Welcome to the first in what will be a periodic series for What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, where I look back at television shows, episodes, and sometimes scenes that still make me happy.
Grand Central Publishing
Later this year will bring the 10th anniversary of TV (THE BOOK), where Matt Zoller Seitz and I attempted to make a television canon of the 100 greatest American scripted shows of all time. We contrived a whole mathematical formula to figure out the rankings — because math is always the best way to judge art. But the thing is, we were never married to the formula. We ran the numbers on a couple of hundred shows, looked at the order, and very quickly decided that some shows were way to high, way too low, or otherwise not quite right. So — and this is a thing I feel comfortable saying after all this time, and I apologize to anyone who feels betrayed by it — we began to make like Bill Rawls on The Wire and started to juke the stats. We adjusted the individual scores as necessary to get various shows to where we felt they actually belonged, including moving a few shows out of the top 100 altogether, and sliding a few on that weren't even the 101st or 102nd. That said, we never messed with the rankings for the very top shows, which is how we ended up with a five-way tie for first place that we resolved in an argument that we reprinted in the book(*).
(*) When Mad Men wasn't part of that five-way tie, there was a brief discussion of whether we should give it an extra point or two to create a six-way tie. In the end, we decided that a five-way tie was already too complicated, even if one of us preferred Mad Men to at least one of those other five. (No telling on which author/show.)
But if the top 5 were played entirely straight, I knew from the very moment Matt and I began mapping out the project what the 100th show would be:
Terriers.