Rant #1,804: TV OD

Again, this is "Best Of" time, where lists abound about everything, so today, I thought I would put up the Top Five of my favorite TV shows of all time.

I am a Baby Boomer, so I was the first generation of TV watchers that grew up with the medium from Day One of our lives. Much like the millennials today, the first generation to grow up with computers and the Internet from Day One of their lives, this then-new medium of television changed us, shaped us, and for better or worse, defined us.

We were the first generation that advertisers earmarked on this new medium, and at the other end of the spectrum, we were also the first generation to see real, true bloodshed on TV, certainly shaping the older Baby Boomers' views on the Vietnam War.

But there was a lot of good on TV, and there still is, although it is much more difficult to find today, what with the multitude of stations we have to choose from.

Somehow, it seemed better with limited choices, honed down to really the best that the medium had to offer.

That is the environment I grew up in and with, and that certainly shaped my list of favorite TV shows.

Here is my list, or at least the first five on that list. The rest will come later on.

1) The Adventures of Superman: If ever there was a real, true Baby Boomer show, this was it. Coming to television in the early 1950s when TV was black and white and that was it, the show was very dark in its first season, almost "TV noir" to suit the lack of color, but then the producers figured that color TV was going to be all the rage someday, and they switched to color, which was a brilliant move. In color or black and white, the show was perfectly cast--led by George Reeves as the penultimate Man of Steel--the stories were often childish but fun, the violence was of the fluff variety, and the show really defined what Baby Boomers watched on TV. If there was a perfect TV show for that age or any age, this was it.

2) Leave It To Beaver: I could really say exactly the same thing about this show that I did about the preceding one. less the color aspect, which never came to this show. The show was actually a boy's eye view of the world, seen through the eyes of one Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver, a suburban kid who had the same problems we all had as we grew from adolescence to teenagedom. The show is beautifully written, well cast, and yes, at times corny as heck, but Jerry Mathers and the rest of the cast made the show less dated then you think it would be. A real treasure, it is supposedly the only situation comedy that has never been off the air since it first aired in the late 1950s.

3) My Three Sons: Probably the most underrated TV sitcom of all time, the show highlighted America's next door neighbors, the Douglasses, going through their daily lives, whether it was at work, at school, at play, or wherever. It was as if during its 12-year run that each episode was a weekly peak into those next door neighbors and what they were doing, which wasn't much different than what we were doing at the time. Led by patriarch Fred MacMurray, the show is actually split into two parts--the black and white episodes which ran on ABC and the color episodes which ran on CBS--with slightly different casts. The show was probably TV's first dramedy, and was certainly the first one to have story arcs, including Ernie's adoption--a bold topic during the time--and the birth of the triplets. Yes, the show is often very dated, but it still remains TV's almost forgotten show, as it has only seen limited release on DVD due to, among other things, the divide of the shows that I just spoke about.

4) The Monkees: A new day was dawning on TV and more importantly, in the world when this show premiered in September 1966, and TV, for one, has never looked back. The counter culture was getting a foothold on our consciousness, and using Micky, Peter, Mike and Davy as its pawns, that counterculture got onto the air in a form of a sitcom patterned after the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night." The show is often funny, full of music, and certainly brought that new type of thinking into our living rooms perhaps for the first time on a regular basis. The band has actually outlived the show, becoming one of the most popular rock acts in history. But it all started with this show, and yes, watching it today, it is little more than a live action cartoon, but at a top level. Surely the template that allowed MTV and music videos to come about, the influence of this show is still being felt.

5) Sanford and Son: One of the funniest shows ever on TV, the sitcom was based on the British show "Steptoe and Son." The American version showed a junk dealer and his son, and their daily lives. Led by Redd Foxx as Fred Sanford, the show was not only well written and cast, but it brought to us Chitlin Circuit performers that never really had a wide outlet for their talents beyond black audiences. Another Norman Lear production, so yes, the show did push some boundaries, and some people thought it was nothing more than a 1970s version of "Amos and Andy," but the show was good, it was funny, and it often made us laugh out loud and think at the same time. A real treasure from the early to mid 1970s.

So those are my first five. Four sitcoms, and one show that is kind of hard to define but was directed firmly at Baby Boomers. Yes, I liked other types of shows, too, as you will find in the second half of my Top 10, coming at a later date, but these five shows not only defined my generation and television when they were on, but they also defined ME.

Speak to you tomorrow.