As the Cardinal Flies

Now, then:

As one might expect, my markup of the list runs strongly to genre SF and fantasy - but it pretty much skips straight from very old material forward to the Buffyverse and its sisters & cousins & aunts, with not a lot of material in between.

There are, more or less, three major reasons for this. First, the vast majority of the shows I was watching as a teenager just aren't on the list, being largely short-run series that didn't last long enough to find an audience - Bill Bixby's Magician, one-season wonders a la The Fantastic Journey or Cliffhangers!, or outright weirdness on the order of Automan and Manimal. Second, I was a very hard sell for pretty much any sort of situation comedy that didn't have a genre hook; far too many of them, then and now, relied on humiliation-driven "jokes", and I'd been the target of too many of those in real life to enjoy seeing them on TV.

Third, and perhaps most significantly, my brother and I grew up in the TV generation where syndicated reruns ruled the airwaves on most afternoons, especially where local non-network stations were concerned. And our local independent had three series in particular that allowed it to dominate the daytime ratings for decades on end - Perry Mason, the original Star Trek, and Batman. They knew their audience, and quickly got on board when they were offered Babylon 5 and the revived Star Trek shows, and did very well in that corner of the market.

Even today, I gravitate away from the high end of the TV ratings curve. I'm still a hard sell for sitcoms. I'm still drawn to relatively lighter fare as opposed to prime-time soaps, violent police dramas, or grimdark shows where capital-E Evil consistently has the upper hand. And my taste in game shows runs to the smarter ones - Jeopardy or The Chase and even $100,000 Pyramid over "reality" TV in the mode of Survivor. (Do not even get me started on The Bachelor and its uncles and its brothers and its sons. Gahhh!, say I.)

And that's why my annotations look the way they do - the greater proportion of what I've liked well enough to be fannish about (and, nowadays, to write for), simply isn't represented on the list as it's come down to me.

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!