A Decade of Awesome: Television

Today, we look at the television shows that routinely bathed me in blue light over the last ten years:

1. The Wire–This seminal show is most easily described as a cop show, but it’s really a Dickens novel on television (except with a lot more swearing and drug use). Over its five seasons, it put a magnifying glass to the city of Baltimore and its entrenched but deeply dysfunctional institutions–the police, city hall, labor unions, public schools, and the media. It offered a devastating critique of how each of these institutions fail Baltimore’s citizens and how easily well-intentioned people can be corrupted by the power they seek. But the heart of the show is the endless battle of wits waged between the cops and the city’s byzantine network of drug dealers. In the end, nobody wins, which is in keeping with the social realism that underpins the entire series.
2. The Daily Show–What started out as just another obscure Comedy Central series is now essential viewing for us political junkies. While most of the “real” news media fed nothing but jingoistic pabulum to the country in the years following 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, Jon Stewart and his crew of brilliant writers couched their horror at world events in cutting satire. Stewart never is shy about wearing his politics on his sleeve, but he also demonstrates that he’s capable of having a reasonable conversation with those with whom he disagrees; a skill that seems to be rapidly disappearing from the media landscape. The show is at its best when it puts on a grim smile in response to our leaders’ stupidity and and hypocrisy. 
3. The Colbert Report–This companion to The Daily Show is even more blatant in its satire. Stephen Colbert plays Stephen Colbert, a brash and smug right-wing host in the mold of any number of Fox News personalities. The show’s conceit allows him to poke fun at the media’s vacuity while keeping himself firmly ensconced in the joke. Colbert also loves to deconstruct our consumerist and celebrity-obsessed culture, as evidenced in his Doritos-sponsored presidential campaign and his efforts to get a space station module named after him. His self-aware buffoonery is one of the best running gags on television today.
4. Battlestar Galactica–Who would have thought that a remake of a super-cheesy science fiction series from thirty years ago could be this good? In its story about humanity on the run from a genocidal race of robots, BSG created a palpable sense of desperation and dread. In something of a rarity for science fiction on TV, it usually didn’t solve problems with science-cum-magic, instead forcing the survivors to muddle through as best they could. As the years went by, the show got even darker, focusing on themes of occupation, torture, and tyranny. The final season relied too much on generic and hokey mysticism, but when BSG was good (see in particular the two-parter “Exodus”), it was riveting.
5. Lost–The hatch. The polar bear. The black smoke. The statue. Dudes wearing mascara. I’m still not sure what it all means and I have a feeling that this season won’t offer completely satisfying answers, but Lost is always interesting. A show about survivors from a plane crash stranded on a desert island could have turned into cliché really fast, but the creators did a couple of smart things to keep the story fresh. First, the extended flashbacks provided compelling background stories for the main characters that ultimately informed their actions on the island. Second (spoiler alert!), getting several of the main characters off the island established a pair of parallel narratives that kept the plot moving forward. Oh, and adding time travel didn’t hurt, either.
6. The Office–Adapted from the original BBC series, the American version provides its own absurd take on office life in a struggling paper company. Michael Scott is every bad boss you’ve ever had writ large: oblivious to his own incompetence, narcissistic in the extreme, and perhaps borderline mentally ill. Still, the writers resist making him a complete parody. Scott understands that work, the place where we spend roughly a third of our adult life, should be fun and that no excuse is too small for an office party. As the economy tanked, the show played up the anxieties of a workplace in crisis mode without losing any of its funny. 
7. Mad Men–Ad man Don Draper is a misogynistic jerk whose world is crumbling around him, but he still embodies a bygone era of cool. Watching Mad Men is a bit like peeking into a bizarro version of our own reality; a reality where everyone has a scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. A reality in which women are regarded as children or objects of lust. It’s a show that reminds us how much of a difference a few decades can make in shaping the world we inhabit. When someone makes the inevitable drama about life in Silicon Valley in the first decade of the twenty-first century, our mores and habits will probably seem equally quaint to younger viewers.