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50 years of great TV: Sun television critic Alex Strachan eschews the obvious to choose a personal top 10 from television's first five decades.
Vancouver Sun
Wednesday, December 29, 1999
Page: C5 / FRONT
Section: Entertainment
Byline: Alex Strachan
Source: Vancouver SunIn Entertainment Weekly's ``100 Greatest Moments in Television'' issue, published in February, live news coverage of world events -- the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Challenger explosion, the Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show -- were judged to be as ``momentous'' as anything in Dallas or Seinfeld. If the list had been compiled in Canada, Paul Henderson's goal in the deciding game of 1972's so-called Hockey Summit would have topped the list.
A television historian's list of great series would have to include I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, M*A*S*H, All in the Family (possibly), Cheers (probably), Hill Street Blues (although a more clever and original choice would be St. Elsewhere), The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show,The Cosby Show and The Andy Griffith Show. This is a list that, in addition to being obvious, underscores the notion of television as a medium that leaves you feeling dazed and amused.
I am not a television historian, just a viewer like you. My favourite programs share at least two things, though: They earned no small measure of notoriety while they were on the air, and they have weathered the passage of time remarkably well considering the artistic limitations of the medium. I did not apply academic reasoning; my criteria for choosing these shows had more to do with how they affected me on a personal, visceral level than whether they were ennobling or culturally significant in some way -- though, to be fair, all can make that claim.
If I were to stretch the personal pantheon offered here to, say, 20 shows, I would make a case for The Fugitive, Cracker, Prime Suspect, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Absolutely Fabulous, South Park, Homicide: Life on the Street and The X-Files -- and possibly even the live drama of Playhouse 90, if for no other reason than being the logical ancestor of quality television.
1. THE SIMPSONS 1989-, FOX
Simply stated, The Simpsons is swell, a smart study in both style and substance, self-aware without being self-indulgent, sweet but not saccharine, sarcastic but not cynical. In its 10 years of existence, the show has survived everything from merchandising overkill to a crusade to have it removed from the air. To these tired eyes, The Simpsons is the truest, most clever, refined and intelligently crafted series in television's half century.
Don't have a cow, it's only one person's opinion -- even though that opinion has been seconded in informal discussions with everyone from kids who sling joe for a living at my local hangout to X-Files guru Chris Carter and Law & Order executive producer Rene Balcer.
One minor miracle of The Simpsons is the simplicity with which it speaks to several generations simultaneously. Another minor miracle is how it has survived and even thrived -- it is that very rare example of a series that was sharp-thinking at its inception and has remained so since. Thanks to the miracle of animation, the characters haven't aged. Bart was 10 years old when the family Simpson took its first collective bow in 1990; he is 10 years old today. If you can look past the deliberately cut-out caricatures and gaudy colours the way readers in the 18th century suspended their disbelief in giants and dwarves, The Simpsons plays like a modern-day riff on Jonathan Swift. The age of irony has come and gone, but satire is timeless.
The Simpsons' critics point accusing fingers at Homer, the family's pear-shaped patriarch, and complain that because he is a slob and a doofus, the program presents a bad role model for children who should learn to respect their elders, not ridicule them. The Simpsons gives its audience credit for having the intelligence to read between the lines, however; bad behaviour begets comeuppance. In its own tongue-in-cheek way, The Simpsons embraces the sanctity of the family unit. It is also startlingly life-affirming.
By masking its themes behind cheerful lunacy, The Simpsons has managed to tackle some sticky subjects -- issues surrounding animal rights, sobriety, ethnicity, violence in media, education, modern psychology, politics, art, the shrinking middle class, the nature of friendship, sports, show business and the pursuit of happiness.
Following the 1991 real-world letter-writing campaign by a Midwest homemaker against the sitcom Married ... with Children, The Simpsons featured an episode in which family matriarch Marge launches a campaign against ultra-violent cartoon-within-a-toon Itchy and Scratchy, Bart and Lisa's favourite program. (``Are cartoons too violent for children?'' Smartline anchor Ken Brockman, voiced by Harry Shearer, asks rhetorically to open the talk show on which Marge is an invited guest. ``Most people would say, `No, of course not, what kind of a stupid question is that?' But one woman would say yes, and she's with us tonight.'')
In another inspired-by-real-life moment, The Simpsons responded to then-U.S. president George Bush's speech at the 1992 Republican convention that his government would strengthen the family unit ``to make it more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons'' by having Bart catch Bush's speech by accident while channel surfing. ``Hey, we're just like the Waltons,'' Bart chirps to the rest of the family. ``Both families spend a lot of time praying for the end of the depression.''
Great stuff.
2. TWIN PEAKS 1990-91, ABC
Who killed Laura Palmer? Even today, it's hard to buy the idea that it was entirely Leland Palmer's doing. Such was the heady combination of David Lynch and Mark Frost's moody images, subjugated sexual tensions, small-town eccentricities and story leads that disappeared up blind alleys, only to reappear in creepy sycamore groves. Continuity and coherence played minor roles, but Lynch's vision was as bold as it was brilliant, as enigmatic and surrealistic as Tibetan rock throwing (which actually played a part in one scene).
3. THE AVENGERS 1961-67, ITV, ALSO ABC
Even if it doesn't quite qualify as the best Canadian television series ever made, The Avengers comes pretty close. It was the progeny of one-time CBC television executive Sydney Newman, who was ``headhunted'' by British ITV network executives desperate to make their programming more ``modern.'' Newman was lured to the U.K. with promises of an annual salary of $22,000 Cdn, a Jaguar and a free mortgage.
The Avengers survived various incarnations, but is best known for the 1965-67 seasons featuring the debonair Patrick Macnee as very proper secret agent John Steed and Diana Rigg as secret agent Emma Peel, named for her "M. Appeal,'' as a producer's scrawl on a notebook shorthanded "man appeal.'' The Avengers was kinky, sometimes seriously kinky. And, bizarrely, it was sometimes feminist as a result.
4. MAX HEADROOM 1987-88, CHANNEL 4, ABC
A Mobius loop of late 20th-century pop culture, marketing and high-technology video. At a time when MTV ruled the air waves with its high-powered imagery and bland, low-octane music, Max Headroom -- a computer-generated talking head -- was originally devised by Crysalis Records to promote its recording artists and get more exposure for their videos. As a series, it quickly became a riff on the prevalence of style over substance.
Max was the electronic memory imprint of a hapless investigative reporter, Edison Carter, played by the startlingly and refreshingly sarcastic Matt Frewer. He was decapitated in a motorcycle accident and his head preserved and stored in a computer mainframe, where he hacked into other computers and exposed everything from illegal corporate machinations to corrupt politicians. The show's title was a typically inside jab: the last thing Edison saw before he was decapitated by a low garage overhang was a sign warning ``Max. Headroom 2.3 metres.''
5. THE PRISONER 1968, BBC, ALSO PBS AND CBS
The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan's allegory on paranoia and the Cold War, must have startled the conservative, middle-class American viewers who saw it for the first time -- it was the summer replacement for The Jackie Gleason Show and came hot on the heels of the Vietnam War and just before the Summer of Love.
McGoohan played John Drake, a British secret agent who, upon resigning, was spirited away to a quaint, isolated, seaside resort somewhere in the south of Europe called the Village, from which it was impossible to escape. Eccentric former agents led a bucolic existence in the community, where they were given not names but numbers. Drake became Number Six, and proclaimed at the beginning of each episode, ``I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered ... I am not a number! I am a free man!'' only to be greeted by gales of laughter.
Hidden, malevolent forces tried to break him psychologically to ascertain the reason for his sudden resignation. They failed, but not before he arguably went mad from his ordeal. Quite possibly the most original, intriguing series ever made.
6. LAW & ORDER 1990-, NBC, ALSO CTV
Gritty, straightforward, consummately performed by a cast of stage and film veterans, this legal anthology has thrived with age thanks to scripts that are topical and an attitude that assumes the audience is intelligent. Other quality dramas may apply; what swings the verdict in Law & Order's favour is its persistence of vision, its grasp of humanity and its sense of place.
Unlike NYPD Blue and other shows of that ilk, Law & Order is filmed in New York City, and it shows. The producers' passion for the film-making craft -- whether it's night scenes that are actually shot at night, snowbound scenes that feature actual snow or hand-held camera shots that are unsettling without being distracting -- is never allowed to detract from what is really important: the story. Law & Order has tackled a myriad of issues, from racism to abortion to victims' rights without once pandering to public sentiment or stooping to hysteria and profanity. In a word, brilliant.
7. THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW 1992-97, HBO, ALSO CBC AND SUPERCHANNEL
Self-aware to a fault and yet blissfully unaware of what was really going on around him, Sanders was played by comedian Garry Shandling as a narcissistic, insecure talk-show host with all the charisma of a wet sponge and the sexual libido of a rhino on a rutting rampage. Larry Sanders was television's most audacious in-joke -- a sitcom about the fictional host of a make-believe talk show, featuring real celebrities playing themselves, only not really as themselves. David Duchovny, for example, suffered a serious homosexual crush, but only after a serious falling out on his first appearance on the show (``You're blowing me off? I can't believe this -- I flew all the way down from f---ing Canada to do this show''). Duchovny and Shandling are friends in real life.
8. TAXI 1978-82, ABC
James L. Brooks, the Academy Award-winning film-maker of Broadcast News and Terms of Endearment, calls Taxi the best television program he has ever worked on, and since his other series include The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Tracey Ullman Show, that's saying something. Taxi is head and shoulders above other situation comedies for its complexity and zaniness, not to mention taking the slimmest excuse for a series -- a taxi stand owned and operated by a truly dysfunctional band of eccentrics -- and turning it into one long, dizzying jam session on our dysfunctional times.
Seinfeld was cleverer, I Love Lucy more charming, but nothing could equal Taxi for comedy in its purest, most simple form. Just try matching the scene in which the Reverend Jim Ignatowski (Christopher Lloyd), his mind wasted from a steady regimen of drug abuse in the '60s, is stumped by a question on the written exam for his driver's licence. (``What does a yellow light mean?'' he whispers urgently to a colleague. ``Slow down,'' comes the whispered response. Ignatowski nods, then says very loudly and very slowly: ``What ... does ... a ... yellow ... light ... mean?''
9. THE TWILIGHT ZONE 1959-65, CBS
Imagine, if you will, a political climate so oppressive that you don't dare write about divisive social issues for fear of being labelled a subversive and hauled before a government committee to explain yourself. And if, in front of that committee, you do not name the names of your colleagues and friends who think the way you do, you are denounced and your career and reputation forever ruined -- on live, national television.
It was in the fallout of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, chaired by rabid anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy, that Rod Serling, a young playwright fresh off Playhouse 90 and live stage productions of his television plays Requiem for a Heavyweight and Patterns, decided to mask morality plays about prejudice, nuclear holocaust and society's obsession with looks behind a science-fiction anthology dressed up with mad scientists and bug-eyed monsters from outer space. The deception worked, and in so doing provided popular culture with one of its most enduring and entertaining parables.
10. FAWLTY TOWERS 1975 AND 1979, BBC, ALSO PBS AND CBC
In 1972, the Monty Python comedy troupe stayed at what John Cleese referred to as ``a seaside establishment in Devon'' run by an innkeeper so rude, Cleese later told New York Daily News columnist David Bianculli, that he inspired wide-eyed horror in guests and employees alike. Three years later, Cleese and his then-wife Connie Booth (who played the maid Polly) wrote six episodes of classic comedy that redefined rage. The show -- named for Basil Fawlty (Cleese), the innkeeper with a hair-trigger temper -- proved such a hit that four years later, Cleese and Booth wrote another half-dozen before calling it quits.
Illustration:
• Color Photo: HUMANITY: Sam Waterston and Dennis Boutsikaris in Law & Order.
• Color Photo: THE BEST: Kyle MacLachlan and Michael Ontkean in Twin Peaks.
• Color Photo: Anne Francis in The Twilight Zone episode The After Hours.
• Color Photo: Matt Frewer's computerized alter ego Max Headroom.
• Color Photo: The animated study in style The Simpsons.
Idnumber: 199912290024
Edition: Final
Story Type: Feature
Length: 2245 words
Illustration Type: Colour Photo
