TV Guide - June 19, 2009 09:45 AM EST
From I Love Lucy to Lost and everything in between, we're counting down TV's finest. Check out the top ten episodes that made our list. Where does your favorite rank?
10. 24
"Season 1: 11PM-12AM" 5/21/2002
The actors were appalled, the network fought to stop it, but as the clock ticked toward midnight that first season on 24, everyone knew. "We had to kill off Teri Bauer," says cocreator Joel Surnow. Fans had spent all season watching Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) sweat to save his wife, Teri, their daughter and the future president. "Usually on TV, goodness prevails and tragedy is averted as our hero wraps things up, but we took away the predictable," Surnow says. Producers spent weeks arguing with Fox suits and convincing the cast that offing a major character made sense. The episode, says Surnow, "cast 24 as a show where anything could happen and anyone could die. It was like, "Oh, my God! What did I just see? I want to see more."
9. ALL IN THE FAMILY
"Cousin Maude's Visit" 12/11/1971
"We wanted to bring in a heavyweight who could belt Carroll O'Connor's Archie as he deserved," says creator Norman Lear, "and no one could be a cousin with a grudge like Bea Arthur." The sparring began when Edith's liberal cousin Maude arrived to bring relief to the flu-stricken Bunker household. "We knew two days into rehearsals that there was a show in Maude," Lear recalls. The night the episode aired, network chief Fred Silverman called with an order: "That woman! That's a series!"
8. MAD MEN
"Nixon Vs. Kennedy" 10/11/2007
The penultimate episode of Mad Men's first season was undoubtedly its climax: Adman Don Draper, aka Dick Whitman (Jon Hamm), is forced to confront the revelation of his false identity by nasty little blackmailer Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser). The action unfolds on Election Day 1960, a notable date in creator Matthew Weiner's metaphor-rich mind. "It was a great way to tell how Don was more like Nixon than Kennedy-an outsider and a self-made man," he explains, while Pete and JFK shared youth and Ivy League cachet. The episode had two stunning set pieces: a poll-watching office party that gets out of hand and a battlefield flashback that explains Don's macabre reinvention. Says Weiner, "Nixon lost and Don won, but it doesn't feel like it. He's just this poor, haunted guy."
7. THE HONEYMOONERS
"Better Living Through TV" 11/12/1955
Here's the template for generations of working-stiff big mouths brought low by their own bluster. Jackie Gleason's self-deluding Ralph Kramden comes up with a surefire plan to make easy money-a gadget called the Handy Housewife Helper. ("It cores apples, it scales fish, it sharpens scissors, and there's a little thing here that takes corns off your feet.") Despite the advice of wife Alice (Audrey Meadows), he and true-blue sidekick Ed Norton (Art Carney) stage a hilariously disastrous commercial. "The genius of Gleason's Kramden," says 'Til Death star Brad Garrett, who played Gleason in a 2002 CBS biopic, "was that his schemes and frustrations were always a by-product of his desire to make a better life for him and Alice." Garrett's exactly right. "You can't put your arms around a memory," Ralph says to Alice, threatening to walk out if she doesn't go along with his latest bad idea. She just gives him that look and says, "I can't even put my arms around you." But she does-every time. In other words, baby, they were the greatest.
6. ER
"Love's Labor Lost"
This heart-pounding race to save the life of a pregnant woman and her soon-to-be-born baby also offered a profoundly moving study in the moral growth of cocky young teaching doc Mark Greene (an outstanding Anthony Edwards). "I was on set watching the scene in the trauma room where the chaos escalated," recalls executive producer Christopher Chulack. "There was a real high-intensity emotion in being there three feet away, and what came over the air was just as emotional. That's a rare thing."
5. LOST
"Pilot" 9/22/2004 & 9/29/2004
What, exactly, were they thinking? The writers, the directors, the cast-did they really think there was a network series in this bizarre pilot about a downed airplane and the mystical mayhem it unleashes? Maybe not, and viewers are all the better for it. Damon Lindelof says he and cocreator J.J. Abrams found it "incredibly liberating" to craft a pilot that no one seriously expected to work as a weekly series. "It freed us up to do things that normally would've scared the hell out of us." Not that the weight of their endeavor completely escaped them. One line in the pilot particularly resonated with foreboding for Lindelof. "I'll never forget the day we were shooting Dominic Monaghan [Charlie] as he looked around and said, 'Guys, where are we?'" It was that moment, Lindelof says, when he realized, "Wow. We might actually have to answer that question one of these days."
4. I LOVE LUCY
"Lucy Does a TV Commercial" 5/5/1952
Sip by drunken sip, Lucy Ricardo made a TV commercial and Lucille Ball made TV history. "It was one of her favorites," says daughter Lucie Arnaz of the famous Vitameatavegamin episode. "The night it happened, she realized she'd hit the jackpot." The show's writers had to concoct a way of getting Lucy drunk without the character knowingly imbibing. "They never allowed her to get drunk on purpose," says Arnaz. "She never wanted anything that would be a bad influence." So what was in those bottles? Apple pectin. "The prop man, Herb Browar, searched and searched for something gruesome enough to help her make that face," says Arnaz, who recently ordered up the product for "An Evening With Lucille Ball," a stage production she's directing. "I finally got to taste it-and now I know why Mom made that face. It's like biting into a lemon. Or drinking that stuff they give you the night before you go in for your colonoscopy."
3. THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW
"Chuckles Bites the Dust" 10/25/1975
Take one unlucky peanut-clad clown, a rogue elephant, an irreverent newsroom, an Emmy-winning script and a virtuoso performance by one of TV's greatest comedians, and you get one of the biggest laugh-out-loud sitcom episodes ever. When kiddie-show host Chuckles the Clown has his tragic culinary misadventure, it's catnip to the WJM-TV crew-except for a disapproving Mary Richards. The comic payoff comes with Mary's unsuccessful attempts to stifle her snickers during a eulogy celebrating Chuckles' alter egos Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo and Auntie Yoo-Hoo. The pièce de genius: When the minister gives Mary permission to laugh, she begins to bawl. Amazingly, not everyone was on board, recalls star Mary Tyler Moore. The series' usual director opted out of the episode "because he thought it was not in good taste," says Moore. CBS also had misgivings about the show's tone, she says, "but we knew it was something special. It's not just about laughing at the funeral, but also the tensions and talking about it in the newsroom. It really is a uniquely funny episode."
2. THE SOPRANOS
"College" 2/7/1999
Meet Tony Soprano. Loving dad, waste-management executive, murderer. "College," which finds James Gandolfini's capo di tutti capi accompanying his daughter, Meadow, on a bucolic campus tour, was inspired by a similar road trip that creator David Chase had recently taken with his own daughter. "Then you start thinking," recalls Chase, "what could happen there that would be dramatic? Well, what if some guy was living in witness protection in some little town in New England and Tony saw him…" He adds with a chuckle, "I guess that's what they call 'high-concept.'" And high drama, as Tony proceeded to stalk the "rat" and strangle him with an electrical cord. When HBO execs fretted that showing the star of their new series in such a savage light would alienate viewers, Chase had a two-pronged defense. "In Tony's terms, that guy deserved it, and if the audience was at all identifying with him, they'd feel the same way," he says. "Also, if Tony knows the informer is there and he doesn't [kill him], the audience will lose even more respect for him." Viewers found themselves both shocked and enthralled. A hit was made.
1. SEINFELD
"The Contest" 11/18/1992
Ironic: The most celebrated episode of a show that claimed to be about nothing is an episode obsessed with something. Genius: It never actually said what that something was. Not that it could have been anything else. As soon as Jason Alexander's George related being "caught" doing, um, "you know..." by his traumatized mom, we knew the topic at hand. Thus began a glorious half hour of pop-culture history in the making. "It gave people this sudden sense that there was a different kind of show on TV," says Jerry Seinfeld, calling "The Contest" a "pivot point" in the series. He thinks the script's success hinged on its coyness: "There's nothing easier than being shocking. The sexuality wasn't what made the show so memorable, but the way that we did it." Yes, it was based on a real-life battle of wills in which cocreator Larry David once engaged. No, we don't know if he won, but this episode unquestionably won our contest.
Check out the rest of our list here:
#100-81
#80-61
#60-41
#40-21
#20-11
Good gracious!!
