-
ADD TIME NEWS
- MOBILE APPS
- NEWSLETTERS
The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME
"First, I apologize. I know I left some of your favorite shows off this list. How do I know that? Because I left some of my favorite shows off this list. The happy and unfortunate fact is that there are far more than 100 great shows, and more created every year. Lists are incredibly important: they are how we define what matters to us, what we want entertainment and art to do, what we expect of our culture."
TIME TV critic James Poniewozik
An American Family
Before reality TV involved writers, immunity challenges and Paris Hilton, there was the Loud family. A public-television crew spent hundreds of hours in 1971 with a "typical" California family that proved to be anything but. Midway through the twelve-hour cinema-verite series, paterfamilias and executive Bill Loud and wife Pat decided to split up. Their son Lance was casually introduced into the gay social scene of Greenwich Village, in what would remain one of the most matter-of-fact treatments of a homosexual TV "character" for decades. The series raised what seem likein the Big Brother and MySpace eraquaint questions about how videotaping reality alters reality itself. But ethically justifiable or not, it remains one of the greatest documents of American life, American media and the steadily vanishing distinctions between the two.
View the full list for "The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME"Special Features:
Most Popular »
- Are the Bible's Stories True? Archaeology's Evidence
- Another Snowstorm: What Happened to Global Warming?
- Who Were the First Americans?
- Spain's Troubled Economy: Why Europe Is Worried
- Counterterrorism: The Debate Moves Right
- Asian Carp in the Great Lakes? This Means War!
- In Tokyo, Embattled Toyota Chief Faces a Nation
- Toyota's Safety Problems: A Checkered History
- What Is Robert Gates Really Fighting For?
- Are the Bible's Stories True? Archaeology's Evidence
- Spain's Troubled Economy: Why Europe Is Worried
- Another Snowstorm: What Happened to Global Warming?
- Who Were the First Americans?
- What Is Robert Gates Really Fighting For?
- How to Build Your Own Bedbug Detector
- Toyota's Safety Problems: A Checkered History
- How German Homeschoolers Won Asylum in the U.S.
- EMI's Downfall: Will the Hits Keep Coming?
- In Marriage, Worse First Can Mean Better Later

















RSS