The mass media have a fixation upon throwing up lists.<\/p>\n
Sports editors run innumerable lists of the \u201cTop 10\u201d high school and college teams.<\/p>\n
Arts and entertainment editors run lists of the top books, movies, songs, and even video games.<\/p>\n
Financial and business editors tell us who they believe are the \u201cmost important\u201d moguls, and rank each on a scale that has no meaning to anyone, especially the moguls themselves.<\/p>\n
Fashion editors love making lists of \u201cbest dressed\u201d and \u201cworst dressed\u201d celebrities.<\/p>\n
News editors love making end-of-the-year lists of the \u201cTop 10 Headlines.\u201d Like the other editors, they don’t tell us why their pick of the top news story was more important than the No. 2 story\u2013or why the No. 10 story was any more important than the thousands that did not make the list.<\/p>\n
TV Guide also loves lists. This month, it threw out a list of what some of their editors irrationally believe are the \u201c60 Greatest Shows on Earth,\u201d complete with a sentence describing each show. And, like most lists, it’s little more than annoying static.<\/p>\n
The top three shows, according to TV Guide, are \u201cThe Sopranos,\u201d \u201cSeinfeld,\u201d and \u201cI Love Lucy.\u201d Squeezing into the list at the bottom are \u201cMonty Python’s Flying Circus,\u201d \u201cThe Good Wife,\u201d and \u201cEverybody Loves Raymond.\u201d Inbetween\u2013and completely without any logic, except for the editors’ over-ripe egos that they actually know something\u2013are numerous shows, some great, some better than mediocre. For instance, \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d which believes stretching out a good one minute comedy sketch to five minutes makes it five times better, is the 18th best \u201cgreatest show on earth.\u201d The editors, who seem to be in a time warp that left them in junior high, placed \u201cSNL\u201d above \u201cThe Dick VanDyke Show\u201d (no. 20), \u201cThe Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson\u201d (no. 22), \u201cFriends\u201d (no. 28), \u201cTaxi\u201d (no. 35), \u201cBarney Miller\u201d (no. 46), \u201cThe Bob Newhart Show\u201d (no. 49), and \u201cThe Daily Show, with Jon Stewart\u201d (no. 53.) No one at TV Guide can explain how \u201cThe Daily Show\u201d was 35 places below \u201cSNL\u201d or why \u201cThe Colbert Report\u201d never made the list.<\/p>\n
The editors also didn’t explain how \u201cThe Mary Tyler Moore Show,\u201d by all accounts one of the best comedies on TV, was rated no. 7, while Sid Caesar’s \u201c Your Show of Shows,\u201d a 90-minute live comedy show in the early 1950s that exposed America to the acting and writing talents of Carl Reiner, Imogene Coca, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Howard Morris and dozens of others, was 37th on the list, 19 below \u201cSNL,\u201d which should have used the Sid Caesar show\u2013or even its own first half-dozen years\u2013as models of comedic genius. Missing from the list of the \u201c60 Greatest\u201d is \u201cThe Tonight Show, with Steve Allen,\u201d which established the standard by which all other late night show operate.<\/p>\n
\u201c60 Minutes,\u201d which has often been the top-rated show, made the list at no. 24. But, \u201cSee It Now,\u201d with Edward R. Murrow, one of the nation’s most important and influential journalists, did not make the list, an oversight that could be attributed to the fact that TV Guide editors probably slept through most of their college journalism lectures, days after their after drug-induced high while watching \u201cSNL.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also missing from the \u201c60 greatest\u201d list\u2013and indicative of TV Guide’s lack of understanding that America extends beyond the polluted Hudson River\u2013 is \u201cNCIS.\u201d TV Guide editors freely mark the best prime time shows to watch each day; they usually don’t give \u201cNCIS\u201d that distinction. Only in the past couple of years, exhausted by seeing \u201cNCIS\u201d at the top of the ratings week after week, have they published major features about \u201cNCIS,\u201d while constantly gushing over shows and stars that have no chance of lasting a decade in prime time.<\/p>\n
For 10 years, the actors and crew of TV’s most-watched show have just done their jobs, and they have done it well. Every actor is someone who could be on Broadway or handle a major film role.<\/p>\n
The writing on \u201cNCIS\u201d is fast-paced and thought-provoking, wringing emotion from its 20 million viewers each week. Unlike many procedural dramas, this CBS show’s writers layer a fine coat of humor that is far better than what passes as half-hour sitcoms these days.<\/p>\n
The production values exceed most other shows\u2013from lighting to camera movement to even prop placement. The behind-the-scenes crew may be among the best professionals in the industry.<\/p>\n
Behind the scenes, the cast and crew are family. They work together. They care about each other. Numerous shows claim this is true with them. But, the reality is their claims are little more than PR sludge. With \u201cNCIS,\u201d the claims are true.<\/p>\n
There are no scandals and there doesn’t seem to be much ego among the actors.<\/p>\n
In 11 seasons, Mark Harmon, who can evoke an emotion in the audience merely by a slight look and no words, has never been nominated for an Emmy. As every good actor knows, true acting is when people don’t know you’re acting.<\/p>\n
Portraying the fine nuances of a character is a quality that sustained James Garner’s career for five decades. Like Mark Harmon, Garner never won an Emmy, and his popular show, \u201cThe Rockwood Files\u201d never made it to TV Guide’s \u201c60 Greatest\u201d splash of nonsense.<\/p>\n
Mark Harmon and James Garner, both masters of their craft, may not even care they’ve never won an Emmy. They, like millions of us already know, a spot on TV Guide’s \u201c60 greatest shows on earth\u201d is not the recognition they crave \u2014 but probably deserve.<\/p>\n
Walter Brasch’s<\/strong> book, America’s Unpatriotic Acts<\/a>, was the first major book to catalogue and then destroy the government’s belief that the PATRIOT Act was necessary to protect American security at the expense of the Bill of Rights. His current book is Fracking Pennsylvania<\/a>, which looks into the health, environmental, and economic effects of fracking. <\/em><\/p>\n