Faith’s Top 5 Television Shows

I work too much, and I live in a place where there’s no nightlife or daylife, really. So going out and having a good time is more or less out of the question. So how do I unwind when I’ve got a little time off? Asian Horror Films, finishing work, educational television and my already fairly extensive DVD collection. Not TV, or not usually I should say. Because TV just. Sucks. Don’t get me wrong, I watch The History Channel and Adult Swim like they’ll be gone tomorrow, but I miss real deal TV.

Do you remember where there were real TV shows? With real storylines and real, paid actors (who admitted to being paid actors) did their job every week to bring you comedy, drama, romance and horror? What happened to that? There are almost no real TV shows anymore. Television, real television, has gone the way of the dodo.

So I thought I’d get all nostalgic on you and list my five favorite television shows (excluding educational TV) of all time – starting with:

#5 Married, With Children

This show was so good it hurt. It ran 263 episodes, from 1987 to 1997 and centered around the dysfunctional Bundy family. These guys were the extreme of white trash, living a life you never see on TV and cracking jokes about it.

Al, father to the Bundy clan, was an ever depressed shoe salesman (the lowest of all loser jobs). His wife Peg was narcassistic and selfish, and very much the child of the family who’d rather be sitting on her couch eating bon bons and watching soap operas then cooking her family a meal on “The big hot thing”. Cynical malcontent Bud, or Grand Master B as he’d be known in later years, was the youngest child and by far the smartest and most successful – in a sort of theiving, kiniving way. Then there’s Kelly Bundy, the hotsy totsy eldest child who was a mixed breed of tramp and moron that somehow managed to wind up in a kind of innocence.

The show got a little dodgy in later seasons but it never stopped being funny an still gets a high rating from me!

#4 Roseanne

One of my favorite all-time television shows was the 80s-90s phenom known as Roseanne. Roseanne is a show about a working class family living in Lanford, Illinois and the struggles they face that were so real until the last season that it endeared them to an entire generation of TV viewers.

The cast was one of the best in the business, still not outdone in their genre, and the characters were real, deep and sympathetic.

There was Dan Connor, father of the household and a regular blue collar slob working to keep his family afloat. The over acheiver and eldest daughter, Becky (played so perfectly by Lecy Goranson and later royally %&!#ed up by the wooden delivery of Scrubs star Sarah Chalke) and her outlaw himbo boyfriend/husband Mark Healy filled the first half of the show’s run with a great amount of realistic tension. Manly basketball star turned pre-goth coffee house intellectual Darleen and her boyfriend/husband, and Mark’s little brother, David Healy helped to flesh out the middle and later years with an equal realism.

On the fringes of the group were little brother DJ, who started out as a cute and spazzy rascal and became a little more determined and evil every year. And Roseanne’s flakey sister Jackie Harris, the incurably idealistic and always nervous guy magnet who spends the first half of the show hopping from job to job and man to man.

Granted, the last season was a bit surreal but overall this show is one of those I never get tired of!

#3 The X-Files

Possibly the single greatest phenomenon in Sci-Fi television since The Twilight Zone, The X-Files centered around Fox Mulder – a once promising FBI agent who, by the beginning of the series, has been reduced to a sort of dead letter office made up of unsolved and unexplained cases in what amounts to the FBI Headquarters basement. Fox, who’s been not-so-affectionately nicknamed “Spooky”, has been driven to rifling through these cases day in and day out in hopes of finding out what happened to his sister Samantha who was abducted from their home right in front of him when they were young. Being one to see hoof prints and think zebra, Fox is convinced she was taken by aliens.

Enter Dana Scully, -a level headed doctor who spends much of her time on the show caught between the parallel worlds of science and faith,- assigned to the X-Files to debunk Mulder’s work and ends up being taken on the ride of her life.

If you only ever watch one science fiction TV show, do yourself a favor and rent The X-Files. You won’t be sorry!

#2 Mad Men

Period television is never easy to produce, especially not well. Folks like the ones who worked on Rome reportedly nearly went bankrupt spending millions per episode just for the sets, effects, costumes and locations that made the show the success it was.

And while the heathen in me wants to give Rome this spot, just because they somewhat religiously agree with me (Hey, I never said I wasn’t biased!), I have to give it up for maybe the greatest retro television drama in the history of television – AMC’s Mad Men.

I started watching this show about advertising executives (in great vintage suits, might I add) because one of my favorite actors, Vincent Kartheiser, had signed up for one of the lead roles. For those of you who don’t know, Vincent played Angel’s son Connor Reilly on Angel the Series – but we’ll get to that later.

The show is basically a soap opera set in the early 1960s that revolves mostly around charismatic, handsom professional liar Don Draper and his meteoric rise to the top of Sterling Cooper ad agency. I can’t even begin to dissect all of the characters here, it would take forever and I’d bore you to tears (I may do character profiles as a blog series later on?), but the show is coming back for a third season this Sunday on AMC so check it out!

#1 Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel the Series

Okay, yes I know Buffy and Angel were two seperate shows, but considering they’re an extension of eachother (and I wanted to make room on the list for Roseanne) I thought I’d lump them together for my listing ease.

“She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.”

Buffy Summers is a normal even average highschool girl, all about boys and the many shades of nail polish. She’s a gorgeous, privilaged, popular L.A. student who just happens to be the Chosen one. One girl, in all the world, who’s given super human strength, speed and stamina in hopes of beating back the rising tide of chaos caused by the seedy demon underbelly that normal people usually don’t come in contact with.

The shelf life of a vampire slayer isn’t a long one – in fact, most of them don’t even survive their teenage years. But Buffy’s different. Buffy wants to live.

See, usually these girls are on the outskirts of civilization. They don’t have friends, they don’t have family, they don’t have prada shoes. Buffy’s big advantage over her predecessors is that she likes it here, and with the help of her friends she’s going to stick around.

Angel is Buffy’s vampire with a soul boyfriend, who exited the show in season 3 and headed to Los Angeles to wage his own war against a more grown up version of evil.

To date I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a better television show than Buffy in it’s hay day, the only one that comes close to overtaking Buffy the Vampire Slayer is it’s spin-off series, Angel. Man, I miss the 90s, lol.

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