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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
The Twilight Zone
Many TV writers spend their careers trying to get critics to take them seriously; Rod Serling's genius was to create a serious show and convince people that it was frivolous. The Twilight Zone's anthology episodes were mini masterworks of pulp storytelling, but they were also comments on conformity, McCarthyism and the threat of nuclear war, among other (often unnoticed) subjects. Yet in a famous 1959 interview, Mike Wallace asked Serling why, with the show, he had given up writing anything "important." The Twilight Zone wasn't self-important, though, nor was it an editorialmany of the episodes were about more philosophical conflicts, or just old-fashioned sci-fi mind-blowers. But Serling taught TV writers a lesson that's lived on today in shows like Battlestar Galactica: if you've got a point to make, sometimes it's better to let the monsters and robots do the talking.
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