Well the day to give thanks is upon us, so better time to heap praises on our favorite shows. My good friend and partner in crime Mark Estes has given thanks to his TV cornerstone here, and I suspect a few other TVOvermind-ites may be chiming in soon enough; while we're waiting for them, here is my list shows that have kept me glued to the tube over the years:
The Twilight Zone
The Zone is the height of imagination for me. I can't watch an episode without being inspired.
Six Million Dollar Man
It's funny how children can often see hidden mythos in things. Its like they connect with processes the writers themselves have no idea are at work. Six Million Dollar Man is, of course, about a guy with robotic limbs, but to a young boy in the seventies it was every bit an allegory on restraining the surly nature of manhood.
The Prisoner
As a youth I walked away from the experience of The Prisoner with no idea what i'd just seen. As an adult I find myself revisiting the existential poetry of The Prisoner over and over, marveling at how well Patrick McGoohan and his partners in crime balanced entertainment with art.
Dallas
One of the best serials known to man. There is a reason why "Who Shot J.R." is called upon as the counterbalance to any thrilling TV moment that finds itself on the scale of historic TV moments. Dallas had that perfect balance of story, cast, and location.
Tales From the Crypt
HBO gambled on the grotesque and for many seasons some of the biggest names in Hollywood contributed some of the best Horror to ever grace any screen. It's a true shame that there isn't a similar sandbox for the greats of this generation to play in, for any genre.
Twin Peaks
I'm a huge David Lynch fan to begin with, and like most Lynch fans I snorted a bit when he decided to do TV - confident that nobody in the mainstream was going to get it. I got my head turned around when it debuted big, but got to retain a bit of my art house haughtiness when the audience started to grind away under Twin Peak's surreal millstone of a narrative.
LOST
LOST came to me at a time when I had abandoned prime-time television all together, trading art house snobbery for cable. Like Twilight Zone, LOST appears a savagely original and new offering but really just distills everything great from the last few decades of story telling borrowing from the ever popular castaway story, the bizarre and 'unexpected' narratives of Twilight Zone, Prisoner, and their ilk, with the mythology driven swashbuckling of Star Wars, and the cyber-cultural infusement of eastern mysticism made popular by The Matrix. You really can't summarize a set list of 'influences' for LOST, and it is its own story in its most notable aspects, but LOST was for certain one of those rare inventions that was culled from the various myths bouncing around in the contemporary zeitgeist.
