On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 3:22 AM, JW <[email protected]> wrote: > > ...they're telling me > > that we're in a new golden age of television with all of these wonderful > > scripted drama series. Is it that some people can't believe it because > > most of those shows are on premium channels? > > Maybe those people feel that you can dig for the good stuff (which has > probably always been true), but if you just turn a TV on and start > looking, you'll go through a lot of dreadful programming before you > get to something worthwhile. In a (presumably never-existing) Golden > Age, most everything would be good.
The Golden Age of Television (Drama) was pretty much the first decade of the 21st century (more precisely,1999 to 2010) though this does require accepting cable shows. The Most Golden Year of TV Drama was 2005. Obviously it is not really possible to make these assertions quite as baldly as I have. I was in one of these debates with some friends the other day (the best year to watch TV dramas in), and decided to try to find some "objective" data to inform the argument. I decided to use the WGA 101 Best Written Shows (http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=4925). There is lots of room to quibble with that list, but quality writing seems like a pretty good definition of a golden TV drama, and the WGA list is arguably as credible as any other single list. I identified the 25 top dramas from this list (see below), and then noted the years each show was on in first run. I then summed how many top 25 dramas were on in each year (from 1959 to 2013, the years covered by the list), and ranked each year from the most such shows to the least. This is done by calendar year, so a show that ended its run in the spring of 2003 and a show that started in the fall of 2003 would both be counted for 2003, even though they would not have been on in the same television season. Also, of course, some years are credited with having a top 25 drama even though that show's best years may have been much earlier.[Caveat: I tried to double check for the shows during the top years, but I am not 100% confident in my beginning and ending years for all of these shows]. Five years had 8 top 25 shows, two had 9 and one had 10. The top three years: 1. 2005: Sopranos, The Wire, West Wing, Six Feet Under, Lost, ER, Deadwood, NYPD Blue, Battlestar Galactica, L&O 2. 2002: Above, except - X-Files & Buffy, but no Lost, Deadwood or BG 3. 2004: 2005, but no BG My confidence in this system is increased by the fact that my strong subjective sense of the worst decade for TV Drama (the 1970s) was confirmed. From 1970 to 1980 (inclusive) there was not a single year with even one top 25 drama; each year in the 1960s had only 1 (Twilight Zone and then Star Trek). The first year to have 3 top 25 dramas was 1987; the first to have more than 3 was 1993 with 4. You could argue that the era of golden drama on television begins in 1993 (when one could have watched original seasons of X-files, ER, NYPD Blue, Law & Order and HLOTS (all broadcast of course). Note that in Golden 2005, half of the 10 nuggets were on broadcast, half on cable. Of course, in 5 years some shows that are on in 2013 may be seen as worthy of the Best 25. *25 Best Written Dramas (first number is drama rank, second number is overall rank, including comedies):* 1 1 "The Sopranos" 2 3 "The Twilight Zone" 3 7 "Mad Men" 4 9 "The Wire" 5 10 The West Wing" 6 13 "Breaking Bad" 7 15 "Hill Street Blues" 8 18 "Six Feet Under" 9 22 "Friday Night Lights" 10 26 "The X-Files" 11 27 "Lost" 12 28 "ER" 13 32 "Deadwood" 14 33 "Star Trek" 15 35 "Twin Peaks" 16 36 "NYPD Blue" 17 38 "Battlestar Galactica" 18 40 "Game of Thrones" 19 43 "Downton Abbey" 20 44 "Law & Order" 21 45 "Thirtysomething" 22 46 "St. Elsewhere" 23 47 "Homicide: Life on the Street" 24 48 "Homeland" 25 49 "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
