The Top 100 Television Programmes of the 00s: An Important Statistical Review

It’s the running theme that just won’t die. To round off the coverage of the 00s, just before we put the finishing touches to the book version of the Top 100*, here’s a bit of analysis. We know how all of our readers love pointless bar charts. Also, a poll of polls, which should be really exciting for people who love polls.

(* Three new entries! More pointless meandering! Fewer YouTube links, because really, what would be the point! The 25 worst TV programmes of the decade! Other things!)

TV CHANNEL OF THE DECADE

Which network was home to the most shows on our list? We’ve taken the channels that each programme started on – no point in giving BBC Two the credit for The Thick Of It when BBC Four took the risk of commissioning it, for example – and come up with the following:

So, BBC Two tops that particular chart, with 21 of the hundred best programmes of the decade originating on the channel. Channel Four comes second, proving that it wasn’t all complete shit like Balls Of Steel, Bo Selecta and Fonejacker on there in the 00s. The fact that three of the top four on there are BBC channels does kind of prove how good the BBC actually bloody is, while the number of shows from Sky One, blushing poster boy of the free market system, is zero. No, James Murdoch, just throwing all your money at American imports, even if they’re really good American imports (that were popular on other British channels first anyway) doesn’t really cut it.

It’s not all bad news for the Murdoch family (“Phew! I was concerned there for a moment.” – R. Murdoch), as Fox proves to be the winner from the other side of the pond, taking up five positions on the list, including of course that all-important number one programme. Close behind, possibly the greatest source of genuinely exciting and groundbreaking new comedy over the course of the entire decade, is newcomer Adult Swim, and really, we could easily have included more Adult Swim shows here. A lot more. ITV1 fare better than might have been expected for a network that continues to employ Piers Morgan, sharing fifth place on the list with Fox.

But, of course, this system of working out which was the best channel of the decade is as unfair as the General Election vote of someone who’d pored over party policies, MP voting records and Hansard for the last two decades counting the same as someone who’ll vote for whichever political party leader has the most pregnant wife. This is a meritocracy, and as such, here is a list where each channel has been scored by the position of each show. The channel with the show at number one gets 100 points for that show, the channel with the show at number 100 gets just one point. And this is the result of that thing we just said.

So, BBC Two remains top, though with less of a lead over second placed Channel Four. Fox leapfrog BBC One, BBC Four and ITV1 into third, thanks to their brilliant drama and comedy output, especially Arrested Development, being placed so highly in the rundown. The quality of programming from Adult Swim shines through here too, with it enjoying a higher position on our ‘leaderboard’ than NBC, HBO and ITV1. And BBC Three, but then that’s not really a surprise.

 

BEST TELEVISUAL YEAR OF THE DECADE

So with BBC Two walking away with the entirely notional prize of “Best Channel Of The Last Decade”, which year will prove to be responsible for the largest proportion of the Top 100? Or, to put it another way, as this is a listing of our favourite programmes of the decade, this will reveal which year of television we enjoyed the most, which could become a handy reference guide in case passing BBC Two researchers are looking for talking head gobshites to take part in the almost inevitable “I Love 200x” series. (Note to said researchers: we’ll do almost anything for money, apart from take part in a montage of clip show idiots singing along to a theme tune. But apart from that, yes, literally anything. If you know what we mean.)

As before, we’ve only considered the first year that a show was on air – no point giving 2004 the credit for a programme 2003 took the risk on – and here’s a first chart only taking into account the number of shows on the chart from each year:

 Shut up, looking at this IS an interesting and worthwhile use of your time. So, fifteen of the programmes on our list were born in 2003, and fifteen popped out of a commissioning editor’s schedule-hole in 2007. 2005 and 2006 weren’t far behind, with the worst showing coming from 2009. Could this be because the new shows that made their inaugural appearance in the Radio Times that year have yet to become firm favourites, or that TV companies were too scared of tabloid scorn to take any interesting risks? Time, that fickle old strumpet, will tell.

“But which year is best? We want a list going by chart placing, like before!” scream the imaginary people we like to think are still reading. Well, just for you should you exist, here:

So, 2005 pips 2007 to second place, largely thanks to programmes like My Name Is Earl and The Colbert Report. But, 2003 was the very best year for television over the last decade, helped by it being home to the mighty Arrested Development. And we’ll be handing 2003 the shiny silver “Best Year” trophy, just as soon as time travel is invented.

 

THE BIG POLL OF POLLS

Onto the main, pretty damn huge, and hugely damned pretty part of our stat-fest. We looked at ten other listings of “The Best TV Shows of the 00s”, from the UK, USA and Australia, and scored them all up accordingly. Not all of them were top hundred lists (which is probably why it didn’t take them until sodding April to get to number one, eh readers?), but we’ve accounted for that. Each show in number one position received 110 points – ten points bonus for being So Damn Good, the show in number two position on each chart received 99 points, number three 98, and so on for as long as there’s an entry to score. We’re sure you’re with us here. The other charts we’ve considered are from the following publications:

The Chiaroscuro Coalition
Entertainment Weekly
Hollywood.com
Starpulse.com
news.com.au
The Times
SFGate
Paste Magazine
The Onion AV Club
The Telegraph

…and of course, plucky British upstarts BrokenTV. And just to be extra fair, the programmes that we picked for our chart don’t score double points, even though we’re always right about everything.

Keep in mind that while our list only included programmes which began in the years 2000 to 2009, the others were happy to include anything broadcast in that decade. And so, here’s the rundown, a full Top 200:

Pos	Show	TOTAL
1	The Sopranos	1022
2	The Wire	906
3	The Office (UK)	860
4	Arrested Development	703
5	Mad Men	657
6	Lost	635
7	The West Wing	621
8	Deadwood	472
9	Curb Your Enthusiasm	423
10	The Daily Show	361
11	The Thick of It	360
12	Breaking Bad	348
13	30 Rock	347
14	Doctor Who	328
15	Big Brother	312
16	The Shield	280
17	Freaks and Geeks	278
18	The Power of Nightmares	277
19	24	273
"	Battlestar Galactica	273
21	The Office (US)	271
22	Friday Night Lights	263
23	Dexter	257
24	Buffy the Vampire Slayer	255
25	Peep Show	250
26	Flight Of The Conchords	228
27	QI	215
28	TV Burp	202
29	American Idol	196
30	The Apprentice	186
31	9/11	183
"	Sex and the City	183
33	The Colbert Report	172
34	Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!	169
"	Veronica Mars	169
36	Six Feet Under	168
"	The Venture Bros	168
38	Bleak House	167
39	Malcolm in the Middle	166
40	How I Met Your Mother	165
41	Chapelle's Show	157
42	A History of Britain	156
43	The X Factor	146
44	Strictly Come Dancing	145
45	Jamie’s School Dinners	141
46	The Chaser’s War On Everything	135
47	House	132
"	The Blue Planet	132
49	Who Do You Think You Are?	127
50	Skins	124
51	Life on Mars	123
52	South Park	122
53	Criminal Justice	104
54	In the Night Garden	102
55	Pop Idol	99
56	Survivor	97
57	Monarchy: the Royal Family at Work	96
58	Jam	95
59	Planet Earth	94
"	Slings and Arrows	94
"	Summer Heights High	94
62	Oz	93
63	Bodies	92
"	Everybody Loves Raymond	92
"	Gilmore Girls	92
66	Newstopia	92
67	The Armando Ianucci Shows	91
"	The Comeback	91
69	Marion & Geoff	90
"	Timeshift	90
71	Frontline Football	89
72	Band of Brothers	87
"	Futurama	87
74	Still Game	86
75	Phoenix Nights	85
"	Weeds	85
77	Family Guy	84
"	Firefly	84
"	Little Britain	84
"	State of Play	84
"	The Showbiz Set	84
82	15 Storeys High	83
"	The Fallen	83
84	Big Love	82
"	My Name Is Earl	82
86	Cranford	81
"	Wit	81
88	The Century of the Self	80
"	The Jeremy Kyle Show	80
90	Brass Eye Special	79
"	Rome	79
"	Tomorrow, La Scala!	79
93	Undeclared	78
94	Charlie Brooker's News Wipe	77
"	Out of Control	77
96	Top Chef	76
"	Top Gear	76
98	Adam and Joe Go Tokyo	74
"	Britain’s Got Talent	74
"	Krapp’s Last Tape	74
101	Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution	73
"	Eastbound & Down	73
"	Not Only, But Always	73
104	American Dad!	72
"	Dispatches: Beslan	72
"	Location, Location, Location	72
"	Wonder Showzen	72
108	Black Books	71
"	The Private Life of a Masterpiece	71
110	Living with Michael Jackson	70
111	CSI	69
"	Forgiven	69
113	Bored To Death	68
"	Da Ali G Show	68
"	Grand Designs	68
116	No Direction Home: Bob Dylan	67
"	The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson	67
"	Weakest Link	67
119	Desperate Housewives	66
"	Richard & Judy	66
"	The Riches	66
122	Never Mind the Buzzcocks	65
"	Stephen Fry in America	65
"	That Mitchell and Webb Look	65
125	Dead Set	64
"	Have I Got News for You	64
127	Early Doors	63
"	Footballers’ Wives	63
"	God on Trial	63
130	Look Around You	62
131	Damages	61
"	The Lie of the Land	61
133	The Unloved	60
134	Britz	59
"	The Lost Prince	59
"	The South Bank Show	59
137	Maxwell	58
138	Michael Palin’s New Europe	57
"	Soccer Saturday	57
140	How We Built Britain	56
"	Pierrepoint	56
"	Red Riding	56
143	MasterChef	55
"	Sealab 2021	55
"	When Louis Met the Hamiltons	55
146	Life on Mars	54
"	Robert Newman's A History of Oil	54
148	I Love…	53
"	Lost in Austen	53
"	The Sarah Silverman Program	53
151	Grass	52
"	Springwatch	52
153	Testees	50
"	Wife Swap	50
155	Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares	49
"	Restoration	49
157	Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain	48
"	Jerry Springer: the Opera	48
159	Outnumbered	47
160	100 Greatest Britons	46
"	Days That Shook the World	46
162	Land Girls	45
163	Who Killed Saturday Night TV?	43
164	The Deal	42
"	The IT Crowd	42
166	The Kumars at No 42	41
"	The Story of ITV: The People's Channel (& ITV50 Regional)	41
168	Tiswas Reunited	40
169	Bremner, Bird & Fortune	39
"	That Was The Week We Watched	39
171	Coast	38
"	The Story of Light Entertainment	38
173	Forty Years of Fuck	37
"	Spooks	37
175	Biffovision	36
"	Extras	36
177	10 O’Clock News	35
"	Comedy Map of Britain	35
179	Death of a President	34
"	Fantabulosa!	34
181	Attention Scum	33
"	Hannah Montana	33
183	Countryfile	32
"	The Punk Years	32
185	Gavin & Stacey	31
186	Deal or No Deal	30
"	The Osbournes	30
"	videoGaiden	30
189	Return of the Goodies	29
"	The Way We Live Now	29
191	Frisky Dingo	28
"	My Family	28
193	The Knights of Prosperity	27
194	Bloody Sunday	26
"	The Two Ronnies Sketchbook	26
196	Malcolm & Barbara: Love’s Farewell/Right to Die?	25
"	World of Pub	25
198	Blue Peter	24
199	SpongeBob SquarePants	23
200	Jekyll	22
"	Party Animals	22

And, there it is. The Sopranos, a programme that began in the late 1990s, is judged to be the best television programme of the decade, shortly followed by The bloody Wire and The bloody Office. Pleasingly, the mighty Arrested Development finishes in fourth place, so there’s some hope yet for those up-and-coming publications. Want to see where each chart placed each show? Here’s a full Excel spreadsheet of the calculations. Enjoy.

And there, for the sake of our own sanity, and very probably yours too, is where we leave the online portion of our Top 100 rundown. Now we can get back to being annoyingly esoteric on here. Get ready for BrokenTV’s TV-Tie In Board Game Jamboree. Yep, really.

(And yes, there is going to be a book of the Top 100. Once we’ve finished it. Blimey, eh?)

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The GREATEST Television Programme Of The 00s

Finally. So, after forever, it’s all over. We can finally reveal the BEST television programme of the noughties. It’s not The Wire. It’s not The Office. It’s not The West Wing, or Deadwood, or The Apprentice. Instead, it’s a show that wasn’t even seen as much of a hit, despite being one of the greatest television series of all time.

It’s the story of a wealthy family who lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together.

In the Simpsons episode “Brother From Another Series”, Krusty points out to Sideshow Bob’s brother Cecil that the misfortune of others – such as a custard pie in the face - is only truly funny “when the sap’s got dignity”. Arrested Development proved, quite conclusively, that the misfortune of others is even funnier when the saps have got the delusion of dignity.

Created by Mitchell Hurwitz and broadcast on Fox in the US, on BBC Two and BBC Four over here, Arrested Development followed the fortunes of the Bluth family. For the most part, the Bluths are a pampered, selfish, obnoxious bunch of freeloaders, utterly reliant on the money generated by the family’s real estate development firm, and utterly unwilling to earn any of it. The notable exceptions to this are George Sr (Jeffrey Tambor, almost unrecognisable from his role as Hank Kingsley in The Larry Sanders Show), patriarch and CEO of the Bluth Company, and middle son Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman), the only one of the siblings to take an active interest in the running of the company. On top of this, Michael is sole parent to his nervy but well-meaning and goodhearted son, George Michael Bluth (Michael Cera), after his wife Tracey had died of ovarian cancer, leaving Michael with the juggling act of spending as much time as possible with his son, as well as with the company.

At the beginning of the pilot episode, at a party thrown to celebrate the passing of the CEO position from George Sr to another member of the family, he is caught, arrested and sent to prison after a notable amount of “creative accounting” had been uncovered by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. As a result, it is soon left to Michael, still seething after it turned out the family member being handed control of the company wasn’t going to be him, to become head of the family. Not only must Michael try to keep the company business afloat, but he must also try to prevent his family from taking any more company cash for their ‘personal expenses’.

This proves to be anything but easy, as the extent of George Sr’s sticky fingering (so to speak) soon becomes all too clear, especially as the other members of the family expect their pampered lives to carry on in much the same way as before. Certainly, there is little sympathy from Lucille Bluth, family matriarch (Jessica Walter), who expects no interruption to her decadent lifestyle. Vain, domineering, effortlessly bitchy and Machiavellian, she will go to extraordinary lengths to make a point. This is especially true when it comes to youngest son Buster Bluth (Tony Hale), a socially inept manchild, terrified of just about everything (sheep, seals, birds, closed spaces, open spaces). Lucille keeps Buster on a metaphorical short leash, which for the most part Buster happily plays along with (indeed, one episode sees George Sr remark that Buster left “claw marks” in Lucille’s womb when he was delivered), but at times he clearly longs for escape. Lucille is always ready to punish Buster if he wrongs her, with one early episode having her bloody-mindedly (and drunkenly) adopt a young Korean child just to spite Buster. In the second season, Lucille makes a point to Buster by volunteering him for the US Army, when challenged to by a Michael Moore lookalike.

While the other two Bluth children would like to think they’re a little more independent, neither can cope for too long away from the family cash-teat. Lindsay Fünke (Portia de Rossi) is Michael’s twin sister, bored wife to disgraced psychiatrist Tobias (David Cross), and mother to Maeby (Alia Shawkat). Despite not getting on very well with her mother (who tends to use any excuse to call her daughter overweight), she has many of the same traits, such as her vanity, flirtatiousness and drinking habit, though without the devious intelligence, and with a lazy disinterest in her daughter’s fortunes. Meanwhile, Tobias is trying to make the move from psychiatry to acting, and is blissfully unaware of his overtly camp mannerisms. Maeby, it soon becomes clear, has a level of self-awareness that both her parents utterly lack, but she is hampered by a lifetime in schools that lean more towards “positive reinforcement” than actual learning, and as such has little actual common sense.

Lastly, and leastly in the eyes of his parents, comes George Oscar “Gob” Bluth (Will Arnett), an egomaniacal part-time magician. In the grand traditions of television comedy, he’s not a very good part-time magician, his tricks (sorry, ‘illusions’) regularly failing, and him being frequently overlooked by “the Magicians’ Alliance”. After getting little attention from his parents as a child, Gob puts on a show of being a cocksure womanizer, but will often burst into tears, or take dramatic measures to disguise his self-loathing. Often, he will make short-lived attempts to ingratiate himself with the other members of the family, but will often soon tire of this, and take up a contrary viewpoint. So, while he may offer to help Michael by mailing an important letter, he’ll soon be trying (and failing) to dramatically throw the letter into the sea.

In addition to the main members of the Bluth clan, there are also a large number of supporting characters, but more of that later.

The three seasons of Arrested Development each take in different stages in the life of George Sr. For the first season, he is in prison on bail, awaiting trail. In the second season, he is on the run, having escaped from his trial after faking a heart attack. In the final season, he is under house arrest, again trying to escape, but this time to get away from Lucille’s affections. The other characters also go through a number of changes as the series progresses, George Michael’s affections switch from his cousin Maeby, to his girlfriend Ann. Maeby’s lies see her accidentally land a job at a film production company. Michael begins dating again, with mixed results. Buster begins dating for the first time, most explosively with his mother's best friend, also called Lucille, as well as undergoing an even more shocking development. Gob finds he has a son, and somehow, a wife. Lindsay and Tobias both decide to see other people, though not necessarily, different ‘other people’. All with, as you might expect, splutteringly hilarious consequences.

Arrested Development is a blissful mash of contradiction soup. It has a simple enough premise – “rich family becomes poor, but doesn’t stop spending”. And yet, despite there being plenty of chuckles contained within each episode to satisfy the occasional viewer, it’s probably the smartest situation comedy we think we’ve ever seen, with an extraordinary amount of care taken over the content of each episode. Indeed, so mindbogglingly crafted is the writing, there are jokes in season one that can’t even be identified as jokes until you watch seasons two and three. That’s right, jokes that take up to three years before you reach the punchline – now that’s clever writing. It’s more fun if you discover those slow-boilers for yourselves, and while we’d love to toss you a bone here, we’re so wary of spoilers we’ll restrict ourselves to mentioning a seemingly throwaway line starting with the words “I don’t know what I’d do without my…” in an early episode.

As mentioned in our preamble, the show sadly wasn’t the ratings hit it really deserved to be. The second season averaged about six million viewers in the USA, not helped by Fox kicking it around the schedules, right into the path of live NFL coverage in many US states. As a result, the second season was cut down from a 22 episode order to just 18, with much of the season already having been recorded, resulting in frantic last minute re-writes. Worse still, the programme continued to suffer in the Nielsen ratings at the start of the third season, resulting in the order of episodes for what turned out to be the final season being slashed from 22 to just 13, the final four episodes being thrown out in one go, in a dead rubber slot against the 2006 Winter Olympics opening ceremony.

(images mostly via the excellent AD fansite the-op.com)

However, this did allow for some delicious swipes at the programme’s broadcaster to be added during the frantic script changes. An episode recorded just after the decision to cut the size of season two included a weary resignation from Michael that the Bluth Company's order to design and build 22 homes has been reduced to just 18. Similarly, in a third season episode, where many media commentators were talking about rumours the show might be sold to a cable network, Michael and George Sr can be heard musing over how financial help from the “Home Builder’s Organization” is unlikely to be forthcoming, and that they should put on a big event to woo other investors. Or, more specifically, “Yeah, the HBO is not gonna want us. What are we gonna do now?” “Well, I think it’s Showtime.”

Similarly, despite (relatively) heavy promotion from the BBC, with a plum 10pm Wednesday night slot on BBC Two, and the following episode going out on BBC Four at half-ten each week, it wasn’t a ratings smash in the UK either. Possibly, it wasn’t helped by the Beeb using fairly unhelpful, and not especially funny when out-of-context, scenes from the show in the trailers – if David Cross hadn’t been in the show, we probably wouldn’t have given it a chance. It was soon going out in just the BBC Four slot, and the second and third seasons only saw BBC Four showings originally, though they did finally reach BBC Two in 2007, when the whole series was somewhat surprisingly scheduled between 1am and 3am, with two episodes going out every Saturday night. Of course, if it had proved to be popular over here, Sky would have just nicked the rights to it. At least it remaining a cult hit over here meant everyone who wanted to could legally watch it without a Sky subscription.

Despite a lack of bums on seats, it was a critical smash on the scale of a previously undiscovered Seinfeld episode guest starring Groucho Marx, Bill Hicks and Jesus, thanks to the miracles of time travel. Entertainment Weekly’s Tim Stack pondered "Is it beating a dead horse to once again state that this underappreciated gem is the best sitcom on TV? Too bad. 'Arrested Development' is the best sitcom on TV!" The Guardian’s Alison Powell called the programme “a farce of such blazing wit and originality, that it must surely usher in a new era in comedy." The AV Club named Arrested Development as the third greatest television programme of the decade. Paste Magazine named it the greatest television programme of the decade. And do you know what? So do we.

WATCH IT NOW ON: As far as we’re aware, it’s not currently airing on UK television, Happily, the DVD box sets are affordably cheap. Most trips to your local HMV are likely to bring you into contact with each of the season box sets for less than £13 each, but if you prefer to shop online, HMV.com are selling Season 1 at £9.99, Amazon and Play are both knocking out Season 2 at £13,99, and it’s back to HMV.com for Season three at under a tenner.

 

But that’s not all the Arrested Development fun we’re having today. Here are a couple more rundowns, in which we hope to clumsily cram in all the things we wanted to mention about the show, but couldn’t find room for in amongst the last few thousand words. So, in no particular order:

TOP TEN ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT QUOTES

"Everything they do is so dramatic and flamboyant. It just make me want to... set myself on fire." – Lucille, on her party being interrupted by a gay rights protest.

“Okay, Lindsay, are you forgetting that I was a professional twice over - an analyst and a therapist. The world's first analrapist.” – Tobias, reminding Lindsay of his professional past.

G.O.B: “Anyway, it involves us making some money with our Mexican friends from Colombia.”
Michael: “I think they're called Colombians.”
G.O.B (sarcastically): “Oh, I forgot we’re being politically correct now.”

Tobias: “Yes. Lindsay and I are planning a night of heterosexual intercourse.”
Michael: “You can just say intercourse.”

“I'm an ideas man Michael. I think I proved that with ‘Fuck Mountain’.” – Gob, proving a kind of point to Michael.

George Michael: "Are those strippers?"
Michael: "If I know your uncle, they're at least strippers."
- on seeing Gob’s banana stand ‘mascots’.

Michael: “Gob, I'm going to need you to sneak Mom out of rehab.”
Gob: “Gee, I didn't think the woman I'd be checking out at Spring Break would be Mom.”
Buster: “She's better than the whores you date.”
Gob: “Don't call my escorts whores.”
Buster: “Mom's still got it.”
Gob: “I don't date whores.”
Lindsay Funke: “Stop it, both of you. This objectification of women has got to stop.”
(Beat)
Michael: “It's just Mom and whores.”

George Sr.: "The Brits set me up. I heard nothing about Iraq."
Michael: "Dad, we have a picture of you and Saddam Hussein."
[Cut to picture of George Sr. shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. Caption says "Bluth-Hussein Meeting 1998." ]
George Sr.: "I thought he was the Soup Nazi. I was just congratulating him on a great job. "

Waitress: "Plate or platter?"
Lucille: "I don't understand the question and I won't respond to it."
- Lucille reacts in the only way she knows to having her country club membership reduced to ‘pool’.

“George Michael was getting ready for school when he came across a box of love letters he'd written, but never sent, to his cousin Maeby. One letter, titled "If you weren't my cousin," was particularly incriminating.” – The Narrator.

 

 

TOP SIX MINOR ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT CHARACTERS

Barry Zuckerkorn (Henry Winkler)

The longstanding legal representative for the Bluth family, Barry’s mind often appears to be elsewhere when dealing with the family’s affairs. Certainly, he does seem to have a habit of getting into trouble himself, with his first appearance coming just after he’d been sued by his homosexual assistant for using discriminatory language in the workplace. It’s behaviour like this, despite (or more likely because of) his own repressed homosexuality, that leads Michael to tire of Barry’s incompetent behaviour and poor grasp of the law, and finally sack him. Barry is eventually replaced by excellently named attorney Bob Loblaw, but not before providing the series with one of it’s most deliciously subtle sight gags. After meeting Michael at the harbour after Gob’s escaped seal has been found in the belly of a shark, and where a number of plot points happily slide into place, Barry (played by an actor best known for playing Fonzie in Happy Days, of course) nimbly hops over the expired selachimorpha. A move better known as, of course, ‘jumping the shark’. A joke purely for internet telly geeks? We likey.

Kitty Sanchez (Judy Greer)

George Senior’s fiercely loyal personal assistant. Oh, and mistress. As a result of her loyalty to George Sr, she makes no secret of her dislike of Michael, obstructing him from getting his way at every opportunity. However, that doesn’t stop her from flashing her bare chest at Michael at any given opportunity, generally accompanied with a shouted claim that he won’t ever get another chance to see ‘those’ again, punctuated with a load “WOO!”. Her loyalty to George Sr does waver when it comes to other members of the Bluth family, with Kitty hooking up with Gob and Tobias at various times in the series.

Lucille Austero (Liza Minnelli)

Best friend, next-door neighbour and social rival of Lucille Bluth, chronic sufferer of vertigo, widow, and sometime sixty-something girlfriend to Buster. Generally referred to by the Bluths as “Lucille Two”, and really, you rarely get two characters in the same show with the same first name, do you? Clearly, it’s done here to heighten Buster’s feeling that he’s subconsciously dating his mother, but it’s a nice touch. After all, in any extended family, group of friends, school or workplace, you often get two people with the same first name, often meaning one of them is afforded the prefix “Big-“, “Little-“, “Old-“ or “Fat-“. But, you don’t often see it in fictional television shows. So, nice to see it here.

Oscar Bluth (Jeffrey Tambor)

George Sr’s stoned slacker of a twin brother. Despite Oscar’s hippy lifestyle, George Sr remains largely jealous and bitter about his twin, mainly because of Oscar’s stress-free lifestyle allowed him to keep the long, flowing locks that George had long since lost, and which Lucille still finds irresistible.  With George Sr safely incarcerated, Oscar soon gets more involved with the family, soon making no secret of the fact he is rekindling his earlier affair with Lucille, and that he may just be Buster’s biological father. [SPOILER ALERT] However, George Sr does finally get his revenge on Oscar when, having escaped from justice, he knocks Oscar unconscious, shaves his head, and leaves him for the police, who mistake him for his escapee sibling.

Dr. Fishman (Martin Mull)

A doctor at the local hospital with a frustrating habit of expressing himself too literally. So, [MORE SPOILERS] when Buster is rushed to casualty after being attacked by a loose sea lion, Doctor Fishman informs the family that Buster will be “all right”. By which, of course, he means Buster has lost his left hand. Well, clearly.

Franklin Delano Bluth

If you could pick one character to sum up the majesty of Arrested Development, it would surely have to be Franklin. In an effort to make his magic act more accessible to urban audiences, Gob introduces Franklin, a black puppet, for which Gob clumsily, and borderline offensively, provides the voice. Franklin proves to be a quick-tempered, foul-mouthed, misogynist loudmouth. Not unlike Gob, of course. For some reason, the entire family seems to love Franklin, almost treating him as if he were a real person. Quite unlike Gob, of course.

Franklin’s finest moment comes when Gob uses company money to finance an album of duets between him and his puppet, with the aim of bringing the races together through the medium of song. His best intentions go awry, as the first recording session of ‘Franklin Comes Alive’ is cut short after the first song, It Ain’t Easy Bein’ White, causes the black sound engineer to leave the studio in disgust. Sample lyrics:

Gob: “It ain’t easy beeein’ white…”

Franklin: “It’ ain’t easy beeein’ brown…”

Gob: “So much pressure to be briiiiight…”

Franklin: “I got kids all over towwwwwwn!”

“GEORGE BUSH DOESN’T CARE ABOUT BLACK PUPPETS.”

 

 

AND… THAT’S IT. IT’S OVER. Except, it isn’t. We’ll be back in the next update with a special stat-based look back at the rundown, containing a brilliant ‘Top 100 of Top 100s’ mega list, and more charts than you could shake a Jeremy Vine at. Plus, news of a thing. Ooh.

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The Second Best Television Programme Of The 00s

Back in the 1980s, when we were tiny, Yes Minster always held a strange kind of fascination for us. BrokenTV’s dad used to love the show, so we got to watching it quite often, and while we couldn’t really understand many of the jokes, or even why the funny bits were meant to be funny, we couldn’t help but enjoy it. Maybe it was Nigel Hawthorne’s avuncular grin, recognising Mr Derek from the Basil Brush Show, or the funny facial expressions Paul Eddington would pull when something went awry. Maybe it was for the jokes we did get, along the lines of “they don’t care who’s Prime Minister, as long as she’s got big tits”. Whatever the reason, on re-watching the series as a grown-up (well, as close as we’ve come to growing up since then), the rest of the jigsaw clicks happily into place, and we can now appreciate it fully. It truly is one of the greatest comedy series in the history of television.

But, this isn’t about Yes, Minister. Well, in a way it is (Reader’s voice: “Bloody hell, make your mind up”), because had Jay and Lynn’s masterpiece continued to rumble on away from the cameras beyond 1988, it may well have evolved into The Thick Of It. In between, the Sir Humphreys would have been overthrown by an army of spinners in a bloodless coup some time in the mid-90s, who would indeed have continued to shape policy as they saw fit, only replacing about 40% of the former’s Machiavellian chicanery with shouting. The cosy, leather-upholstered smoky gentleman’s establishment policy hub would have been shaped into open-plan offices fenced with smoked glass and chrome. The rotary telephones and reams of paperwork would have made way for 3G, VOIP and IT ‘solutions’. However, the splutteringly hapless decision makers at the centre of it all would have remained pretty much the same; very little actual evolution has taken place between Jim Hacker MP and Hugh Abbott MP.

We’d hope that everyone reading this is already familiar with the premise behind the series, so here is just the briefest of primers. For the first series, The Thick Of It followed Hugh Abbott, played by Chris Langham, a Member of Parliament for an unnamed British political party (see footnote), and Minister of the Department for Social Affairs. Hugh is aided by his advisors Glen Cullen (James Smith) and Olly Reeder (Chris Addison), as well as his Press Secretary Terri Coverley (Joanna Scanlan). Their main task throughout the series is to carry out their jobs under the wrathful gaze of Number Ten’s ferocious ‘policy enforcer’, Malcolm Tucker (played by the excellent Peter Capaldi), a walking volcano ready to explode with boundless fury, swearing and spittle should the need arise.

From the beginning, The Thick Of It proved to be a little different. For starters, given a budget with which to make a pilot episode, show creator Armando Iannucci managed to make three entire episodes. These were transmitted in May 2005 on BBC Four, and saw Hugh Abbott getting to grips with his new role while trying to stamp his somewhat bumbling authority on his new department. After the success of the tri-pilot, three more episodes were commissioned, recorded and broadcast, making up either a second series (as most episode guides have it), or completing the first series (as the DVD release of the show has it). These take place just as a cabinet reshuffle looms, causing Hugh to fight for his job, to avoid being used as a political pawn, and to avoid becoming embroiled in a number of minor scandals.

Despite the success of this first (or “first and second”) series, the programme itself was affected by a very real scandal, namely that lead actor Chris Langham had been charged by police with the possession of indecent images of children. With a new full series already planned, the team instead began work on two special episodes of the programme in which Hugh Abbott would not appear, the character supposedly holidaying in Australia as events unfolded. This allowed the focus of the series to shift to Malcolm Tucker, with the rest of the Department (since rechristened ‘the Department for Social Affairs and Citizenship) coming into play as they babysat Junior Minister for Immigration Ben Swain.

The first of the two specials, “Rise Of The Nutters”, promoted as a Christmas special and aired in early January 2007, looked at rapidly spreading divisions inside the government, and also gave the viewers their first glance of The Opposition, chiefly DoSAC’s counterparts at the desperately modernising party, with their own policy enforcer Stewart Pearson displaying his own special brand of buzzword Tourettes. The second special, broadcast to coincide with Tony Blair stepping down as PM, followed six months later, but with events following on directly from the end of the first special. All events in the episode took place over a single night, following on from the PM’s resignation just prior to the beginning of the episode.

Chris Langham’s subsequent conviction for downloading indecent images of children in September of 2007 made him returning to the series pretty much untenable (though in the first of the specials, it seemed the door had been left open for his return, with a quick shot of a newspaper story revealing the headline “Where Is Hugh?”). Luckily for the future of the show, the success of the two specials proved that the series could easily carry on without the lead actor, which might not have been the case otherwise. After all, for the first six episodes, Hugh Abbott had been the hub of the programme, with Chris Langham winning a British Comedy Award for Best Comedy Actor in 2005, and the BAFTA for Best Comedy Performance in 2006. Without the central character, there may well have been concern that things might go a bit, well, ‘Green Green Grass’.

Fortunately for fans of top-drawer comedy, this was not the case, and 2010 saw the return of The Thick Of It, with long-time Iannucci collaborator Rebecca Front taking on the role of Nicola Murray MP, Hugh’s post-reshuffle replacement at DoSAC, in a very welcome eight-episode series. But, that didn’t take place in the 00s, so we’ll leave that for BrokenTV’s Top 100 TV Shows Of The 10s, coming your way in early 2020. Keep an eye out for that.

Instead, on to why we liked the bloody thing so very much. For much of the decade, fans of British comedy have had to put up with a lot of broadsheet handwringing over how “American comedy is so much smarter than ours”. “Why can’t we have a Curb Your Enthusiasm?” They’d holler (and hey, we did, Jack Dee’s Lead Balloon, so be careful what you wish for). Well, in The Thick Of It, British television got a series every bit as smart, possibly even smarter than the best HBO has to offer. Oh, and no, we’re not classifying Little Britain USA or their half of Extras as ‘the best HBO has to offer’.

Like Curb, the dialogue is partially improvised. Like Curb, it’s home to more Premier League-standard swearing than you could shake a Jerry Sadowitz at. Like Curb, you could justifiably feel a little bit self-satisfied about the fact you own all the DVD collections of it (providing you’re sickening comedy snob twonks like us). However, for our money, Thick just pips Curb in terms of all-round splendidness. While Curb delights in playing up the mundane until it becomes the most important thing in the world for the characters in the show, Thick does much the same, but looks at how these pointless things can somehow really matter, even if it’s only inside the heads of the real decision makers in charge of a nation. Larry David mistyping an email address might have led to a bollocking from Susie and a scornful glance from Cheryl, but in The Thick Of It it can lead to a potential end to a 40 year political career, the end of a lifelong friendship and the ritual humiliation of a blameless individual on a rolling news network. It’s the little differences like this which help make The Thick Of It our second-favourite television show of the decade people still haven’t fully agreed on a catchy nickname for.

 

FOOTNOTE: “Aah, but it’s clearly New Labour, isn’t it?” seems to be the assumption from anyone covering the series, as if they’ve uncracked some kind of clever code, but the name of the party is never actually revealed within the series itself. Neither is any clue given to the ideology of the party in power within the series. the policies mentioned within couldn’t be said to be left-wing, right-wing or centrist as we never get to see what they actually are. It’s only because the party in question is in power during the first decade of the 21st century that people seem to assume it’s dealing directly with Labour. Really, had the Conservatives won the 2005 general election, this series could just as easily have taken place without any real changes.

Indeed, the only real clues as to the parties involved come in the first of the two special episodes, where we see The Opposition for the first time. They are clearly a political party undergoing a transformation into a more modern, electable concern, reflecting the transformation of The Conservatives under Captain Airbrush. It could be said that even then, the identities of the parties involved are still not clear – any political leanings displayed by The Opposition are drowned in an a tsunami of buzzwords and flowcharts. The truth, such as it is, was finally uncovered in “Malcolm Tucker’s Election Briefing”, a series of articles for The Guardian written by TTOI pensmith Jesse Armstrong, in the guise of Malcolm Tucker. These took the form of rallying memorandums to party members in the run up to the 2010 General Election, and it’s here that Tucker is formally revealed as a New Labour man, with statements such as “they know the Tories are dipping. But we are still losing.”

Even then, it takes until the third of these ‘briefings’ before the word ‘Labour’ is used for the first time, with a section on Samantha Cameron’s pre-election babybump leading to Tucker commenting “The reality is – everyone here got a bit excited that the public had seen through Cameron. But we have to be very careful in terms of taking the parliamentary Labour party as a good barometer of what the British public think or feel about anything whatsoever.” And thus, a not especially mysterious mystery is solved. We could join Scotland Yard’s Really Obvious Crime Squad with analytical powers like that, you know. If it existed.

WATCH IT NOW ON: For series one and two (or, as the box it comes in claims, ‘Series One’), DVD. Plenty of places are selling it for less than seven of your Earth Pounds, so why not pick your favourite online store from here? For the specials, much the same – eight online stores sell the DVD for between £6.85 and £6.99.

Series three is due to be released on DVD next month, with the cheapest price currently being at CD Wow, where it can be yours for just £11.99. If you just can’t wait to re-watch it, the whole series is currently available on YouTube. Start from here, but don’t be surprised if the whole lot of them are removed as the proper DVD release approaches.

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The Third Best Television Programme of the 00s

It seems to be pretty much agreed upon that the first decade of the 21st century has been a bit of a golden age for US drama. Buoyed by the success of programmes like The Sopranos and Oz in the late 1990s, premium cable networks were more willing than ever to commission challenging grown-up fare, with programmes like Deadwood, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Breaking Bad and Mad Men proving to be hugely successful. These have also proved to make for a refreshing change from the increasingly flashy high-concept duffers like Flash Forward, or (and don’t pretend otherwise, you know we’re right) Heroes put out by the main networks clamouring for the next Lost. And yet, our favourite US drama of the decade has turned out to be a programme from a premium network. in this case Showtime, that could easily be dismissed as having a flashy novelty premise itself.

Based on novels from Jeff Lindsay, Dexter told the tale of Dexter Morgan, a blood splatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department, but who also happens to be… a serial killer. A further twist is added – Dexter only ever slays other murderers who have evaded justice, using his position to discover their identities or locations before the other employees of Miami Metro. So, he’s a kind of ‘cuddly serial killer’, if you will. Like Chucky.

All this does sound like the kind of concept a writer might blurt out off-the-cuff in a meeting with network executives, once all their actual ideas had been shot down (“Monkey Tennis?”), and indeed, when you try to explain how good the programme is to people completely unaware of it, you may tend to find yourself sounding like a bit of a berk. And yet, we found the show to be the finest drama series of the entire decade. (Reader’s voice: “What? So Battlestar Galactica isn’t on the list at all?”) No, it isn’t. Geek boy.

It is a fascinating premise for a series – really, while a serial killer who despatches Very Bad People might appeal to the inner vigilante that lurks inside each of us, Dexter goes about his, well, hobby with such cold uncaring professionalism, having appointed himself judge, jury and executioner, it’s a brave move of the producers hoping the audience will really get behind him. Michael C Hall certainly puts in a brilliant performance as the central character, going through his daily life, interacting with his family, colleagues, girlfriend and her children with his emotions barely cranking up any higher than a ‘three’, seemingly spaced out for most of his day, his mind always seemingly elsewhere. It’s only when working on blood splatter analysis that he permits anyone to see his emotions on a ‘six’ or a ‘seven’, with the only people ever to really see Dexter at his most alive tending to be strapped down to a table, with about three minutes to live. As taught by his adoptive father, Dexter operates by a strict moral code which means such encounters are rare, and Hall acts out such scenes with an unsettlingly plausible relish.

This premise alone would soon become a little formulaic (insert your own 50,000 word thesis on television desensitising us all to gruesome violence here), were it not for the way Dexter strives to fit in a (seemingly) normal life around his nocturnal proclivities. He forms a relationship with Rita (Julie Benz), a single mother of two still recovering from life with a drug-crazed shitbag of a husband, at first with the sole intent of providing a smokescreen for his darker side, but before long Dexter is prepared to take steps outside of his strict moral code to protect them. And yet, as Dexter gets more and more caught up in his darker side, the viewer can see his relationship falter, as he tells Rita lie after lie in order to carry out his dark duties, pushing the one person who could ‘save’ him further away, and leaving the viewer feeling as frustratingly helpless as one of Dexter’s victims. Yikes.

The show doesn’t centre entirely on Dexter, however. While it could be easy to surround Dex with an office full of one-dimensional conventional coppers, there are a number of entertainingly rounded personalities working at Miami Metro PD. First and foremost of which is Debra Morgan (played by the delightfully girl-next-doorish Jennifer Carpenter), Dexter’s younger foster sister, and  the only other person Dexter has truly cared about throughout his life. At the start of season one, Debs is a uniformed officer armed with a quick mind and foul mouth, but slightly lacking in self-confidence. By the end of the first season she is working as a Homicide Detective, working in the same department as her big brother Dex, and soon becomes a major player in the investigations carried out by the department.

Detective Angel Batista (David Zayas) is a troubled divorcee who works closely with Dexter on a number of cases, and who goes though a number of existential crises before finally settling down with another character we’re not going to name in case you’ve not seen the series yet. Lieutenant Maria LaGuerta (Lauren Vélez) holds sway over the department, a tough, determined senior officer who will often prove to be fiercely protective of her subordinates should the need arise. The comic foil for the department proves to be Vince Masuka (C.S. Lee), the department’s lead forensic investigator, meaning he works more closely with Dexter than anyone. Perhaps overcompensating for his diminutive stature, Vince plays up to the role of overtly heterosexual male, often preoccupied with making smutty comments at inappropriate moments, or trying to flirt disastrously with Debra. As might be expected, Vince’s awkward charm rarely seems to work with members of the opposite sex, and when faced with socially awkward situations, his lack of life experience becomes abundantly clear.

It’s this combination of fully defined characters (and really, they are a lot more complex than our hamfisted descriptions here, plus we’ve only really covered about half of the main cast) that help the plot to flow so effortlessly around the events of each episode. Every season of Dexter broadly looks at one major case, and a shift in the life of Dexter himself. For example, the opening season sees the department try to track down a serial murderer who becomes known as ‘The Ice-Truck Killer’, as well as Dexter’s growing relationship with Rita. Often, this would lead to a fairly standard schedule for the episodes (i.e. episode 1. “There’s been a murder”, ep 2. “Oh, and another quite similar murder”, 3. “Hey, we’re getting a kind of pattern here”, 4. “Has anyone seen this ‘murderer’ guy?” 5. “We think we’ve got him!” 6. “No, it was the wrong guy”, 7. “Now we know who it is”, 8. “Ooh, nearly got him”, 9. “Oh no, he’s nearly got one of us”, 10, “Caught him, the end”), but Dexter (i.e. the show) is smarter than the average drama series. Much smarter.

Take a brilliant drama show like House. For most episodes, you know that someone will get really ill, the team will come up with about three incorrect diagnoses, and in the last ten minutes something slightly unexpected will happen so that House can save the day. It’s a bit ‘by the book’, but the enjoyment comes from the surrounding events of each episode, it’s as if the whole ‘medical drama’ thing is just a device to hang all the entertaining bits on. Similarly, an episode of Lost. You get to see a bit of someone’s back story, two big questions might be answered along the way, but along will come three new even bigger questions. Again, it doesn’t really matter, we knew what the destination would be, it was the journey that proved to be the most interesting part.

Right, now compared to those, Dexter is a bit like having a bag thrown over your head, being bundled into a boot, but having a surprisingly comfortable journey and you end up at Alton Towers or Disneyland. By which we mean, at the start of each episode you have absolutely no idea what is about to happen, all you really know for sure is that it’s going to be tremendously exciting and rewarding, and you very probably will be surprised by the ending.

And that’s pretty much why we love it so very bloody much. Just when you think you know what is about to happen, you’re spun around and shoved headfirst into an unexpected (but, with hindsight, wholly logical) plot twist. And, just to keep you on your toes, sometimes the obvious thing does happen, just when you were expecting it not to. It’s all a bit like being on a rollercoaster that is different each time you ride it, only with lots of blood and a bald Korean forensics guy making lots of  titty jokes. In short: absolutely marvellous.

Criticisms of the show? Because you just know we’ve got to end on a relative downer, it’s what we do. Well, such is its finery, the only real complaint we’d have is the way each episode begins with the same lengthy quite-clever-first-time-you-see-it-less-so-the-fortieth title sequence where Dexter gets ready for work in a way that looks sinister but isn’t. We’d much rather it were kept shorter, leaving extra time for more swearing from Debra or smut from Vince, or even just letting us soak in a few extra ‘Previously on…’ moments from the preceding episode.

It was also a bit of a shame the way ITV managed to bollocks up their handling of the show in the UK. Despite being on at 11pm on Friday nights on ITV1, the ITV schedulers decided to run the main-network-friendly neutered version of the series, saving the ‘proper’ cuss-strewn, bloodier version for later in the week on ITV4. As a result, the impact of what is an enjoyably uncompromising show was limited, and the ITV audience never really took to it. A real shame, Dexter deserves to be remembered as fondly as dramatic big hitters like The Sopranos, but it seems destined to remain a cult hit hidden away on the FX channel and the DVD box set aisle of HMV.

 

Watch it now on: DVD. Seasons one and two can both be picked up for under £13 from Play.com, as well as in your local HMV or supermarket, we expect. The best price we can find for season three is at CD Wow, where it’s yours for £21.49, though you might prefer to do things properly and just buy the full set of seasons one to three for £39.99 from Play. Season four has yet to be released on DVD, which is a shame as it’s the best of the lot, but expect to see it soon.

TWO TO GO.

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