I’ve become more interested over time about what makes a show “great” versus merely “good,” and the ways in which good, very good, and great shows as a group have come to raise the bar on television quality overall.
Between end of year lists and ongoing chatter amongst television critics and viewers alike, there has been and always will be an endless dialog about what are the “best” (and occasionally, “worst”) shows on TV.
I’ve become more interested over time about what makes a show “great” versus merely “good,” and the ways in which good, very good, and great shows as a group have come to raise the bar on television quality overall.
One of the reasons for this is that I’ll often see shows casually compared to the likes of Breaking Bad or Mad Men. Doing so is fine, but I do think it’s important to realize that in many cases this is akin to comparing a Harlequin romance novel to Crime and Punishment or On the Road or The Stand while making some kind of theoretically serious argument. In other words: it’s apples and orangutans.
The Not Good
Before I get to the best, let’s talk about the rest. And to be clear, most shows are not very good, which is why television tends to get falsely labeled by many casual viewers (and some curmudgeonly critics) as a medium in which “nothing good is on.” But while let’s say 85%+ of primetime content on the hundreds of channels available (even leaving aside the burgeoning amount of high-quality serialized content available on Netflix, Hulu, web-exclusive series, and so on) is not “good,” that leaves an astonishing amount of shows that are at least good.
The Competent (but not really good)
There are a great many shows on broadcast networks that have sky high production value and talented casts. There’s absolutely nothing “wrong” with these shows, but they’re not really very interesting either. Casual viewers can tune in and tune out without missing much, and there’s typically a tidy wrap on plot elements by the end of each episode. Sitcoms in this category are broad and comfortable, with jokes that you can see coming from many a mile away as the crow flies.
I don’t even think that I need to name any names here. If you’re reading this, you’re likely already coming up with a list of your examples.
Competent but not good shows often see high ratings. But in aggregate those ratings have been slipping for years as aggressive and ambitious cable networks have been sniping away with superior or simply catered programming to pull away segmented audiences.
The Good
Good TV shows are ones that I would roughly define as “worth watching.” Obviously, what’s “good” for me may not be so for you or others, but these are shows where I can make an argument that there’s something intriguing or compelling going on that pulls it out of the pack. They may also have some problems or be inconsistent from time to time, but not enough so to stop you from watching.
Good shows get into your DVR rotation and while you may not run to the set on the night a new episode airs, you’re likely to watch it later in the week or a few episodes back-to-back during a solid catch-up TV session.
Good TV show examples:
* Boston’s Finest
* The Ultimate Fighter
* Vegas
* House of Lies
* Workaholics
* Cougar Town
* Catfish: The TV Show
* Bar Rescue
The Very Good
You’ll find most very good shows on TV critics’ best shows of the year lists. They are strikingly unique and make us feel honored and blessed in that we get to be entertained by them. Louie and Girls is a dynamite tandem that pushes the bounds for what “comedy” even means on television. And meanwhile Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey are clearly and objectively superior to most costume dramas that you’d pay to see at a movie theater. And then Southland and Justified are finding new creative depths within well explored genre territory (cop shows, crime dramas).
We do our very able best to watch very good shows on the night they air, and then we often discuss them with friends and co-workers. They take up the vast majority of bandwidth that critics use to slice and dice what’s going on across the dial. They are, as I say, very good indeed.
Does that mean they will be remembered much 25 or 50 years from now? That’s hard to say, but in any event they represent an elite group of shows that continue to raise the bar for the medium.
Very good TV show examples:
* Justified
* The Americans
* Louie
* Game of Thrones
* Southland
* Suits
* Girls
* Downton Abbey
Quick addendum regarding The Americans: yes, in its first season it very good. The chilly and exciting Cold War-era spy drama from FX is by far the best new television show I’ve seen in months.
The Great
I use “great” very sparingly. Great means “all-time great,” and I think the “confusing” thing (and, well, great thing) about this era is that we are living through an age in which television is pumping out more all-time great shows than ever before.
That being said, in my view there are two “still active” shows that are clearly great right now: Mad Men and Breaking Bad. This pair of AMC dramas, extremely different in focus yet sharing a dedication to deeply fascinating characters and wildly absorbing stories, sets the bar in 2013 for which all others must follow. Of course, in some ways it’s not truly possible to declare a show as “great” using this definition until it has finished its run, but I believe these two shows are so iconic and deeply entrenched in popular culture and the national zeitgeist to make an early proclamation (even if some may cry, sacrilege!).
Now, one of the things that fascinates me the most about watching television and discovering new shows is looking for signs or flashes of “very goodness” or even greatness.
Stephen King’s fabulous memoir-meets-instruction manual, On Writing, talks about how writers who are merely competent can work their tails off to become good, and the same for naturally good writers to eventually become very good. But in his view the few and rare towering greats occupy a territory all their own, an impenetrable fortress (heaven?) that we mere mortals can never attain.
I think that may be true for TV as well. Mad Men and Breaking Bad were out of the park smash hits of dizzying dramatic joy right out of the box. And the same goes for The Sopranos, the granddaddy of this Golden Age. I can sit through the pilots for each of these shows again and again and get something new out of them while still enjoying every moment.
Even still, I do think very good shows can show flashes of greatness while good shows can often get their acts together to become very good over time. Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey come to mind in terms of very good shows that are occasionally great. And Justified bounces around a bit between good and very good before going wham¸ slapping you upside the head pistol whip-like with a short and bright explosion of great. And meanwhile a Southland or Suit s will simply consistently produce a special and very good product week in and week out.
I also think that “at least good” shows that don’t fit cleanly into a categorical “box” tend to get a lot of critical attention. For example, The Walking Dead is often a very good show, though it is plagued from time to time with basic issues of pacing, plot, and character development (perhaps brought on in part by the constant shuffling of its creative team). Therefore, it’s ripe territory for critical pontification as opposed to, let’s say, a Season Eight/Episode 17 dissertation on CSI: Somewhere.
It’s also interesting to note that the “better” a show tends to be generally regarded as overall, the higher standards it tends to be held to. Thus, many critics were largely disappointed by The Walking Dead’s season finale, Welcome to the Tombs, with comparisons to the brilliant “Clear” from earlier in the season. And this is also why I often chuckle my way through episodic reviews of Mad Men or Breaking Bad, in which critics will hold these shows to an impossibly high standard, particularly when viewed without yet having seen the big picture of a seasonal arc play out.
The Falloff
On a final note, almost all shows – even the best – see a falloff in quality over time. The truly all-time greats fight this off, which is what helps to place them in that small group of all-time classics (The Wire’s five-season run is probably a series that ended at precisely the right time, for example).
But that doesn’t stop us from getting a little sad when once good or very good shows display signs of slippage. The Office was once very good for a number of seasons before sliding into, we might say, comfortably competent territory. Contrast this though with Community’s very good run with flashes of zany greatness over two seasons before a descent into some shell of its former self in the post-Dan Harmon era.
How do you define a good, very good, or great TV show? Let us know!
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.