Four years ago I wrote a blog post titled ‘The Best Frakkin’ Show On TV‘ in which I singled out my five favorite shows at the time.
In the top spot was Friday Night Lights, the first season of which was practically a religious experience. The rest of its run didn’t consistently reach the heights of those first two dozen episodes but it remained the best show on TV until it bowed out — with typical grace and emotional power — earlier this year.
Three of the other shows I featured (Battlestar Galactica, Lost and Entourage) have also gone off the air since I wrote that post, and the remaining show (The Office) lost its main character.
So it’s time, I think, for an update (complete with lots of YouTube goodness).
And so Battlestar Galactica, one of television’s greatest shows, has come to an end, signing off with a rousing finale that highlighted both how wonderful and how frustrating it could be. The series was as maddeningly imperfect as its characters but at its best it was among the most resonant and meaningful works of art I’ve seen in any medium.
Over the past 5-10 years, television has increasingly taken over as the dominant filmed art form in terms of quality. There have certainly been many great theatrical films over that span, and it’s still tough to beat the experience of the big screen, but television’s ability to tell complex tales across multiple seasons and to evolve characters over many years is unique.
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