Monday, March 23, 2009

Best In Show (TV Edition)

It's weird to talk about "the best show on TV" now that The Sopranos and The Wire are off the air, and the end of Battlestar Galactica brings that particular third-way contrarian option to a close.

There's the old Yeats joke; when Swinburne died, WBY said, "Now I'm king of the cats" -- and he was (probably) for the next thirty years. It's strange now that the new king of cats might actually be on broadcast TV rather than cable -- but Mad Men aside, that's where we seem to be -- and there are a LOT of genuinely ambitious network shows out there.

Rex makes the case for Dollhouse, which has indeed picked up. If you were (figuratively) buying stock in a show, it'd be a hot bet. But I'm going to stick with Lost in the drama category (no one does it like you), 30 Rock for character-based comedy (Liz Lemon is our decade's female answer to Homer Simpson), and The Daily Show/The Colbert Report hour for sheer cultural relevance -- simply put, nothing else is essential.

Sorry if those answers seem boring, but that's just how it is sometimes.

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