BCB Top 100 TV Shows - And the winner is...

[toomanyhatz]

Also completely forgot about Black Adder. Haven't watched it in years, but I remember thinking it was funny.

[Quaco]

I think older comedies only date well if they're at least fairly fast-paced.* Bilko is maybe the best example of this. The Young Ones definitely rattles along breathlessly.

Conversely, I don't really like dramas that are too fast-paced. In general, I am drawn to series that are like plays, where people are moving about in spaces, letting the script do a lot of the work and leaving silence for us to think and discover along with the characters. The best episodes of Star Trek are like this ("The Corbomite Maneuver", "Court Martial"). The antithesis of this would be CSI, which is like smoking crack.

[copehead]

Fair enough, I get a bit lightheaded contemplating anything below York.

I thought you were from Brighton?

I was hounded from Brighton due to my homophobia

Like deebank

[toomanyhatz]

Shows I might have voted for had I thought about it:

I Love Lucy
The Old Grey Whistle Test
The Blue Planet
Cosmos
The Rockford Files
Top of the Pops
Dr. Who
The Avengers
The Latry Sanders Show
The Muppet Show
Police Squad
Black Adder

Shows I guess I have to watch now:

The Thick of It
Breaking Bad
The Wire

[toomanyhatz]

1) It's still better than most shows, particularly of its type
2) I get laughs - at least a few - every episode.
3) The list of shows at a high level for 9 years is incredibly small.

[Quaco]

Shows I guess I have to watch now:

The Thick of It
Breaking Bad
The Wire

Why torture yourself?

[Darkness_Fish]

I'm sure there's a large element of nostalgia with The Young Ones vote..and that's fine; best not to rewatch it though because they'll realise it's not actually that funny.

It's very funny.

What pleased me when I watched it again recently is how much is going on. It's not just dickhead students shouting at each other - there's a fair portion of (good) surrealism, there are the animation cutaways, Alexei Sayle's visits, the musical interludes. I'd forgotten about a lot of that and I think it stands up pretty well. Maybe it's gone through 'dated' and out the other side.

The fact that it's placed higher than The Sopranos is wrong whichever way you look at it. But I'm glad to see it there.

I have rewatched a fair bit of The Young Ones, and I don't think I found it massively funny. However, it still stands alone in how chaotic/shambolic everything was, the fact that it wasn't polished, that bits of it were rubbish, bits of it were quite funny, bits of it were just nonsense that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. I like that. When you see how over-written American comedies are, and how completely safely boring most British comedies are, it deserves a vote just for being a loosely drawn together shambolic thing. Which helped redefine TV expectations for a bit.

I almost voted for The Sopranos, too, it was the last major series I watched, but also a kind of cut-off for that kind of thing. I was sick of it by halfway through season 2.

[clive gash]

The Simpsons has well over 100 wonderful episodes. Slim fucking pickings eh?

[clive gash]

I suppose it’s a little like your head Kal.

All we see now is a follicle-free expanse of scrotum coloured flesh, but surely it’s better to remember the time, pre-chromedome, when hair held sway?

[Quaco]

I have rewatched a fair bit of The Young Ones, and I don't think I found it massively funny. However, it still stands alone in how chaotic/shambolic everything was, the fact that it wasn't polished, that bits of it were rubbish, bits of it were quite funny, bits of it were just nonsense that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. I like that. When you see how over-written American comedies are, and how completely safely boring most British comedies are, it deserves a vote just for being a loosely drawn together shambolic thing. Which helped redefine TV expectations for a bit.

Seeing it from different angles also makes it better. I enjoyed this, where they go through the script a bit, a lot:

[toomanyhatz]

Again: Beatles vs. Frog Chorus. Not that I think it's ever descended that far, but even if it did - he was still in the Beatles.

[Quaco]

It should also be noted that the Frog Chorus isn't the worst thing McCartney has done!

[martha]

My prediction is Simpsons, Fawlty Towers, Father Ted, Monty Python and the IT Crowd.

[Dayodead]

My prediction is Simpsons, Fawlty Towers, Father Ted, Monty Python and the IT Crowd.

The IT Crowd was #63...so, just a tad off...

[Neige]

My prediction is Simpsons, Fawlty Towers, Father Ted, Monty Python and the IT Crowd.

The IT Crowd was #63...so, just a tad off...

The 5th is Twin Peaks.

As for their actual positions, I think that anything is possible. I'd place a smallish bet on Python being first.

[martha]

My prediction is Simpsons, Fawlty Towers, Father Ted, Monty Python and the IT Crowd.

The IT Crowd was #63...so, just a tad off...

WTF!! LOL. That's so weird. I didnt write "the IT Crowd." in there at all! I said "my prediction is Simpsons, Fawlty Towers, Father Ted, Monty Python and... "

I left it at four. I had no guess for the final title. That's so weird.

[martha]

Phew! Lol. I was freaking out for a second. I thought I was going crazy or that someone had edited my post or hacked my account.

I'm moving and packing house at the moment and my computer is packed so I was using my "smart" phone to connect to BCB tonight.

Earlier I was texting and talking to the spouse about DVDs and had sent him a list of the contents of a box so he could add it to our spreadsheet, but before I sent it I realized that I couldn't get the lid to close flat on it so I went in and pulled out a DVD and packed it into another box to make it work. It was the IT Crowd. I then copied and cut out the words "the IT Crowd." from the list.

Then later when I posted here my phone Auto corrected "Monty Python and..." to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so I highlighted the holy Grail and entered a period to replace it... But instead of overwriting it with a period I must have pasted in "the IT Crowd." from my clipboard instead.

Whew. For a minute there I was in a panic thinking I'd been hacked or I was losing my marbles.

[never/ever]

Rambling rose, indeed!

[Goat Boy]

1) It's still better than most shows, particularly of its type
2) I get laughs - at least a few - every episode.
3) The list of shows at a high level for 9 years is incredibly small.

1. I'm not comparing it to shows of its type. I don't really like most of the imitators.
2. I watched a couple of episodes from series 13 the other day. Not one laugh. Not one. Can you imagine that happening in series 6, for example?
3. 9 years is generous. I'd actually say series 3 to 7 were the classics.

I would say season 2 to 9 is the golden age. Season 9 is where the decline begins perhaps (hello Mike Scully) but there's still enough great episodes (Joy of Sect is a personal fave) to include it in the shows Golden Age I think.

That stretch is genius though. I still watch old episodes and laugh out loud despite having seen them so many times. They still glitter and that's rare with comedy you know?

I would like somebody to put together a greatest hits of the post Golden Age years. My general impression is that from around season 10 onwards things went awry but I've seen newer episodes over the years that I felt were very good. Not as great as the shows peak years perhaps but still worthy.

[naughty boy]

I just watched an X Files pisstake (season 9?) and laughed my little socks off the whole way through.