn’t have bothered me in the least. Still, I was intrigued when it was announced that a new big budget film, featuring a recasting of the characters from the original series, was being planned. Star Trek had avoided the hornets’ nest of recasting for decades by re-characterizing, creating new characters rather than replacing beloved actors such as William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy. Instead of Kirk you got Picard, Sisko or Janeway. Instead of Spock you got Data, Odo or Tuvok. It had been a winning formula. But that was about to change.
Star Trek (2009) was the brainchild of a Star Wars fan named J.J. Abrams. Abrams is, at best, a hack with one trick up his sleeve, the vaunted mystery box, which he deployed most effectively at the start of the TV series Lost. We all know how that ended. For Star Trek, Abrams and his crew created one of those big blockbuster summer tentpole movies that had become a Hollywood standard in the 2000s. These films tend to be heavy on special effects, light on story, and usually feature an abundance of gratuitous property damage (such imagery usually evoking the events of 911). The first movie was made somewhat tolerable by the presence of Leonard Nimoy, reprising his role as Spock, but the rest of the thing bore little resemblance to Star Trek.
The Hollywood obsession with the anti-hero would, in turn, make thugs out of Captain Kirk, Sherlock Holmes, and Superman. In the follow-up to the first of the Star Trek reboot films, the abysmal Into Darkness, NuKirk submits a false report to Starfleet to cover up a violation of the Prime Directive. While the original Captain Kirk was more than willing to break the rules (“he was never a Boy Scout”), he was a man of honor. He would not have lied about the violation, but rather would have defended his decision and faced the consequences. But America has no more use for men of honor and truth, however fictional they may have always been. The third film in the reboot series, Star Trek Beyond, was a slight improvement, and did capture some of the spirit of the original series, but mostly it was as much an explosion-riddled noise maker as the first two.
Then, there was Discovery, the first new Star Trek TV series since the cancellation of Enterprise in 2005. Originally the brain child of Bryan Fuller (Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, Hannibal), he departed as showrunner in 2016 to focus on Showtime’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. There is no certainty that Fuller’s presence would have made Discovery better. After all, the production team that took over was working from his storyline. What they’ve created looks a lot like Star Trek, superficially, but seems profoundly disconnected from the essence of that enterprise. The series dabbles in hope and optimism by having a few of the characters say and do the right things, but the underlying tone is dark and pessimistic. And maybe it was never possible for it to ever be anything else. Informed by the trauma of 911 and sixteen years of endless, misguided war, maybe it’s impossible for American popular culture to sincerely create anything in the spirit of optimism, in the spirit of Star Trek.
Death and taxes. According to the old saying there are few things as certain as death and taxes. The first represents the inevitably of mortality, that all living things die. The second represents the inevitability of government, that all societies larger than a few individuals require some kind of order. In early hunter-gatherer tribes, it may have amounted to no more than a certain fluid division of labor. Hunters hunt, gatherers gather, everyone contributes to the good of the tribe. As societies grew more complex, so did the institutions required to govern them, giving rise to tribal confederations, city-states, empires, nations and republics. These units of organization require citizens to contribute something to the common good, usually through taxes, to keep society functioning. If they fail, the result is a state of anarchy that may be more taxing than the taxes were.
In fiction, death is often the focus of the plot. Literary works often use the stress of death to wring emotion out of characters, and some story genres, such as thrillers and mysteries, often start with the death of a character or require the threat of death as the primary source of tension. Certainly, there are genres and subgenres of fiction that also deal with taxes, and the governments that collect them. The police detective in the mystery novel is paid by a municipal government to investigate crimes and enforce laws. The spy in the thriller can waste tons of tax revenues on fancy machinegun-armed sports cars. The stoplight in the romance novel that makes the heiress late for her yoga lesson was presumably bought with somebody’s tax dollars. You can’t build a Death Star if you don’t have the money, and the organizational skills, to do so. So even in fictions where these institutions do not play a vital role, plausibility suggests that they are a vital part of the underlying society that the characters live in.
In science fiction, writers and film producers have the luxury of reimagining these institutions. The fantastic settings allow them to have characters that live under governments totally different from those that exist in the real world, either currently or historically. Of course, some stories are more dependent on these details than others. The Empire was vital to George’s Lucas’ Star Wars saga, since it was the rebellion against the imperial government, and the struggle to destroy its Death Star, that propelled so much of the story. The Federation featured in Star Trek may be more in the background, but regulations such as the Prime Directive reveal things about the political foundations of that society. And though the platoon of marines we see in Aliens suggest the presence of a government institution, the influence wielded by Burke and his ilk suggest the true power may be vested in a corporate oligarchy. Each of these film/television series, and a dozen others that have been created in the last 50 years, have made predictions about how the future (or in Star Wars case a long time ago) would be governed.
To many people the subject of politics can be deadly dull. They are happy to ignore all of the invisible work done by governments to support their daily lives, or to complain about the taxes they have to pay to support that work, but they are in no way interested in the minutiae of political or government activity. For these people, the series of blog posts I’m planning on the politics of the future, exploring the governing systems described in pop culture science fiction may not be that interesting. Showing senatorial trade route debates in the prequel episodes of the Star Wars saga was not well received by fans or critics. But if the political aspects of science fiction world building interest you, I will be posting at least seven or eight of these essays on the politics and government of the fictional future, exploring everything from Star Wars’ Republic and Empire to the feudal system seen in Dune. How do these institutions work? How do they compare with real-world equivalent systems? What are creators and producers trying to say with their portrait of governance? These are some of the questions I will explore over the next few weeks.
There is only one reason that I continue to subscribe to HBO, and it’s not the occasional episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, the opportunity to see movies that have not yet made it to Netflix or the slim hope that there will be another season of The Newsroom. It is to watch Game of Thrones. To watch each episode of each season as soon as they are available. That is the only reason that I have continued to pay for the premium cable network. But now that season four, and the adaptation of the 3rd book in the A Song of Ice and Fire saga, A Storm of Swords, has been completed, I cannot recall a single event in the next two books of the series that I feel an overwhelming need to experience on screen. And even though the producers of the TV series have thrown a few interesting curve balls our way, they’ve thrown enough bad ones to make me question the value of paying $18 a month just to watch three months of GOT in the Spring.
Novel author George R.R. Martin reached the plateau of his story with A Storm of Swords. After the The Red Wedding, the poisoning of Joffrey Baratheon, the second trail by combat for Tyrion Lannister, the Battle for Castle Black and the arrival at The Wall of Stannis Baratheon, and the death of Tywin Lannister, this story was begging for its author to start moving toward the conclusion, something that could have been accomplished within the next two books. Instead, the surviving character we already know get bogged down in story lines that seem to go nowhere. Daenerys remains stuck in Meereen, failing largely to control either the population or her dragons. Stannis and Jon Snow remain stuck at the wall, worrying about Wildings and White Walkers but not really doing anything about either. Sam and Gilly wander through western Westeros. Brienne and Pod wander through eastern Westeros. Tyrion and Jorah Mormont wander through western Essos. Arya has some interesting adventures, but not much else seems to happen for all the other characters we know.
Then there are the new characters, Iron Islanders, the Dornish, even new Targaryens that might have some claim to the Iron Throne. Clearly Martin wanted to expand his saga to cover these new kingdoms and people, but at this point I really just don’t care. Just because you set your story in the seven kingdoms of Westeros doesn’t mean I want to read about all seven kingdoms. And after killing off so many of the characters I was already invested in, what makes you think I would want to get invested in new characters that you will slaughter. Time to start moving toward a conclusion, getting Dany off her throne in Meereen and moving across the Narrow Sea, bringing the White Walkers down from The Land of Always Winter for their big conflict with Dany and her Dragons (assuming that is how the story will end). But I doubt even the next book, The Winds of Winter, will start to significantly resolve these storylines.
I’m not giving up on the story. I’ll continue to read the books as (and if) they are released. But I’m not paying extra for the TV series. I’ll just wait for that distant day when these next few seasons are released on DVD or Blu-ray or finally make their way to Netflix. Because from where I'm sitting, the best parts of this story are behind us, and unless Martin does something truly spectacular with the next book, I have no reason to follow it in more than one medium.
Along with seasons six through eight, Dexter’s fifth season recently became available on Netflix. The Showtime series about murderer murdering sociopath Dexter Morgan took quite the turn at the end of the fourth season with the killing of Dexter’s wife, Rita, and season five has been dealing with the repercussions of that event. Having binged on the first four seasons in the Fall of 2013, I found the show compelling, but not as high quality a series as I was led to believe. To me the “Dexter has a new serial killer mentor/mentee” routine was getting kind of repetitive. And Jennifer Carpenter has to be one of worst actresses in the world. Never for a minute do I believe her as a homicide detective. Jimmy Smits run as Miguel Prado in season three was also less than impressive and even though John Lithgow as Arthur Mitchell raised the acting bar considerably for the series, with exception of Rita’s demise, season four didn't really break any new ground.
The fifth season has tried to shake up the formula somewhat, based on what I've seen so far. The focus of Dexter’s homicidal impulses has been a single group of men who committed a series of savage torture/rape/murders. Dexter becomes aware of this crime after killing one of the men and freeing the last of their captives, Lumen Pierce (Julia Stiles). There is a subplot involving a Latin American murder cult that features decapitation and the removal of people’s eyes and tongues. (Hey, if you don’t want to watch a story about horrible things happening to people, why are you watching Dexter?) Yes, Dexter’s relationship with Lumen does take on the same mentor characteristics seen in the first four seasons, but at least there is an element of righteous vindication in her actions. Julia Stiles also gives one of the series best performances. The name Lumen is a bit heavy handed, and I’m not sure what they are trying to say about darkness or Dexter’s dark passenger by essentially naming his latest associate ‘light’. As of this posting, Season Five has proven to be at least as good as the preceding three, if not quite as good as the first. But of course, a poor ending can ruin any story, and that remains to be seen.
Much like the ubiquitous vampires of the recent Twilight era, zombies are
a hot commodity, as evidenced by the popularity of The Walking Dead and World
War Z. Sure, zombies have probably passed the peak of their popularity, but
they may have a couple of years before they become as overexposed and tedious
as the vampires.
One unexpected consequence of all this zombie popularity is that it has
pretty much eliminated the possibility that the zombie apocalypse will ever
occur. I know, you’d have thought that the major problem with that would be
biological, that dead organisms can’t really get up and walk around after they
are, well, dead. But the presence of zombies within pop culture poses another difficulty to the zombies, should the problem of animating necrotic tissue
ever be solved, and that is, we all now know how to deal with them.
Let’s face it, the only thing that zombies really have going for them is
surprise, no one expects the dead to get up and start biting people. In a world
without a pop culture reference to zombies, people would probably be confused
and uncertain how to deal with the newly resurrected
corpses. But us, we’ve got this covered. After the initial shock wore off, we’d
get down to business pretty quickly, shooting walking corpses in the head and
making sure that the dead were properly disposed of. Even if the generals and admirals were uncertain of how to respond
to an outbreak, soldiers and sailors raised on Resident Evil and other video
games would step up and squash the threat fairly quickly. Sure there might be
some initial panic and maybe even quite a few causalities, but ultimately the
zombie apocalypse will never have a chance.
