Top 10 TV Shows of 2007

It's another year, and another time to let the Blogulator push its taste upon you in the hackneyed, formulaic format of which is the Top 10 List. Part one of The Blogulator's Best Of lists starts with television shows. The tube has been kind to us this year. Below are our Top 10 shows, as voted on by the Blogulator staff, and commented upon by the Blogulator staff as well. Let the geekiness begin!

10. "Curb Your Enthusiasm"
I don't just like this show because I am a toned-down, female version of the main character. Honestly. Oh, the situations he gets himself into! I have never been a fan of Seinfeld, but I absolutely love Larry David and this over the top series. What can I say: when a situational comedy is done right, it's wonderful. The characters are all pretty much despisable (much like Seinfeld) but this works so much better. Probably because Larry David is so much less annoying as a main character than Jerry Seinfeld. And, like Extras, a series that features celebrities "as themselves" but jerkier/stupid versions of themselves is always fun to watch, because, let's face it: we hate celebrities and want them to look more stupid than we are, but we love celebrities and so we want to know that they have a sense of humor and are able to poke fun at themselves. And of course there are the moments when we can all feel for Larry--if I make a large monetary donation, I certainly wouldn't want to be shown up by "anonymous" Ted Danson! I'd say that my donation was "pretty good," too!
--Brigitte

9. "Battlestar Galactica"
My admitted affinity to sci-fi helps place Galactica at the summit of my current (and future?) TV mountain. The sci-fi aspect of it, however, is only the starting point for a show I contend provides better social commentary than any of the news networks. Science Fiction, in working through unrealistic metaphor, "tricks" people into receiving ideas that their preconceptions otherwise wouldn't accept. The third season does so with allusions to the Iraq war, providing a perspective that tends to be ignored in the standard, victory-biased, van-der-sloot-drowned network coverage. Or it doesn't, if you don't want it to. The Galactica story itself - a story of isolated fear and survival - is one of the best telenovelas ever told this side of Mexico. Starbuck is my Ugly Betty. There are dips here and there, almost always found in the network-mandated one-off episodes intended to draw casual viewers. But the strong, central story - frequently emerging from unexpected-but-could-have-been-expected places - always survives. The end is near (this will be the last season), and I am happy for it. This book is written well, and a good book deserves a real ending. And if you haven't seen it, the opening three hour miniseries is Independence Day Plus. At least grant me and my dying cat our wish for you to do yourself the service of watching that. The fact that my cat isn't really dying shouldn't change your mind.
--DoktorPeace

8. "Law and Order: SVU"
What does SVU stand for? Special Victims Unit? Yeah, right, maybe a few seasons ago. SVU really stands for nothing. "Law & Order: SVU" used to be about sex crimes, etc., but pretty soon they ran out of rape, incest, and child abuse story lines and had to stretch the premise just a bit. This is how episodes work now...

Scene 1: Somebody thinks they got raped or a woman's dead body is found which means the crime was sex-based.
Scene 2: Nope, false alarm, there wasn't a rape. But there was still a crime. Since Detectives Dick-Cream (Stabler) and Whatshernamegitay
(Benson) are already on the case, they can solve it.
Scene 3: Tie things into some current trend like Second Life, Facebook or Prep School Students.
Scene 4: Blond lawyer does a terrible job in court and gets all emotional.
Scene 5: Despite blond lawyer's failure, the good guys win!

Yeah, I'm mocking the show, but that doesn't mean it's not awesome. It's better than 90% of the crime-dramas on TV (with the exception of regular L&O and this Wires show I keep hearing about.) And it's the only L&O show to give us a little more than cursory background stories for the characters. Like Elliot's ongoing marital troubles and Benson's crazy brother. Also, Det. Olivia Benson + Elliot's pregnant wife going into labor + Car Accident = Great TV.
--Sean

7. "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia"
I've never liked "South Park" because it so outwardly wants to shock you and I've never understood how people can be shocked by something that is saying before you even watch it, "youze gonna get shocked!" How can it be shocking if it's expected? This helps prove the sheer genius behind Sunny. You watch it and you want to like these guys. They seem like your friends and you - regular friends that argue about stupid stuff too much but are ultimately lovable. But every time they prove to be the scum of the earth, and you kind of love it because you're kind of the scum of the earth too. So then you watch it again, almost as if watching a Disney movie over and over again as a kid, thinking "maybe something different will happen this time." And it never does, but you're glad, because if you found a dumpster baby, you'd want to become rich off it too.
--Chris

6. "The Sopranos"
When all is said and done, "The Sopranos" ended its remarkable six-season run this year with moments that will never be forgotten, at least by this viewer. In the end, the series hammered home its central themes harder than ever -- depression is something some people never get over, family affects one's life more than anything, and so on. And the last season didn't disappoint in terms of send-offs for its vast collection of characters, or in its surprising plot twists. James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano is among the best performances in television history; partially thanks to this show, the medium of dramatic television has been validated as a large canvas in which a story can be painted upon.
--Qualler

5. "Extras"
Ricky Gervais' newest series, a collaboration with the BBC and HBO, lasting only two hilarious, short seasons, started out with its main hook being to poke fun at celebrities who appeared as themselves in each episode, including Patrick Stewert whose ambition it is to write a screenplay in which the main character has the power to make women's clothing fall off and Sir Ian McKellen, who reveals the great secret of his acting, saying "you see, what I do, is I imagine myself to be the character, and then I act as if I am that character...I see you're not following me...I'll break it down for you." The end of the second season shifts its focus towards Andy Millman's (Gervais) sitcom (as our hero becomes a pseudo celebrity himself,) and although this year's series finale got a bit preachy, (how can artistic integrity remain in an industry so dumbed-down and corrupted by know-nothing producers seems to be the question,) I think this was definitely the show that made me laugh the most in 2007.
--Brigitte

4. "Flight of the Conchords"
When I started a band with my friend Dan and friend of the Blogulator, Paal, we strived to write songs as hilarious as the band Flight of the Conchords. Flight of the Conchords, the band, managed to take a formula which I (stupidly) thought I had invented and made the best absurdist sitcom on television since the short-lived but brilliant "Stella." And now my head is full of Flight of the Conchords quotes -- "I love beer, I could drink a whole glass of beer."; "That's not the bird, this is the bird (flapping hands like a bird)"; "We're not Flight of the Conchords anymore -- we're the Crazy Doggz." And, of course, the songs, oh the songs. I'm sure you've heard many of them by now, but in the context of episodic television, the funny / brilliant level of the songs gets upped by a million. So, Jemaine and Bret, if you're reading...will you be my friend? Please listen to my band, Humor!
--Qualler

3. "Big Love"
Society may never be ready for polygamy but thank god HBO is! In season two, we see the drama factor multiply exponentially. Now that we've all been sucked in to the show and are attached to the characters we can explore the dirty dealings of compound life. Throughout the season Bill becomes less and less of a good guy, Barb gets closer to leaving the family, and it becomes more obvious why Nicki is so screwed up. Throw in a teenage runaway, a back-stabbing business deal, and the possibility of adding a fourth wife and you've got yourself a pretty good follow-up to the first season where we aren't even sure that Barb and Bill want to be polygamists. I think
it was made pretty obvious that Bill married Nicki because Roman helped him out when Barb was sick, but I always wondered why they married Margene. Though I still don't have the answer, it seems that Bill isn't as separated from his polygamist past as I had thought. I'd say the lesson to be learned from season two is that the compound
can suck you in even after you've left.
--Lady Amy

2. "30 Rock"
Like its closest movie cousin, Hot Fuzz, Tiny Fey and company break out the silly sidesplitting hysterics and wry commentary with equal measure and equal success on the best sitcom on television. It's a classic style sitcom, with A plots and B plots and self-contained conflicts, but it is used to its full advantage, much like its other intellectual half-hour predecessor "Arrested Development". Every show takes its perfectly balanced, albeit stock, characters from the consistent ensemble and gives us a simple story about the pratfalls of success, racism, sexism, classism, and the list goes on. And yet the show always manages to go over the top while still staying true to its audience-tested formula. How beautiful.
--Chris

1. "The Wire"
It's hard to say anything that comes remotely close to truly representing what The Wire is about and why it is the best show on television today, so I"m going to leave it to creator / writer David Simon to discuss his approach to what makes "The Wire" different from the average television drama, from this interview:

. . . which brings us back to Average Reader. Because the truth is you can’t write just for people living the event, if the market will not also follow. TV still being something of a mass medium, even with all the fractured cable universe now reducing audience size per channel. Well, here’s a secret that I learned with Homicide and have held to: if you write something that is so credible that the insider will stay with you, then the outsider will follow as well. Homicide, The Corner, The Wire, Generation Kill—these are travelogues of a kind, allowing Average Reader/Viewer to go where he otherwise would not. He loves being immersed in a new, confusing, and possibly dangerous world that he will never see. He likes not knowing every bit of vernacular or idiom. He likes being trusted to acquire information on his terms, to make connections, to take the journey with only his intelligence to guide him. Most smart people cannot watch most TV, because it has generally been a condescending medium, explaining everything immediately, offering no ambiguities, and using dialogue that simplifies and mitigates against the idiosyncratic ways in which people in different worlds actually communicate. It eventually requires that characters from different places talk the same way as the viewer. This, of course, sucks.

There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more time—hence the need for this kind of viewing to be a long-form series or miniseries, in this bad metaphor—but if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and open yourself up to a new place and new time and new people, soon you have a sense of another world entirely. We’re after this: Making television into that kind of travel, intellectually. Bringing those pieces of America that are obscured or ignored or otherwise segregated from the ordinary and effectively arguing their relevance and existence to ordinary Americans. Saying, in effect, This is part of the country you have made. This too is who we are and what we have built. Think again, motherfuckers.

I couldn't have said it any better myself.
--Qualler

This entry was posted by Unknown, on Monday, January 07, 2008. You can leave your response.