The 4 Best Dramas Of The Last 25 Years

Horror seems more a singles genre, I guess. I'd rather just watch a handful of good Tales from the Crypt episodes.

lol at Mad Men making this list.

my thoughts exactly.

I may have noted this before, but fwiw the vast majority of Mad Men fans I know are women, who readily concede what attracts them to the series are the fashions, the period details, the hunky men, the bad boy behavior and all that sort of stuff. I've never heard anyone discuss the story. Don't know what to make of that. When I watched Downton Abbey, another show with I presume a larger than usual female audience, I kept thinking of Mad Men.

Don't think of Buffy as horror, because it's really not (X-Files is more straight horror) and please don't think of it in terms of Tales from the Crypt. Buffy's really quite intelligent and perceptive about the adolescent experience, with the supernatural stuff both metaphor and vector for emotional development.

i think if your idea of what constitutes a good tv show is consistency you're denying yourself much of the fun of tv

Why should we set the bar low when plenty of shows have been plenty consistent? Reminds me of this person once who asked me if I liked a particular book. I said no, so she asked why. I said it was poorly written, and she didn't argue, but then claimed something like "there's more to a book than the quality of the writing." I guess, but good writing is a pretty good place to start.

write in vote for - THE I LOVE CRICKET: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX THREAD FOR THE MENTALIST

sopranos
sopranos
sopranos
sopranos

The best episodes of Buffy work, well, best if you have the emotional context down, which makes The Body and the musical ep sort of weird introductions.

OTMFM. I've long cited the gut punch of "The Body" as a prime example of one of the things television/serialized narrative is uniquely qualified to do well. It wouldn't be a fraction as effective if you didn't have five seasons of investment in the characters.

so, basically the Sopranos and then three TV shows that Tumblr whites used to comfort themselves into thinking TV was "important" since there wasn't a show like the Sopranos on TV anymore

may have noted this before, but fwiw the vast majority of Mad Men fans I know are women, who readily concede what attracts them to the series are the fashions, the period details, the hunky men, the bad boy behavior and all that sort of stuff. I've never heard anyone discuss the story. Don't know what to make of that. When I watched Downton Abbey, another show with I presume a larger than usual female audience, I kept thinking of Mad Men.

Don't think of Buffy as horror, because it's really not (X-Files is more straight horror) and please don't think of it in terms of Tales from the Crypt. Buffy's really quite intelligent and perceptive about the adolescent experience, with the supernatural stuff both metaphor and vector for emotional development.

i think if your idea of what constitutes a good tv show is consistency you're denying yourself much of the fun of tv
Why should we set the bar low when plenty of shows have been plenty consistent? Reminds me of this person once who asked me if I liked a particular book. I said no, so she asked why. I said it was poorly written, and she didn't argue, but then claimed something like "there's more to a book than the quality of the writing." I guess, but good writing is a pretty good place to start.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 23 March 2012 14:22 (4 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wow, you sure have problems with women

I do! That's exactly right!

"oh no mad men's on hiatus! quick what show can we pretend is john updike so we can still comment on onion episode recaps. whew thank you based breaking bad"

i think if your idea of what constitutes a good tv show is consistency you're denying yourself much of the fun of tv

I would counter by saying: there is good TV, and there is enjoyable TV.

Voting Breaking Bad btw.

Whiney helped me make up my mind.

"oh no mad men's on hiatus! quick what show can we pretend is john updike so we can still comment on onion episode recaps. whew thank you based breaking bad"

john updike basically is the middlebrow tv of literature, though?

I would counter by saying: there is good TV, and there is enjoyable TV.

why would i want to watch good tv when i could be watching enjoyable tv??

why BB wins, again

The fanboy angle on Buffy has ensured I will never watch it, unfor.

― Eric H., Friday, March 23, 2012 9:48 AM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the fact that it;s like quippy proto-Twilight dramaclub vampire brony trash has ensured I will never go near it in a thousand years. i couldn't imagine what would make a grown man think it's ok to even watch a Teen Dracula Can't Lose show called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" let alone rally around its creator to the point where he think it was acceptable to release something called "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog."

The whole cult around all of this makes me sicker to my stomach than furry conventions

I didn't say it was a dichotomy, thomp. There's a ton of overlap, but there's also a lot of "just enjoyable but not particularly good" overhang.

tbf Whedon's new horror movie is pretty awesome

i think part (most) of what makes good tv enjoyable and interesting is how the all-hands-on-deck nature of making it is something that any auteurist version of it (or just any single sense of it) has to work with or against in productive ways

i think mad men is a terrible example of an aesthetic getting totally emptied out and flattened for the sake of 'consistency' and 'quality'

i like sopranos and breaking bad for such different reasons, even though they have a lot of superficial plot/character similarities.

Hard to choose between The Sopranos and The Wire. Breaking Bad is awesome but not quite up to their standards, Mad Men isn't even close.

Whiney, do you just, like, read a book or something while your smug sense of uninformed self-satisfaction is posting on ILX? I can imagine that it's a really fruitful symbiosis.

Consistency often implies sticking to a set formula and not taking any risks. Enjoyed the first three seasons of Mad Men well enough -- mostly for the styles and prettiness of the characters (w/some of the story arcs whose effecttiveness or otherwise have been discussed on here) and this is surely fair enough. A certain quality of style (which Mad Men often achieves) can be quite substantial in itself, is perfect when illustrating the illusion of that world.

what Number None said.

for such a supposed exemplar of "good" "quality" TV,mad men sure does rely on a lot of cheap gimmicks and tricks.

and for the record, i liked the 1st season of mad men. sometime after that, i realized that i neither liked nor cared about the antics of a bunch of largely unlikeable stiffs.

The main thing with Mad Men is I never ever find myself wanting to rewatch an episode whereas i've seen The Sopranos and The Wire front to back multiple times

Consistency doesn't mean playing it safe. I think of it as seeing a show's story and themes through, which is why I loved "The Shield" so much. It never seemed to lose sight of its goals for the sake of extending the show's run or whatever. Unlike "Buffy," which surely bobbled, or even "The Wire," whose final season comes a little too close for comfort to running off the rails. Or definitely "The Sopranos," which has a superfluous season or two, imo (though I'm in the minority, I guess). Like, so far "BB" is doing an awesome job keeping it together without getting rote.

Some of the best TV watches like a good novel reads, with each episode like a chapter.

Yeah, you're pretty OTM w/r/t the consistency of the shows you mention. I'm still upset that HBO gave David Chase an extra half a season to dick around with at the end of The Sopranos run. Completely deflated the tension he'd so masterfully built up.

The main thing with Mad Men is I never ever find myself wanting to rewatch an episode

Almost this. I did watch "The Suitcase" at least three times.

Some of the best TV watches like a good novel reads, with each episode like a chapter.

p sure you mean 'some of the best tv watches like a 19th-century novel reads, delivered in regular instalments of equal page counts interrupted by advertisers, with high production values to gloss over inconsistencies created by the format, p.s. i hate women'

I watched all the options bar BB. I'll watch it once, repeatibility has no bearing -- often something could be really good and hard to watch at the same time.

Shame that Oz has been written out. Possibly my single favourite. I'm sentimental about it..haven't seen it again.

I think these are all v strict definitions of good novels or TV -- its an easy thing to keep a theme going for a while, not sure why any prizes for quality shd be handed out for that. xp

The Wire keeps its consistently worthy themes going until it detours to McNulty's playing around.

McNulty

Fuckin' McNulty

Shame that Oz has been written out.

I've said it before: Oz was a soap opera with wangs and shivs. Entertaining, but not exactly top-tier entertainment.

No 'quality'...yes, I get it.

tradition de qualité

Sorry for suggesting that we use 'quality' as a signifier of what might make one thing better than another.

that's not really how the term gets used though

i mean it's a really nebulous thing when ppl start scarequoting it: smth like 'art which naturalises its aesthetic decisions by promoting itself and being in the world in such a way as to suggest that those aesthetic decisions were already the ones which made it good art'

i suspect it's ultimately as much as a mental copout as the attitude it's supposedly mocking, though

thx for the new screenname Deric

More how quality is being defined to promote this kind of television -- which is v good and likeable, but maybe not as good as ppl say it is. So Oz used a lot of elements from sopa operas maybe...well so what, that can make for great TV.

Someone start Wangs 'n' Shivs Repetory Summer Theatre in the Park.

I'd take the Shield over all these. But I'll go with BB.

Okay, with respect to serialized fiction (not procedurals, necessarily, because they do their own thing), I'd say that one aspect of quality is the extent to which the narrative strives for something more than "and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened". The extent to which you are building something (character, a world, etc.) that is greater and more coherent (a better word than 'consistent')than the sum of the individual parts. This is a lot of what ultimately pissed me off so much about L O S T: they pretended for so long that they were building up to something, but it really was just a series of relatively meaningless events that led pretty much nowhere. Oz was good at what it did, but it wasn't pretending to be, like, some intricately-woven tapestry.

Eric, you're very welcome.

one aspect of 'quality' is the extent to which the narrative 'strives for something', yes

Oz ws done as a world, just bcz it was played for laughs or didn't go anywhere doesn't make it any less valid.

And its not as if The Wire was building to something so incredibly profound, there ws no incredible reveal as it ends at the beginning (and the last season fell apart so getting there was hard enough, hardly indicative of an 'intricately-woven tapestry'). Don't get caught up in destinations..

I think you guys think I'm hatin' on Oz, but I'm not.

I don't think you are -- what you are saying is that at least 3 items in this poll are better. That's fine, I don't care, but I am struggling at the reasoning being applied.

At the end of the day, it's largely about subjective judgment based on a number of criteria that are probably discrepant with the criteria being used by someone else who is also judging subjectively. I think people get wound up about stuff like this when they start taking it at all seriously or thinking that it actually means anything (which I have to refrain from myself, given that I could easily get wound up about The Vulture eliminating Six Feet Under in the first round by matching it against The Sopranos...I mean, A-DOY, I WONDER WHICH ONE YOU WANTED TO WIN, THE VULTURE).

Yeah, its all subjective, why bother :-)

Not wound up, haven't even read the article and not going to either.

i.e. if there's anything up to The Singing Detective, The Prisoner or the Rockford Files, LMK

Singing Detective was crucial viewing in my family's house growing up. amazing show, needs more love

I have figured out I really only like comedies when they're full of horrible people

http://epguides.com/GoldenGirls/cast.jpg

http://25.media.tumblr.com/582f8cf858f875be32960db690ca119e/tumblr_mpzy7xQEhK1rn1jnoo1_400.jpg

http://www.patspapers.com/images/uploads/gumby_flickr.jpg

http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2012/12/04/119651577_wide-a14a2e7454bbeb28c06f579a58899ea934273cc6-s6-c30.jpg

http://epguides.com/GoldenGirls/cast.jpg.

the idea that the 5 best television shows are all dramas from the last decade or so is ridiculous.

Not to say it's necessarily true, but the argument holds some water. The medium has changed a lot in the last decade or so and it's still evolving.

*PICTURE OF ILXOR.COM*

what are the 4 best ilxor.com dramas of the last 25 years?

- threads with Geir
- threads with ethan
- threads with Mordy
- threads about an "ism"

instoppable sex machine

I'll confess that as a UK resident, it feels like ever since The Sopranos was imported, I've been opening newspapers and conversations and being hit WHOOSH by a mighty wind of people talking with high speed and volume about good tv that you've got to watch.

Now I think I do believe that something called a good television program exists. I think Dennis Potter had the intention of making them and so did a bunch of people in the BBC/pre-Murdoch era. I think British television post-Murdoch Shift cared a lot less about making them and in fact probably didnt have much in mind apart from making something that sold a lot and assumed you got sales via lowest common denominator.

As far as I know there never really was a Reithian idealism in American television and you know if American ppl felt like there wasn't any good TV and then some came along and they wanted to celebrate that, well, fair enough, and in as much as the good tv you've got to watch rhetoric comes from that, fair enough.

But I also think that talk is a blatant marketing gimmick at the same time, used to get people to subscribe to the services offered by a company called Home Box Office and also get them watching TV generally, and it kind of pisses me off watching ppl who generally can see through this kind of thing getting dragged along with it.

I don't five a flying fuck about this 'good tv'. The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad are three exciting, enjoyable and particularly well done crime thrillers (a grand tragic one, a brutal realism one and a crazy fucked up one) that I really like, on their own merits.

Mad Men, on the other hand, is so blatantly trying to work on you by pressing the 'good tv' button installed in your head by the Sops and the Wire. The plot is not interesting, the period references are stupid and clumsy, its designed with the aim of getting people to talk about this new Good TV Show. It isn't actually a very good period drama at all.

Seeing those four titles in a box at top of this thread is really depressing because it suggests that our general what a good television show might be is now circumscribed by this 'good tv' concept that blew up in the wake of the sopranos

Morbs otm about The Prisoner tho

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/10/simpsonized-characters/?cid=co13400554

The Prisoner is cool but a bit of a trifle? MacG is great, of course, and Portmeirion is fun to look at.

If you like people saying random numbers to you for a half hour I recommend bingo.

whatever the prisoner is, "trifle" is... not the right word

ok, if we're eliminating "trifles," I'm proud to announce that the greatest TV show of all time is

Fawlty Towers

that's probably about right