Entertainment Weekly has just posted its list of top ten best current dramas and five best current comedies. Apparently this list is also in the print edition, although I'm not sure whether it's in the issue on newsstands right now or if it's upcoming, or if it's actually from an issue that everyone's already read and discussed and I should be embarrassed that I'm just noticing it now. Whatever. Anyway, the comedy list looks fine -- it's weird they left off My Name Is Earl and The Daily Show, but the five they pick (Scrubs, The Office, South Park, The Simpsons, The Colbert Report) are solid. The dramas, though, they've got all wrong. Here they are, in reverse order, with my comments:
10. The Shield. Haven't watched, am sure it is good. For some reason EW is very specific: they're not talking about the current season, but last season, which is apparently airing now on Spike. When I first noticed this distinction, I suspected that they were going to use the same loophole to somehow include their weird Friends obsession in this list, like season 5 is airing on WGN right now or something. Oh, Friends is a comedy, I guess, so maybe "The One Where Phoebe Says Something Wacky" was only good for #6.
9. Veronica Mars. Why so low?
8. The entire Law & Order franchise. No comment.
7. Gilmore Girls. OK. I agree -- belongs on the list. BUT. This season has seen a huge -- huge -- drop-off in writing quality. It's a real problem when the entire season's A-plot -- the gradual devolution of Luke and Lorelai's relationship -- doesn't work. Luke is being written as a priggish moron; the long-lost daughter twist is preposterous. It looks like Amy Sherman-Palladino is writing fewer episodes this season, which does not bode well.
6. Everwood. Agreed. The entry has a weird, family values vibe to it that makes me go back and re-read the Gilmore Girls entry and . . . ditto. Remember when EW was kind of irreverent?
5. Lost. I guess. Still not convinced that there's anything there -- do the writers know what's going on on the island? Have they really got all the plot threads in hand?
4. Battlestar Galactica. Fourth? Fourth? This seems like a slap in the face, really. Either leave the show off the list -- because it's cable, it's Sci-Fi, it's vaguely Canadian -- or rate it a lot higher, something like 50 slots above . . .
3. CSI. Oh, crap. Are they serious? Worse, there's this bit of pandering: "More proof that the mass audience is smarter than some think."
2. The Sopranos. This is another one, like Battlestar Galactica, that you have to either leave off entirely or rank first. I'm not watching anymore, I've heard it's good, and assumedly Gillian Flynn and co. have advance screeners, so they really can judge at least the first half or so of the current season. BUT. I'm not convinced. Every season since the first one (which was really, really perfect) has been progressively worse than the one that preceded it. The last two were pretty boring, with occasionally some pretty smart stuff, but balanced by tooth-achingly self-indulgent episodes. And the stunt-casting -- almost NBC-level in its shamelessness.
1. 24. The Hell?
I would have probably put Veronica Mars in all ten of the top slots. I gave up on Lost after the first few episodes, when the structure of pre-crash flashbacks paralleling this week's crisis started to get annoying. (Do they still use that structure? It was so boring!)
Posted by: Charlie Anders | March 31, 2006 at 06:25 PM