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

American Idol

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Let's be clear: this is not the All-Time 100 Best Music list—any crimes against your ears and radio this show has committed are beyond my responsibility. But as a TV show, for all its cheese, filler and loopiness, Idol has done something rather amazing: it's taken musical performance and criticism and turned it into a sporting event second only to the Super Bowl. Ed Sullivan was about taste handed down to America (and if you're gonna give Ed credit for the Beatles, you've gotta remember Topo Gigio too). Idol is about America's taste percolating up. The fact that that taste, in a given year, is reliably pretty lousy is beside the point; turning aesthetic debate—Why Is This Thing Better Than That Thing—into America's single remaining mass weekly entertainment is good in itself. Now if someone could just figure out how to do that for politics.