Variety names “I Love Lucy” as the greatest television show of all time!

A surprisingly good list.

That's not a bad top ten.

(I'd replace Sex and the City with All in the Family.)

No Golden Girls?

Okay. I read the entire list. It actually is a pretty good. Succession is WAY to high is the one glaring misstep.

(R3, GG is in the top 20. Fear not.)

R3 it’s in the Top 20. I only posted the Top 10. You can see the full list in the article

God, how is it possible that I fucked up a post that small, that bad??

Oh, dear times ten.

Help me out here if you have seen the entire list. I tried but my iPad did not go along although I saw most..

Justified

Little Drummer Girl

The Night Manager

Please tell me they made the list.

My issue with a list like this is do they consider a TV series' entire run, or only its best years? As we know there were really great shows that simply ran too long and stopped being great. Examples would be Friends, Seinfeld, Two and a Half Men, etc.

Pretty sure all of those are on the list r8

Mad Men #2?!

Sex and the City is ridiculous.

Excellent list.

Interesting that there's no Norman Lear productions in the top ten.

I’m surprised Frasier didn’t make the cut.

It’s a great list but I would switch some out. The Wonder Years should be much higher than 72.

Mad Men was an overrated bore.

R9 thanks

Two and a Half Men is one of the worst sitcoms ever. Glad it wasn’t on the list. Glad that shit Big Bang Theory wasn’t on it either.

The greatest television show of all time:

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

[quote] Mad Men was an overrated bore.

No it wasn't R16. You're just mad because your favorite, "Murder, She Wrote", wasn't on the list - and would not even have made the Top 1,000 shows of all time.

Deadwood at 74? Nope. Try again, list.

Roots should be higher on the list. Certainly higher than SATC.

Mad Men is my favorite drama series ever. I owned all the DVDs and bought a full series box set when it came out. I donated them all when I moved into a smaller apartment and now have them all digitally

R22 Roots was watched by over 70 million people when it aired. It was groundbreaking and a sensation. You don’t need to be black to have felt it was good. Millions of non black people watched it. Stop bringing race up

My Top 10:

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Designing Women

Will & Grace

Cheers

The Powers That Be

Veronica's Closet

Filthy Rich

Dynasty

The Dick Van Dyke Show

Leave It To Beaver

[quote]Mad Men was an overrated bore.

It bears repeating: Mad Men was an overrated bore.

R25. With an honorable mention going to the 1990's 'High Society' with Jean Smart and Mary McConnell.

Nah Mad Men was great. I would put Sopranos above it though.

Decent list, but I think I would have snuck in Reservation Dogs. I really liked it.

WOW and I must be the only gay who is not a fan of I Love Lucy. What about All in the Family?

Surprised by most especially, SIS, TW and R.

R30 huh???

I don't get Mad Men, tried watching it, got through 2 episodes, boring. Maybe for breeders it's titillating.

SNL is 15?

If the Simpsons had ended after 8 seasons it would indisputably be hailed for decades as the greatest show of all time.

What season on they on right now, 37?

You can tell R25 is a big old queen just from that list.

Sex and the City is ranked too high.

R36. Excuse me!!

The only one on this list I haven't seen is The Wire since I purposely avoid watching cop propaganda. Maybe I'll make an exception for this one.

No Homicide Life on the Street or Oz?

Neither were EVER considered the greatest shows r40

They are by me r41! amongst the greatest anyway.

Fucking Grey's Anatomy has no business being on a list like that. Shonda Rhimes is an overrated hack.

What about Glee?

None of those shows are better than the wire

R39

The Wire deserves its spot. But if you think the Wire is cop propaganda I assume you have never once read a review of the wire.

It may be the most important series ever done in terms of what it showed and how it informed and moved people.

On Sunday nights around 9-10 pm they claimed violent crime in Baltimore dropped. The drug gangs the police the courts Barrack Obama everyone was home watching HBO and the Wire...

Game of Thrones is missing from the top ten, I'm surprised.

It doesn’t belong on the Top 10!

I agree it's a good list but I'd also nix "SATC" for "AITF" and I'd also replace "Breaking Bad" with "Twin Peaks." The former was just a really well-done serial drama of which there are several others on the list. "TP" remains massively influential and is about the only time a truly avant-garde sensibility ever infiltrated network television.

It's a mediocre list. Choices are generally safe and predictable. Girls does not belong on a Top 100 of anything positive. List is lacking American Crime, Antiques Roadshow, Frasier, What's My Line?, among others.

Mad Men is completely overrated and totally forgotten. Unlike the Sopranos, nobody is talking about Mad Men in 2023.

R51 nope.

The list needs more Lee Pace.. Halt And Catch Fire or Pushing Daisies should be on there.

Cheers at 11? Wtf. Cosby at #88? What kind of racist bs is this?

Cheers should be replaced by Frasier with its 2 gay leads.

Too focused on recent years.

Would have been a better list/discussion if it were best of the new century thus far.

I don’t agree as with any list but it is not bad. The list gets dicier to me as you move out of the Top 20. Iof course, I did not see some of the more premium cable shows so it is partially my ignorance. I don’t recall a single Western. I might have thought Bonanza in the top 10. MadTV was much better than In Living Color which didn’t last that long and was inconsistent.

Damn, Damn, DAMN!!!!

I wonder if Cosby and Roseanne got moved down the list because they are assholes. Where's The Crown?

Bonanza in top 100, not 10! Typo, it wasn’t tjat good.

In what world is The Crown one of the best shows? It’s barely watchable.

You would probably see Bonanza and other shows if the list was strictly scripted series. I was shocked to see they included all types of series, including miniseries and talk shows and reality tv and game shows.

Who was the cretin who put together this bullshit list?

St. Elsewhere, Columbo, Deadwood and The Bob Newhart Show don’t make the top 50?

And where the fuck are Barney Miller, Gunsmoke and the show with the greatest finale of all time, Newhart? And I don’t care what anyone thinks of Dan Levy, Schitts Creek deserved a spot.

WTF?!

The Leftovers at 46 and The Americans at 42 are too low, especially the latter! It's also missing Southland.

I’m [R62] coming back to agree with [R40], Homicide and Oz deserved spots.

Oh, please.

The only good tv shows are American tv shows!

I like Mad Men but the Sopranos, The Wire and even Oz are better than it

No Small Wonder?

Shocked that Petticoat Junction isn't mentioned.

I Love Lucy is at the top of my list too.

Daria should be number 2, instead of MM.

How in the world is Schitts Creek and Frasier not even on the list? Ridiculous.

No Fawlty Towers?! That needs to be ranked in the top ten.

Strangers with Candy should be in the top 20

Peep Show, The Thick of It, the original Office, and Alan Partridge are just a few of the really influential and great series left off the list.

Watched Mad Men once. It was like watching paint dry.

R64 because you are him. Lmao. Like come on already. Give it up!

R67 say, “to me”. That is your opinion.

R76 it’s a show for mature adults. Not for you.

R75 and none aired in the states.

Schitts Creek is TERRIBLE

I watched a few Peep Shows on Tubi and found it dated, but funny.

A few episodes of Peep Show. . .

No MODERN FAMILY?

Mary Tyler Moore should be at the top of the list.

Sex and the City should not even be on the list.

Downton Abbey!!

No Bewitched? Bastards!

Married with Children? Murder, She Wrote?

This list is a joke.

Why does it feel like a Millennial and Boomer threw this together? They knew that if they made some shit like Sex and the City #1, this thing would be mocked.

Where the fuck am I?!? This list is bullshit.

There have been a ridiculous amount of shows since the inception of television. They only gave 100 spots. Not every show can be listed. Get over it.

Any TV show in which "Six Feet Under" is not in the Top Three is dead to me.

Where is Homicide: Life on the Street, the best TV show of all time? Stupid list.

R78, most every post on DL is the poster’s opinion. That would add a lot of extra words if everyone had to qualify “to me”.

Who cares what they or most list makers say?

The criteria are incomplete and include fixed proportions for "diversity," "women's," "classy," "children's," and other representations; a few intentional misplacements to drive chatter; checking boxes for time period and genre.

(*)s.

Since they included soap operas (GH), they should also have listed the Douglas Marland years of As the World Turns, which ended shortly after his death in 1993.

R97 they didn’t break it down by eras of a show. Just a show overall. They included all tv programming, which surprised me. Usually these lists only have scripted dramas and comedies but this list has soaps, talk shows, reality tv (Survivor), game shows (Jeopardy), miniseries (Roots) etx.

No Gilligan's Island? Ginger's career is OVER!

Dynasty

Maude, Sanford & Son, Good Times, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Practice, The Fugitive, and The Rockford Files are missing from the list.

But Living Single and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air are on it? Home Improvement was better than those shows. And Scandal and The Good Place are two of the greatest TV shows of all time? You have to be kidding me.

Also, General Hospital was and is nowhere near the greatest Soap Opera.

Deadwood is the only Western.

No Dallas?

R101 IN YOUR OPINION. And no, Home Improvement wasn’t better than Fresh Prince or Living Single

R103 THAT'S YOUR OPINON (i can do capitalization too!) And they weren't.

R104 yes. They were better. Spoken like the lowlife racist you are. Probably never even watched those shows. Fresh Prince was a huge hit too.

Bewitched absolutely deserves to be on the list! The first two seasons in particular were really more in the vein of a grounded, suburban romantic comedy with veiled political commentary and outstanding performances from the entire cast. It was a slow, steady decline after that but imo there were glimmers of brilliance throughout.

Anyone who works a corporate office job should watch Mad Men, especially in any quote creative industry. It is a primer on basic human behavior in that environment. The fact that it also manages to be interesting enough to watch multiple times is amazing.

I agree that there are several omissions. One not mentioned yet is Northern Exposure. Way ahead of its time.

Roots was like a miniseries meets a very special episode. Shocking that it’s there. Same goes for SATC, a soap opera.

The responses are even more predictable than the list. Any list that assigns precise rankings is going to generate quibbles. For example, I think The X-Files deserves a higher rating than 38.

The real question is whether the shows that are ranked at all (out of thousands of TV shows in the last 70 years) were good. Of those I've seen I'd say yes. Of the shows on this list that I watched, I'd say they were all good. Stacking programs from so many different genres and eras against each other is fundamentally ridiculous, but in general the best shows made the list, and those near the top were all very good of their type.

Where's Mama's Family?

Law and Order ran for decades. Could it have been so bad as not to be in the top 100? I'll Fly Away was also a powerful show on PBS in the early 90s'.

Law & Order was boring

Without naming Buffy to this list, Variety has no credibility.

[quote]Law and Order ran for decades. Could it have been so bad as not to be in the top 100? I'll Fly Away was also a powerful show on PBS in the early 90s'.

Though I agree with you that I'll Fly Away was a great show—it's in my all-time top five—the original episodes ran for two years on NBC. PBS created a kind of "Where Are They Now?" episode, and ran all the NBC episodes before airing their episode. I could have watched it for another five years.

Not much I would disagree with except for the inclusion of "Friends" and placing Sex and the City so high on the list.

Not sure “Sex and the City” deserves its high placement.

And since I’m re-watching “Six Feet Under” on Netflix, and finding it just as good — or better — than I remember it being the first time around, it deserves to be higher than #55.

Family Guy

The Original Star Trek

Married with Children

Married with Children which Roseanne so horribly and blatantly ripped off

Variety is full of shit.

I’ve watched the entirety of MAD MEN at least 5 times. It is NOT boring.

Overall, it’s a good list, even if THE AMERICANS and TWIN PEAKS and VEEP should all be higher.

BETTER THINGS should have been there. A beautiful series.

All In The Family and Roseanne should be on the list. I know she destroyed her show, but seasons 2-5 were great, Archie Bunker was a character like no other before him, the gay episode with Phil Carey and Tony Geary was a first.

[quote]Married with Children which Roseanne so horribly and blatantly ripped off

Except I was able to believe in the Connors as a family unit. The Bundys never convinced me they were more than actors performing on a stage.

Not a bad list. But it has the usual problems with these types of things. Succession is way too high. Sex and the City doesn't belong in the top 50. Not putting the original Star Trek on the list is a mistake. Frasier belongs on the list.

This list is homophobic by not including AbFab or Strangers With Candy. Also, no Monty Python?

If they had included British TV shows, 50% of the list would have been British.

I think Monty Python would be sufficient

R126 do you think Mrs. Brown's Boys is funny?

R122, they [italic]are[/italic] on the list. They just aren't in the top ten.

Before people complain about this or that show being overlooked, they should check OP's link. Maybe your favorite show is #11.

My Mother, the Car, Manimal, and OK Crackerby are missing from the list. Invalid!

Mission: Impossible was great its entire run. Carol Burnett had a great long run. Bewitched, Homeland, Dallas would be on my list. I agree MadMen is worthy.

Hey r131, please see r129.

R 114, Buffy IS on the list

R114, Buffy IS on the list.

Glad to read that NOBODY disputes LUCY as Number One!

Brideshead Revisited is the number one television show of all time.

If you’re into jaded droll wealth worship

OZ.

The Lucy Show (with Vivian Vance and Gale Gordon)

High Society

The Powers That Be

The Honeymooners should definitely be in the top ten.

R136. I believe the list is of American (or joint US-UK) productions only. Otherwise, I, Claudius would the number one show of all time, and (as someone said upthread) half the shows on the list would be British.

... oh, and all the elderlesbians would vote for Prisoner: Cell Block H.

Lots of good ones here - Friday night lights, the comeback, twin peaks… No Oz, melrose place or Beverly hills 90210 (huge cultural landmarks), Desperate Housewives, Felicity…

Power Rangers made the list, right?

I've seen worse lists (Rolling Stone). Roots is fantastic and was a cultural phenomenon but it being included as a show is annoying. The write-ups on each show were great, except how they mentioned Columbo's "ever-present cigarette" or whatever they said. He always had a cigar. They let Cosby have it. Ouch.

I bet those cunts Keshia Knight Pulliam and Phylicia Rashad were upset about The Cosby Show not being on the list.

The Cosby Show is number 90 on the list.