Meme: The Mother of All TV Lists (#1 of 3: Editor R Us)

[graycardinal]

Yes, it's that meme, the one with the ginormous list of shows - except that it's probably actually the one with dozens of slightly different lists by now (because there's no such thing as purely linear distribution on the 'Net). The one I ganked is from thisbluespirit, and has obviously come down via a chain of native Brits who have seen many, many series that I, on the western edge of the continent on the other side of the relevant pond, have never so much as heard about.

When I pick up one of these, I am often minded to rewrite the rules slightly. Here, what I've done instead is a light edit on the list as a whole, because what I discovered on the way through is that there were several entries which either didn't map to a specific TV series ("Batman and Robin", "Power Rangers") or failed to distinguish between multiple iterations of a series ("MacGyver", "Quantum Leap"). In a few cases, this caused entries to move - in particular, "Superman" became "Adventures of Superman", as the only TV series to which that can realistically refer is "Adventures of Superman", the 1950s series starring George Reeves. I've also corrected an assortment of typographic or technical issues along the way, and applied dates in cases where they were necessary for clarification.

Next rock: the list proper!

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

The one I ganked is from [personal profile] thisbluespirit, and has obviously come down via a chain of native Brits who have seen many, many series that I, on the western edge of the continent on the other side of the relevant pond, have never so much as heard about.

No, not as far as I know. I took it from trobodora, who I think is German, although they did add The Avengers, but that is one of the best known old UK shows in the US anyway. I'm surprised it wasn't on the original, really. The list has only about 5-6 UK shows aside from the big fandom obvious one of Doctor Who, and I think most of those must have come with the original list, because they're very 2000s LJ (Life on Mars, which was big back then, Spooks was there, but only as MI5 - its US title & a couple well known things like Blackadder & Fawlty Towers, plus B7 which was still big in old school slash fandom in those days). The rest is, as per usual on the English-speaking internet, largely from the US. Perhaps some of the others you and I don't recognise are Australian or Canadian as well.

I added S&S, though, which is deeply obscure even to Brits! But that's just me. (The other two I added were US shows. I was going to add Spooks originally, but as I said, it was already on the list as MI5 - and no Brit would have put it on under that name.)

It was going up and down my flist, so I could have snagged one from another Brit if I'd wanted to, but I didn't.