Listful again (The Best Single Seasons of TV from 1993 to 2006)
Rather than judge any show against each other for a time being, lets take some of the best and simply place the season runs against t’others. Drama and Comedy are included. There are no restrictions for entries, but I am going to limit them somewhat. By the way, if Miniseries were included, Band of Brothers would have taken this one in a walk.
That’s a whole post, but really, it’s the best thing anyone has done since Catcher in the Rye. I truly believe that.
I’ll leave my usual babbling to the later parts, but on to it:
8. Simpsons Season 5. After Deep Space Homer it peters out a bit, but before that, there isn’t an episode that isn’t legendary, with Cape Feare, Homer’s Barbershop quartet, and Rosebud being not the standouts, but the rule of how good this run was.
7: Newsradio. Season Three.
From the episode Complaint box:
[Reading cards from the complaint box]
Dave: "You suck." "You suck." "Howard Stern rules." "If you can read this you are a dork." "Coupon for one free kiss from Joe if you are a girl." "We need more complaint cards." "Coupon for one free kiss from Joe if you are a guy."
Joe: Hey.
Dave: [pulling out a fortune cookie slip] "You will go on a journey, happy long time." "Matthew is a moron." "No I'm not." "Yes you are." "No I'm not infinity." "Yes you are infinity plus one." And this one, "I have doobie in my funk," which I assume is some sort of reference to the Parliament Funkadelic song, "Chocolate City." Uh, "You got peanut butter in my chocolate. You got chocolate in my peanut butter. Together they taste like crap." "Matthew has been staring at me all day... and I like it." I don't think I get this one, it says, "I try to be good hard-worker-man, but refrigemater so messy, so so messy."
Lisa: I think that one's probably from Milos, the janitor.
Dave: Oh. Refrigem... oh, then that one's legitimate.
[Continues reading the complaint cards]
Dave: Uh, "Who's the black private dick who's the sex machine with all the chicks."
Bill, Beth, Lisa, Matthew, Joe: SHAFT.
Bill: I thought we'd all enjoy that.
Dave: [reading one last card] And, "Help, I'm being held prisoner in a complaint box," which is actually kinda funny.
Let’s get it out of the way. Newsradio was the best sitcom of the 90’s. Even better than Seinfeld. Why. Because it works as a whole and it’s jokes come from plot and not from catchphrases. I clearly love Seinfeld, and there on the list, but as a whole, Newsradio was a better show. Any one of the seasons could be on here, but they are all a mash because the creators were never truly given a full season without notes from execs. Phil Hartman was never better (even in the Simpsons) and the whole cast was able to gel like few comedy shows ever have.
Season three doesn’t have all of the great episodes, and maybe some of the others could substitute here, but with Newsradio, it doesn’t matter. It just fit perfectly.
One last quote:
Bill (Phil Hartman): Pay attention to the headlines: Corporate America has caught on to what biker gangs and fraternities have known for years; Hazing Works.
As much as I love it, Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report is just channeling Hartman.
6. South Park: Season 8. The best full collection of one what can be the best show on TV some months. I say months because the runs are only 8 weekly episodes at a time and the flow of a following a season never gets as involved as network TV. The two worst of the season, Up the Down Steriod and Douche and Turd (about Steroids/special Olympics and the 2004 election, respectively) are still good episodes, but still seem a bit forced in trying to meet a point. Instead, just revel in episodes like “You got Fucked in the Ass” which takes the plot of “You Got Served” to a level of idiocy it deserves, “The Passion of the Jew” which truly nails Mel Gibson as nothing more than an evangelical sadist, the best X-mas show in the series run; “Woodland Critter Christmas,” and maybe the best episode in the series run, “Goobacks.” Aside from the episodes themselves, the show took another step forward in realizing what it could do in it’s satire with an episode like “Good Times With Weapons” which featured an anime segment progressed solely from the imagination of the kids.
5. Seinfeld: Season 4.
Seasons 3 and 5 could also be up here, but the overall coherence of this season puts it as my favorite. It has three of the top five episodes, (1, 4, and 5)
1. The Bubble Boy: George driving like a madman gets them lost from the caravan only to find himself playing trivial pursuit with a bubble boy. Kramer burns down Susan’s fathers’ house, subsequently revealing his father had a gay affair with writer John Cheever.
Genuinely mean spirited are the characters and the plot, which mocks small towns, the sickly, and homesteads. Maybe George’s finest episode, he brags and lies about his land-speed records, he is completely self absorbed (asking Susan for change while her fathers house burns) and relishing beating the bubble boy on technicality –moops not moors—and refusing to be proven wrong.
2. The Boyfriend – the lone hour long masterwork of the series. Between Keith Hernandez serving as a discourse for male friendships past 25, the JFK loogie incident with Kramer and Newman, it’s an hour long of everything that made the show so unique.
3. The little kicks. Elaine dances (horribly). George plays the bad boy. Jerry is a bootlegger. For a show that was more about dialogue jokes than visual gags, this one gets the mileage out of something as perfectly hilarious as Elaine’s train wreck of a dance.
4. The Contest. Taking upon celibacy, the foursomes sex lives become all the more difficult to ignore. Worth watching the next time if only for Kramer rushing in post whack yelling “I’m out!”
5. The Airport – A fine look at how the two classes on the plane are completely different worlds. Jerry meets a model, Elaine has to eat the vegetarian fare.
Fast paced, filled with character relationship details, and brutally uncomfortable in parts.
4. The Simpsons: Season 4
Kamp Krusty “You never found out how World War II ended. WE WON!”
Marge vs. The monorail: Nimoy “A solar eclipse: the cosmic ballet goes on.” Passenger next to him “Anyone want to change seats?” That and the mechanical ants.
Last Exit to Springfield: “You don’t have to be a whiz to see that you’re looking out for number one”
The best all around season, as there isn’t a dud in the bunch and the show began to round the characters out to where they are now, it’s also the season where the surreal side of the show is the at it’s best and yet doesn’t overwhelm the cogency of the plots.
3. The Office (UK) Season 2 and the special.
A mere five episodes plus the finale of squirm inducing lunacy. Perhaps the best acted sitcom ever made, it relies on the cast to execute the humdrum and meticulousness of office terror, and they create comedy gold not with punch lines, but blank stares, double takes, and awkward silence.
2. Arrested Development: Season two.
Filled with season long running jokes (any time anyone mentions George Michael’s girlfriend Ann, it’s prompted with “Her?), the show starts the season with a fresh break from season 1. After that, it amps everything up into comic chaos, little by little.
With the exception of Michael, every character goes through a completely bizarre progression of comic delight.
Buster loses his hand, but gains a father (or is it an uncle)
Maebe cons her way into an exec job at a studio.
George Sr. hiding out in an attic, trying to run the family and keep his twin brother from running wild.
Lucille struggles with being in love with identical twins (one with hair, one without)
GOB tries to gain acceptance as a member of the real world, only to muck it up with his illusionist career, ultimately settling with his puppet sidekick Franklin
George Michael continues to date Ann for all the wrong reasons, only to rediscover his love for his cousin.
Tobias and Lindsay failing in their open marriage, leading Lindsay to pursue celebrities and then herself, and Tobias to be a blue man, a gay bar proprietor, and then finally a British nanny.
The shows greatest asset was it’s biggest drawback for new viewers. It’s impossible to do justice to what made the show so hysterical because it requires prefacing a joke with 10 minutes of exposition for a 3 second gag. Watching these episodes in sequence, the genius comes not from the traditional comedic build up with new scenarios every week leading to wild laughs, it’s the underpinning of the whole run, crafted as precisely as a great mystery, filled with foreshadowing, double entendres, and cross-references within the show and to the outside world as well. It’s barely quotable in conversation, because it’s extremely hard explain.
How complicated are some of the jokes? In one episode Henry Winkler jumps a shark, (referencing the Happy Days cliffhanger which has entered the cultural lexicon as when an object loses it’s steam) but it’s so deeply hidden with other plot points and other jokes going on in the same scene, I didn’t pick it up until the 4th viewing.
Arrested Development was perfectly clever, as rewarding as any text every made, and it’s even better the second and third time around. It’s a juggling act of a sitcom, amazing and completely entertaining, and as the season moves on, the show throws more and more elements into the fray and speeds up the juggling one wonders how it’s able to keep it going. After the act is finished, you wonder how anyone could ever do better.
1. Sopranos: Season 1. From episode 1 to episode 13, this fits as entire of a single movie more than it does TV. The rhythms of the arcs are episodic, but instead of building in 13 parts, they feel divided in beats as a whole. The stories in the series build, release, then build again, bringing in all of the tangents from before in almost operatic sensibility. The easier comparison would be to compare it to a novel, but the first season flows more like a symphony, building, and then finishing, building, releasing, and then the final episode serves as a coda of all of the season. The tagline of the series was “Tony Soprano has two families, if one doesn’t kill him, the other will” and even with a simple distillation to summarize, it was the first show that captured what other shows never did. Human life is more than one situation, it’s the home life, the work life, and the moments that havoc lives when the two worlds combine. Costanza yelled: “You’re killing independent George!!!” Sopranos could be the best show because it actually saw the struggles of two identities in one man waging against each other, and did it superbly. This was an assailment of family, culture roots, iconography, and personal connections as we as viewers have come to know it, and it showed the only outcome was a misery in trying to plan for the future; it’s simply too hard to let go of the past.
That’s a whole post, but really, it’s the best thing anyone has done since Catcher in the Rye. I truly believe that.
I’ll leave my usual babbling to the later parts, but on to it:
8. Simpsons Season 5. After Deep Space Homer it peters out a bit, but before that, there isn’t an episode that isn’t legendary, with Cape Feare, Homer’s Barbershop quartet, and Rosebud being not the standouts, but the rule of how good this run was.
7: Newsradio. Season Three.
From the episode Complaint box:
[Reading cards from the complaint box]
Dave: "You suck." "You suck." "Howard Stern rules." "If you can read this you are a dork." "Coupon for one free kiss from Joe if you are a girl." "We need more complaint cards." "Coupon for one free kiss from Joe if you are a guy."
Joe: Hey.
Dave: [pulling out a fortune cookie slip] "You will go on a journey, happy long time." "Matthew is a moron." "No I'm not." "Yes you are." "No I'm not infinity." "Yes you are infinity plus one." And this one, "I have doobie in my funk," which I assume is some sort of reference to the Parliament Funkadelic song, "Chocolate City." Uh, "You got peanut butter in my chocolate. You got chocolate in my peanut butter. Together they taste like crap." "Matthew has been staring at me all day... and I like it." I don't think I get this one, it says, "I try to be good hard-worker-man, but refrigemater so messy, so so messy."
Lisa: I think that one's probably from Milos, the janitor.
Dave: Oh. Refrigem... oh, then that one's legitimate.
[Continues reading the complaint cards]
Dave: Uh, "Who's the black private dick who's the sex machine with all the chicks."
Bill, Beth, Lisa, Matthew, Joe: SHAFT.
Bill: I thought we'd all enjoy that.
Dave: [reading one last card] And, "Help, I'm being held prisoner in a complaint box," which is actually kinda funny.
Let’s get it out of the way. Newsradio was the best sitcom of the 90’s. Even better than Seinfeld. Why. Because it works as a whole and it’s jokes come from plot and not from catchphrases. I clearly love Seinfeld, and there on the list, but as a whole, Newsradio was a better show. Any one of the seasons could be on here, but they are all a mash because the creators were never truly given a full season without notes from execs. Phil Hartman was never better (even in the Simpsons) and the whole cast was able to gel like few comedy shows ever have.
Season three doesn’t have all of the great episodes, and maybe some of the others could substitute here, but with Newsradio, it doesn’t matter. It just fit perfectly.
One last quote:
Bill (Phil Hartman): Pay attention to the headlines: Corporate America has caught on to what biker gangs and fraternities have known for years; Hazing Works.
As much as I love it, Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report is just channeling Hartman.
6. South Park: Season 8. The best full collection of one what can be the best show on TV some months. I say months because the runs are only 8 weekly episodes at a time and the flow of a following a season never gets as involved as network TV. The two worst of the season, Up the Down Steriod and Douche and Turd (about Steroids/special Olympics and the 2004 election, respectively) are still good episodes, but still seem a bit forced in trying to meet a point. Instead, just revel in episodes like “You got Fucked in the Ass” which takes the plot of “You Got Served” to a level of idiocy it deserves, “The Passion of the Jew” which truly nails Mel Gibson as nothing more than an evangelical sadist, the best X-mas show in the series run; “Woodland Critter Christmas,” and maybe the best episode in the series run, “Goobacks.” Aside from the episodes themselves, the show took another step forward in realizing what it could do in it’s satire with an episode like “Good Times With Weapons” which featured an anime segment progressed solely from the imagination of the kids.
5. Seinfeld: Season 4.
Seasons 3 and 5 could also be up here, but the overall coherence of this season puts it as my favorite. It has three of the top five episodes, (1, 4, and 5)
1. The Bubble Boy: George driving like a madman gets them lost from the caravan only to find himself playing trivial pursuit with a bubble boy. Kramer burns down Susan’s fathers’ house, subsequently revealing his father had a gay affair with writer John Cheever.
Genuinely mean spirited are the characters and the plot, which mocks small towns, the sickly, and homesteads. Maybe George’s finest episode, he brags and lies about his land-speed records, he is completely self absorbed (asking Susan for change while her fathers house burns) and relishing beating the bubble boy on technicality –moops not moors—and refusing to be proven wrong.
2. The Boyfriend – the lone hour long masterwork of the series. Between Keith Hernandez serving as a discourse for male friendships past 25, the JFK loogie incident with Kramer and Newman, it’s an hour long of everything that made the show so unique.
3. The little kicks. Elaine dances (horribly). George plays the bad boy. Jerry is a bootlegger. For a show that was more about dialogue jokes than visual gags, this one gets the mileage out of something as perfectly hilarious as Elaine’s train wreck of a dance.
4. The Contest. Taking upon celibacy, the foursomes sex lives become all the more difficult to ignore. Worth watching the next time if only for Kramer rushing in post whack yelling “I’m out!”
5. The Airport – A fine look at how the two classes on the plane are completely different worlds. Jerry meets a model, Elaine has to eat the vegetarian fare.
Fast paced, filled with character relationship details, and brutally uncomfortable in parts.
4. The Simpsons: Season 4
Kamp Krusty “You never found out how World War II ended. WE WON!”
Marge vs. The monorail: Nimoy “A solar eclipse: the cosmic ballet goes on.” Passenger next to him “Anyone want to change seats?” That and the mechanical ants.
Last Exit to Springfield: “You don’t have to be a whiz to see that you’re looking out for number one”
The best all around season, as there isn’t a dud in the bunch and the show began to round the characters out to where they are now, it’s also the season where the surreal side of the show is the at it’s best and yet doesn’t overwhelm the cogency of the plots.
3. The Office (UK) Season 2 and the special.
A mere five episodes plus the finale of squirm inducing lunacy. Perhaps the best acted sitcom ever made, it relies on the cast to execute the humdrum and meticulousness of office terror, and they create comedy gold not with punch lines, but blank stares, double takes, and awkward silence.
2. Arrested Development: Season two.
Filled with season long running jokes (any time anyone mentions George Michael’s girlfriend Ann, it’s prompted with “Her?), the show starts the season with a fresh break from season 1. After that, it amps everything up into comic chaos, little by little.
With the exception of Michael, every character goes through a completely bizarre progression of comic delight.
Buster loses his hand, but gains a father (or is it an uncle)
Maebe cons her way into an exec job at a studio.
George Sr. hiding out in an attic, trying to run the family and keep his twin brother from running wild.
Lucille struggles with being in love with identical twins (one with hair, one without)
GOB tries to gain acceptance as a member of the real world, only to muck it up with his illusionist career, ultimately settling with his puppet sidekick Franklin
George Michael continues to date Ann for all the wrong reasons, only to rediscover his love for his cousin.
Tobias and Lindsay failing in their open marriage, leading Lindsay to pursue celebrities and then herself, and Tobias to be a blue man, a gay bar proprietor, and then finally a British nanny.
The shows greatest asset was it’s biggest drawback for new viewers. It’s impossible to do justice to what made the show so hysterical because it requires prefacing a joke with 10 minutes of exposition for a 3 second gag. Watching these episodes in sequence, the genius comes not from the traditional comedic build up with new scenarios every week leading to wild laughs, it’s the underpinning of the whole run, crafted as precisely as a great mystery, filled with foreshadowing, double entendres, and cross-references within the show and to the outside world as well. It’s barely quotable in conversation, because it’s extremely hard explain.
How complicated are some of the jokes? In one episode Henry Winkler jumps a shark, (referencing the Happy Days cliffhanger which has entered the cultural lexicon as when an object loses it’s steam) but it’s so deeply hidden with other plot points and other jokes going on in the same scene, I didn’t pick it up until the 4th viewing.
Arrested Development was perfectly clever, as rewarding as any text every made, and it’s even better the second and third time around. It’s a juggling act of a sitcom, amazing and completely entertaining, and as the season moves on, the show throws more and more elements into the fray and speeds up the juggling one wonders how it’s able to keep it going. After the act is finished, you wonder how anyone could ever do better.
1. Sopranos: Season 1. From episode 1 to episode 13, this fits as entire of a single movie more than it does TV. The rhythms of the arcs are episodic, but instead of building in 13 parts, they feel divided in beats as a whole. The stories in the series build, release, then build again, bringing in all of the tangents from before in almost operatic sensibility. The easier comparison would be to compare it to a novel, but the first season flows more like a symphony, building, and then finishing, building, releasing, and then the final episode serves as a coda of all of the season. The tagline of the series was “Tony Soprano has two families, if one doesn’t kill him, the other will” and even with a simple distillation to summarize, it was the first show that captured what other shows never did. Human life is more than one situation, it’s the home life, the work life, and the moments that havoc lives when the two worlds combine. Costanza yelled: “You’re killing independent George!!!” Sopranos could be the best show because it actually saw the struggles of two identities in one man waging against each other, and did it superbly. This was an assailment of family, culture roots, iconography, and personal connections as we as viewers have come to know it, and it showed the only outcome was a misery in trying to plan for the future; it’s simply too hard to let go of the past.
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