100 Favorite Shows: Conclusion
“It has to be joyful, effortless, fun.”
Well, it’s been quite a time. Last February, I finished my first ever watch of M*A*S*H, the last show I knew I had to see before I dared to rank my one hundred favorite television series ever made. Last April, I began the first step of ranking them by revisiting my favorite episodes of each show and taking notes on them, starting with “Andy and April’s Fancy Party” from Parks and Recreation. Last November, I published an introduction and my first essay on the countdown, for Full House, kicking off a weekday-centric publishing routine that eventually brought us here, to this April. And now, the list has been completed! We’ve ranked all one hundred and laughed and cried and shared love and memories along the way. It was such a special experience and now here I am, writing a conclusion that somehow will dare to “wrap up” some semblance of what I’ve learned about television over the course of the past year and how I might view it going forward now that this “era” of my life and its relationship with television is coming to an end.
Throughout this project, I was embroiled in a program that sought to help me earn the materials necessary to begin my dream career. As I write this conclusion, I am a week away from achieving that and moving into the next, most uncertain phase of my life. It’s a scary thought. After all, I’ve lived in the same place for almost twenty years and always had the safety net of being a child/teenager/young adult to fall back on if the idea of truly committing to adulthood terrified me. But now, I’m in the show; it’s time to begin. No more coming home from school on a Monday and knowing there’d be a How I Met Your Mother episode to lull me off to sleep before visiting my rent-free bedroom.
The truth is, though, that’s been over for a while now. There was a time when the television schedule of my life was (roughly) The Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers on Sundays, HIMYM on Mondays, New Girl, The Mindy Project, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Tuesdays, and The Office, 30 Rock, Community, and Parks on Thursdays. I know that’s not quite accurate. The Simpsons hasn’t been truly stellar during the entirety of Bob’s’ run on the air so far. Brooklyn and Office never overlapped. But they all represent that era of my life when television was an affair of weekly check-ins, appointment viewings, and recommendations solely stemming from my family.
Now, the television landscape is so clearly scattered. I watched all of the above shows with my family, but they’ve never seen a sliver of The Americans or Girls. BoJack Horseman would dump all its episodes at once in the summer, Fargo comes back whenever it feels like, Dickinson is available on a highly exclusive streaming service that is so far from the universally accessible nature of NBC. The monoculture of television has been so splintered across the favorite shows of a generation. (Unless you’re a Game of Thrones or an MCU installment on Disney Plooos, of course.) Television is a different era now than when I first came to love it. And as I recognize that the specific era of my life that I’ve grown so comfortable within is coming to an end, too, I wanted to engage in this project to help me reconcile those feelings.
Yes, these are (mostly) fictional stories with fictional characters, but they all speak to universal themes and strive to tell deeper, more thoughtful stories that might change the way we view the world and the people around us. The love I’ve always harbored for television is emblematic of the love I share for the world and all the people who move me so much when I simply see their name or imagine their visage in my mind. Writing about Psych helped me understand why spending time with television, as a result of my parents’ interest in it, was so important. Writing about New Girl showed me how much my conceptions of change and growth have been shaped by the hangout comedy. Writing about Community showed me what television even means to me.
Just as an episode of I Love Lucy is about more than a chocolate factory, so too are these essays about more than just a love of television; they’re about a love of the world and all the creativity that exists within it. That remarkable realization will always keep me motivated, driven, and obsessed with how the medium can fundamentally change us as human beings. Whether that’s in the form of stopping by apartments and office buildings and magical continents to see how friends are doing each week or simply taking away the lesson of making someone, anyone feel a little happier, television is as magic as all of them. Television is a lovesick paper salesman confessing his feelings in a dingy parking lot. Television is an immortal vampire fucking off to Pennsylvania to help a high school volleyball team. Television is shouting, “That’s what the money is for!” when you just can’t open yourself up emotionally anymore. Television is all the magic of our existence and the fact that we grasp the written word at all.
As Pam Beesly says in the series finale of The Office, it’s like a “long book that you never want to end. And you’re fine with that because you just never, ever want to leave it.” That’s how I felt about The Television Project: 100 Favorite Shows. I could stay in Westeros and Scranton forever. I could happily revisit the old staples, like “Pizza Delivery,” “The Constant,” “Pier Pressure,” “Loplop.” I’d be happy to do it. I’d be happy to stay in these worlds forever. But eventually, they all end. One day, The Simpsons will end. It just will. Thrones is gone. Lucy dipped seventy years ago. We’ll say goodbye to Brooklyn later this year. For as long-gestating as television can feel, it’s never permanent. There are always changes.
Many times, those changes are really exciting! My deadline was June 1, 2020 for this project and yet, so many series debuted after that deadline that make me so excited to eventually revisit this list one day and write some more essays. Ted Lasso, Dash & Lily, The Queen’s Gambit. There are always more stories to tell and they will always enrich us. As it was, this project opened my mind to so much. When engaging with the incredible fan communities that exist out there for all one hundred of these shows, I learned about some recommendations I should take seriously. The True Detective community, for example, highly suggested Treme. I’ve loved meeting every fellow television fan who took the time to read an essay, share their thoughts, share the love.
Not to mention the various creatives who helped bring these stories to life and took the time to engage with me about the connections we share through them, even from afar. John C. McGinley, Joanna Robinson, Michael Schur, Mitch Hurwitz, David Mandel, Dan Goor, Damon Wayans, Jr., Brian Grubb, Jim Fanning, Amy Brenneman, J.B. Smoove, Craig Thomas, Tim Federle, Joe Serafini, Zachary Knighton, Arian Moayed, Kimberly McCullough, Starz, Jamie Nesbitt Golden, Anthony Carrigan, Henry Winkler, Matt Youngberg, Lang Fisher, Stephen Falk, Alena Smith, Jason Ritter, Timothy Omundson, Vicky Jones, Jay Ellis, Paul Feig, Donna Lynne Champlin, Tony Yacenda, Phil Matarese, Dahvi Waller, Paul Rust, Milana Vayntrub, Mike Mitchell, and Paul Feig.
I have also enjoyed embracing the recommendations of friends. If one thing comes out of this project, I hope it’s that others will share what their favorite shows are with me in the hopes that I’ll share the love right back with them. Yes, I’m more than happy to become a walking resource of recs and references for people and point them in the direction of exceptional television. But already, my mother has fired up Just Shoot Me, one friend has suggested Damages, another implored me to watch Toast of London. Do they all land? Not always. But it’s in the discovery where the joy comes from. The fact that I never knew Will Arnett voicing a horse would eventually be a top fourteen show. That’s what I live for in the realm of television. I assure everyone that I associate shows with all of you now. I know what you’re drawn to and what you love. Chuck, M*A*S*H, Fleabag, The Sopranos, Love, The Golden Girls. Every show on this list evokes a memory of a treasured loved one. Many evoke multiple. To everyone who threw their support or engagement my way, it means the world. It blew my mind that people were interested in someone else’s list. It blew my mind that people cared.
The spark has always been there, from my early obsessions with SpongeBob SquarePants, Drake & Josh, and all the age-appropriate programs, even dating back to Blue’s Clues, which is the first show I ever paid attention to. But it was perhaps truly unlocked back in 2007 when I witnessed “Women’s Appreciation” on The Office, my first ever dalliance with the show and with adult comedy, as a whole. Maybe it was a foregone conclusion that my subsequent obsession with the workplace comedy would eventually lead to its spot as the number one show on the list (the logo probably revealed a bit, too), but it’s not an engine of adoration moving in one direction.
Yes, The Office remains my favorite show ever made, as it has for as long as I was old enough to recognize that SportsCenter isn’t a true television series. But the categories are highly diversified. Community is responsible for my favorite episode of television, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas.” Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope is my favorite character. Fargo’s second season is probably my favorite single season of television ever made. Scrubs possesses my favorite series finale ever put to air. Mad Men is my favorite drama. Thrones is my favorite fantasy. SpongeBob is my favorite animation. I Love Lucy is what I believe to be the most innovative. The Good Place is probably the most consistent series on the entire list. They all have their individual merits, even if The Office is just too towering a figure in my life to deny.
There is beauty in all of them. I cherish all of them. All one hundred. I cherish what they’ve meant to me and how they’ve shaped me and I love engaging with them as much as I love reading Othello for the tenth time or racing the same Mario Kart: Double Dash tracks over and over again. All the same, the shows themselves tell us so much about television. Look to The Good Place. It’s a finale that teaches us how to say goodbye. The characters to each other, human beings to life on Earth, us to the show. It’s all right there, waiting to be recognized for how gorgeously soaring it was and will continue to be long after I’ve watched my final episode and ventured through the tree-stretched arch into oblivion, junk mail, and the name Michael Realman. After I’ve looked around at all there was to love and thought about the lovely memories of my childhood, adolescence, schooling, family, and introductions to the world, each of which had many days that were punctuated with an episode before bed. An episode where a study group became video game characters or a sea sponge sang at the Bubble Bowl halftime show or a regional manager at a dying paper company got through the day. And he helped us do it, too.
I’ve written a lot of words here and throughout the past year, publishing them once a day. The essay on The Office had fifteen thousand words itself! In total, I wrote over two and a half hundred thousand words. I’m not sure I have anything left to say about any of them. I’m not sure I have anything left to say about television. I’ve exhausted all of my thoughts and love for the shows that have shaped me. But we always keep rolling. So yes, I have nothing more to say about television. But it’s only for the moment. I’m sure there’s yet another dynamite show airing right now — just waiting to be discovered.
