There’s nothing that quite riles people up than some trumped up, self-loathing, columnist-nobody criticising their TV habits. And given that’s exactly what I did last week, I thought it only fair to repay those truly aggrieved by my views on the televisual dreck that abounded in the ’90s by taking a look at five of the best story-driven TV shows of all time. That’s right Kanye – of all time.
Sure, my choices are bound to offend someone. They’re my tastes after all, and it should be noted that I’m the kind of person who lists their favourite Christmas anthem as Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas. (Once, in the flirtatious early stages of a relationship, I made the mistake of sending some of my favourite music to a new boyfriend. That relationship is over now, but I still maintain that the soundtrack to Disney’s Hercules makes for excellent running music. Now I live with a man who won’t let me hold his records because he thinks someone with taste as horrendous as mine might melt them on touch.)
Anyway, enough of my attraction to musical snobs. On with the show(s)!
1. Roseanne
If we were to believe everything American sitcoms told us, we’d think that no one in that fair land was fat, poor or rude to their kids. Everyone’s problems are wrapped up in a neat 22 minutes which, to be fair, is roughly all the time it takes to resolve the heinous crime of an overgrown manchild forgetting his long-suffering wife’s birthday.
Roseanne hit American TV screens with exactly the kind of bang you’d expect from a brash broad like Barr. To date, there hasn’t been a single three-camera-angle sitcom like it that champions a story so at odds with America’s conservative aspirational values.
The Connor family were poor. They had no respect for authority or social mores. Roseanne and her husband Dan were both morbidly obese, yet clearly still (and frequently) hot for each other’s bods. Through the course of its nine seasons, the show tackled issues such as alcoholism, domestic violence, teen pregnancy and unemployment – topics still verboten in the suburban enclaves found in many sitcom neighbourhoods.
Sure, the final season was pants and Barr is kind of crayfish now, but overall Five stars.
2. Battlestar Galactica
Look, I know space shows aren’t for everyone. They’re not even for Edward James Olmos, who plays the titular captain of the Battlestar Galactica, a breaking-down spaceship on a quest to find the mythical Earth after Cylons destroyed the 12 colonies. (Don’t worry, you’ll pick it up pretty quickly.) Olmos famously had it written into his contract that he would disappear the instant an alien was introduced – and between you and me, I wouldn’t mess with that guy.
So even though it’s set in space, it’s not really a space show per se. Think of it more like The West Wing, but with more black holes and less cocaine involved in the show’s scriptwriting. Basically, all these human-type people’s lives are ruined when Cylons (robots that look like humans) launch a full-scale nuclear attack on the 12 colonies and completely destroy their civilisation.
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A handful of them escape in a bunch of different spaceships and set out on a perilous mission to find “Earth” so they can start a new home. All the while, the Cylons are chasing them across the galaxy and trying to finish what they started because they think humans are rubbish. And even though you start off disagreeing with them, by the end you kind-of realise the truth is in between – humans are a bit rubbish and Cylons are a bit good. It’s all very confusing from a humanist perspective.
But the important thing is that it’s awesome. Also, it inspired this –
