Welcome to the Watchies, the Still Watching award show. On the penultimate episode of VF’s TV podcast, hosts Hillary Busis, Richard Lawson, and Chris Murphy discuss, debate, and ultimately award the greatest TV shows of all time—well, at least according to them.
Busis, Lawson, and Murphy doled out awards in three categories: drama, comedy, and reality TV. The nominees in the first category: Mad Men, Succession, and My So Called Life. After a late-breaking suggestion of HBO's The Leftovers, the trio decided that AMC's Mad Men takes the cake.
Created by Matthew Weiner, Mad Men starred Jon Hamm as suave and troubled 60s era ad man Don Draper. It first aired on AMC on July 19th, 2007 and ran until 2015. Mad Men was certainly celebrated in its time, picking up 16 Emmys and five Golden Globes over the course of its seven seasons—and yet all three agreed that Busis's choice for the greatest drama series of all time has only gotten better in age.
“Mad Men is so well done and holds together over its seven seasons in a way that is surprising when you watch them in a binge,” says Busis. “It's kind of surprising in retrospect that there wasn’t a plan for the ending from the beginning, because it wraps up so well.”
While many may argue that The Sopranos is the greatest drama series of all time, Lawson proposes that awarding Mad Men is a way of showering praise on The Sopranos as well. Weiner got hired to write on Sopranos after submitting a spec script for Mad Men; when he finally got a chance to make his own original show, they acted like natural counterparts. “Mad Men and The Sopranos are in such deep dialogue with each other," said Lawson. "If Sopranos is about the very end of the American Dream, Mad Men is about the first cough. It's like, ‘Oh, something is going wrong here.’”
The nominees for greatest comedy series of all time were Arrested Development, 30 Rock, and Enlightened. After a spirited debate, the hosts landed on Murphy's choice, 30 Rock Tina Fey's incredible meta-comedy about running a sketch comedy series, which first aired on NBC in 2006. Created by Fey and Robert Carlock, 30 Rock's joke-per-minute ratio is unparalleled—as is its fearlessness in criticizing parent company NBCUniversal without ever taking itself too seriously.
“At the core, it’s about this friendship that emerges between the artist and the, the corporate suit,” says Lawson. “The corporate suit is right most of the time—which is an interesting tack to take and maybe would not be greeted as warmly now as it was then.”
Speaking of things that might not have aged well: America's Next Top Model beat out both RuPaul's Drag Race and The Real World: Seattle for greatest reality television show. Originally airing on UPN in July 2003, America's Next Top Model was hosted by Tyra Banks, who additionally served as its executive producer. While many of the situations and challenges on the show—like making the contestants change their race for photo shoots, or forcing one to pose in a coffin hours after finding out her friend had died—have aged terribly, ANTM was problematically entertaining and laid the groundwork for many other reality shows, from Drag Race to Project Runway to Top Chef. And at the end of the day, Banks knew what the main draw of the show was. “The thing about the America's Next Top Model is that the top model was always Tyra,” said Murphy. “It was about Tyra all the time.”
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