The New York Times has been generating quality engagement bait in recent years by using its prestige and reach to get industry insiders to vote on the top 100 movies, books, and, now, TV shows to premiere in the 21st Century (which the NYT defines, not unreasonably, as beginning in 2000 rather than in the pedantic 2001).
There’s something to be said both for surveys of critics and for surveys of the public. But getting over 500 TV professionals to vote on the best 100 is impressive.
Something to keep in mind is that the TV show with obviously the most influence on this century’s television, The Sopranos, debuted on January 10, 1999.
So it was not eligible. Judging by how the voting turned out, as you’ll see below the paywall, especially the top 3, if the time period began in 1999 rather than in 2000, The Sopranos likely would have been #1.
Here’s #100 through #51:
One obvious issue that was apparently left up to each voter to decide for himself was something that baseball statistics analysts have been debating at least since the beginning of the Hall of Fame in the 1930s: how do you balance off peak performance vs. endurance? For example, who was a better pitcher: Sandy Koufax, who won 78 games in his three best seasons, or Tommy John, who won 288 games in all 26 seasons? (Currently, Koufax is in the Hall of Fame, but the late John is not.)
Similarly, #81 is The Queen’s Gambit, the what-if-Bobby-Fischer-were-a-girl chess miniseries, which ran for a total of seven episodes in 2020. (And below the paywall are a couple of top 50 dramatic series with a total of 9 episodes between them.)
In contrast, #78 is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, now in its 21st year. It has run about 180 episodes.
One top 50 sitcom has run for 250 episodes. A contest show in the top 50 has chalked up well over 700 episodes by now.
They should probably have different categories for their professional TV-makers to vote upon. On the other hand, it’s worth seeing which genres the insiders respect most.
One thing to keep in mind is that people really like TV. For example, compare 1 to 10 ratings on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) of films vs. episodes of TV shows.
For example, IMDB users (who tend to be fanatical film fans among the public, along with some industry insiders) rated Lawrence of Arabia 8.3, #102 all-time for movies.
On the other hands, dozens of individual episodes of Larry David’s retirement project, Curb Your Enthusiasm, are rated better than Lawrence of Arabia, with 14 episodes rated 9.0 or higher. IMDB rates the best ever episode of Curb at 9.3, better than than The Godfather at 9.2:
Actually, Curb fans may have a point. “Palestinian Chicken” is really funny.
And now for the top 50 TV shows:
Paywall here.
