August 2001 Archives

If you've been following the TeeVee Awards closely this year -- no doubt to put the finishing touches on your unauthorized biography, Total Assholes: The TeeVee.org Story with special foreword by Dennis Boutsikaris -- you may have noticed we've had a little trouble coming up with decisive winners this year. In no less than four categories, we've thrown up our collective hands after hours of tedious debate and handed out accolades to multiple honorees. When the time came for definitive declarations, we wavered. When charged with heralding the best of the best, we hemmed and hawed. In the moment of truth, we kicked the point-after instead of trying to run it in the end zone for two, took the tie, and puckered up for a delightful afternoon of sister-kissing.

Well, except for the Worst Actress Award. It took us less than a minute to single out Emily Procter for her crown of thorns.

So in a year marked by indecision and second-guessing, we're pleased to end our annual awards with a category in which we honor one clear winner as the Best Half-Hour Show of the 2000-01 season. Even better, it's probably the easiest time we had picking a winner other than those glorious seconds watching Ms. Procter's nomination clip. And best of all, we managed to come up with a cut-and-dry winner in a field brimming with top contenders.

"What the deuce?" you've probably exclaimed, assuming you're the type of person who uses arcane late 19th century exclamations of amazement in lieu of profanity. "Didn't you guttersnipes just finish venting considerable spleen about how dreary and awful sitcoms have become when you dragged NBC's good name through the mud? Or have repeated blows to the head completely diminished your short-term memory?"

Possibly. But we assure you, we're on the level here.

Oh sure, the 30-minute live-action sitcom is well-nigh unwatchable these days, a joyless rehash of interchangeable premises and stale banter that wasn't all that funny when Ross and Rachel said it the first dozen or so times. Once the ruling elite of network television, the sitcom now finds itself as bloodied and toothless as a preppie who wanders into an Oakland biker bar and asks the assembled patrons if they could maybe move those scooters. As a genre, the sitcom's on life support -- and grieving relatives are beginning to eye the plug hanging out of that nearby electrical socket with alarming frequency. If you're watching a sitcom these days, it's likely out of inertia or force of habit or a misplaced sense of obligation. Or maybe you've just lost the remote -- we try not to judge here.

So what's a lazy TV watcher to do? Stuff the 30-minute sitcom into a cheap pine box, pay some day laborer a couple of bucks to dig an unmarked hole in a potter's field, and resolve yourself to a life of watching television programs in hour-long increments?

Nah. Things are bad right now, but they're not that bad. Although Bob Saget does return to prime time TV next month, so you might want to keep the gravedigger on speed dial.

Until then, there are still a few shows out there trying to squeeze some life out of the spent orange rind that is the half-hour sitcom format -- and they all seem to have a few things in common. Our favorite half-hour programs take chances. They eschew the "seemingly harmless misundertanding results in 26 minutes of hilarious consequences" rut in which so many other shows seem to find themselves. Instead, the best half-hour programs of today defy the sitcom conventions that have been carved in stone since Jack Tripper first ran afoul of the Ropers. They chart out new territory. Most important, they make us laugh.

It's probably a coincidence that most of them also happen to be animated.

That's not to say programming that features flesh-and-blood actors isn't worth the occasional look-see. Everybody Loves Raymond and King of Queens don't exactly have premises that split the atom or reinvent the wheel. What they do have is solid writing, great casts, and not a single one of the urbane hipsters NBC likes to stick in its sitcoms within a 500-yard radius of the cameras. If other sitcoms followed the lead set by Raymond and King of Queens, we'd be living in a golden age. That the two shows bookend Yes, Dear tells you that we are not.

Good Eats -- reason enough to call up your cable operator and threaten bodily harm if you don't get wired up for the Food Network -- doesn't purport to be a sitcom. And yet, there were few funnier moments on TV this past season than watching Good Eats host Alton Brown mimic the opening sequence of Mission Impossible 2 for an episode on the wonders of poaching. When Good Eats isn't making us laugh, it's teaching us important life lessons about canola oil's smoke point and the right bowl for whisking up a good batch of flan. And say all you want about the relative merits of Frasier or Friends, but when was the last time either of those shows taught you how to make a kick-ass chocolate mousse? We'll take our man Alton Brown over Kelsey Grammer, David Schwimmer and all the rest of their poseur pals any day of the week and twice on Sundays (when Good Eats episodes sometimes air commercial-free, as a matter of fact).

But if you want truly innovative programming these days, you'd best start favoring ink and paint over flesh and blood. For the best in half-hour programming -- in the 2000-01 season, at least -- cartoons reign supreme.

In a sense, it's almost unfair to compare animated sitcoms with their live-action counterparts. An animated show can tweak the rules and conventions of prime-time programming to the breaking point in a way that live-action productions can only imagine in their most liquor-besotted dreams. A cartoon -- be it of the after-school, Saturday morning, or prime time varieties -- can bend, mutilate and spindle its characters without any consequence. Try that with a live-action show, and you've got, well, Meego.

Try suggesting a couple of years ago that animation was the best thing going for prime time TV, and people would have looked at you like you just toasted the Queen's health in a Belfast pub. That was back in the days when network executives -- seduced by the success of The Simpsons and King of the Hill and always looking for ways to produce programming on the cheap -- flooded the airwaves with one terrible cartoon after another. But after a brief but thorough winnowing-out period -- goodbye, Dilbert; see you in hell, PJs -- the lackluster to just-plain-awful shows were sent off to the woodshed, leaving the solid to spectacular animated series to give live-action shows a run for their money.

What that leaves us with are shows like The Simpsons, a program praised so lavishly by so many people that entire thesauruses have been worn down to the nub as etymologists work feverishly to invent new superlatives. Yeah, the show can be uneven, and any Simpsons fan worth his or her salt can recount the litany of ways the series isn't as good as it used to be. But consider that there are probably fans of the show that weren't even alive when The Simpsons debuted -- and yet it still delivers the comedic goods at a more-than-respectable clip.

When Bob Saget can make that claim, we'll lay off.

Daria hasn't scaled the absurdist heights of The Simpsons. But it does provide a nicely skewed look at the world of high school, infusing its characters with more depth than all the standard-issue sitcoms in prime time put together. That it happens to provide a unique, intelligent brand of humor on MTV -- a channel whose programming increasingly feels like a continuous advertisement for something horrible, ugly and loud -- may be its most amazing accomplishment of all.

Malcolm in the Middle isn't an animated series -- but it might as well be. It has that same "Anything for a laugh and to hell with the time-space continuum" mentality that has been the bread and butter for shows like The Simpsons for years. No detail is too small to escape the notice of Malcolm's producers, no visual aside so insignificant that it doesn't make for a good throwaway joke. In fact, some of the best jokes on the series this season -- a choir of military school cadets practicing a swinging rendition of "The Candy Man," or any shot of Erik Per Sullivan staring wordlessly into space -- take place in the background while the main plot chugs ahead on center stage. Perhaps the best compliment we can pay Malcolm is that the show holds up under repeat viewings -- you get to see some the jokes you missed the first time around because you were laughing so much at the rest of the show.

But as good as all of those programs are, they're no match for our winner of the Best Half Hour Award. In just its third season, Futurama has long since dropped the distinction of being Matt Groening's other show to make its case for being the best program on network TV.

Futurama boasts some impressively rich and detailed animation -- you almost have to watch the show on freeze frame to catch the many textures and visual gags that comprise the background. But the richness of the Futurama palette extends to the writing as well. Few other shows have as many tricks in their repertoire, let alone pull them off as masterfully as Futurama does week after week.

You like a little pop culture-skewering with your programming? This season alone, Futurama featured shout-outs to M*A*S*H, "The Cider House Rules," "Fantastic Voyage," and "The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island." Big fan of silly comedy? In that Harlem Globetrotters episode, Futurama posits that the Trotters are extraterrestrials from a distant galaxy who travel the universe challenging planets to basketball contests in which nothing -- not even the fate of civilization -- is at stake. You want comedy that rises into the rarefied air of brilliance? Turns out the Globetrotters are also brilliant astrophysicists -- astrophysicists who dismiss rival scientists as "jive turkeys," but astrophysicists nevertheless.

It's also worth noting that while Futurama can deliver the funny in heaping doses, it can also be fairly touching when it tries. This season's "Luck of the Fryrish" episode dealt with estrangement, loss and reconciliation, without ever resorting to maudlin manipulation or overwrought pathos. Another show tries that, and it comes across as a transparent Emmy grab. Futurama pulls it off because the writers respect both the characters they created and the audience they're addressing.

But Futurama's greatest feat may have occurred in the episode in which Fry's girlfriend from the 20th Century shows up in Futurama's world of the distant future. A minor plot point in that episode involves Pauly Shore -- the wretched comic and past winner of Worst Actor honors here at TeeVee -- getting thawed out of hibernation for the 1,000th anniversary screening of one of his horrible movies. In the Futurama universe, however, Pauly reveals that he became so interested in biospheres and environmental studies during the filming of Bio-Dome that he pursued an advanced degree in that subject. He now goes by the name of Dr. Paul Shore.

For making us laugh at a Pauly Shore performance, Futurama deserves a MacArthur Genius grant, or maybe a share of the Nobel Prize. In the meantime, our silly Best Half-Hour Show award will have to do.

Additional contributions to this article by: Philip Michaels.

We've been doling out these TeeVee trinkets for a few years. So by this point, you've probably figured we're not like the other awards out there.

First there's the banquet -- bottles of wine, a nice plate of chicken (plus a vegan alternative for those flaky Hollywood types): we don't have one of those. Then there's the award. Other ceremonies offer big brassy statues, giant paperweights costing upward of $500 a shot. Seeing as how this Web site as a whole is unlikely to make enough money to pay for even a single one of those statues -- let alone pay our domain-name fees -- the gaudy doo-dads are out of the question. Most award shows feature Armani tuxes and designer gowns. As for TeeVee, it might interest you know that the person typing this isn't wearing any pants.

Then, of course, there's the matter of us being a bunch of cruel bastards who delight in putting down the hard-working men and women of the showbiz community -- whether we're wearing pants or not.

And that's why, unlike those banquet-holding, heavy-statue-giving, fully-clothed suck-up awards, we at TeeVee like to mix in some sour with our sweet. So while this may be one of the few times during the year in which you'll find us saying anything nice at all, we like to supplement our accolades with some well-deserved crunchy beatings.

And that brings us to where we are today, handing a big bouquet of thistles to the two hour-long series this year that made us retch the most. That's right -- it's time to celebrate the Worst Hour Shows.

One of our stinkers is Titans, an obvious choice. And yet, it was a hard choice to make, given just how much lousy stuff is on television these days. When NBC announced last spring that it planned to take the prime-time soap genre out of the deep-freeze and set the microwave on thaw with a series that followed in the footsteps of Dallas and Dynasty, we didn't roll our eyes... well, not much. Because, in the irony-laden universe we live in, surely Titans would be a meta-soap, a series that understood the ridiculous trappings of those relics from TV's past, and could send them up or camp them out. You know, sort of like Melrose Place. Only without the subtle nuances of Andrew Shue.

Unfortunately, Titans was produced in an irony-free zone. And that's why this leaden hour sunk like a stone. No campy fun was to be had. Instead, we got to see that, yes, that nice Yasmine Bleeth could sink lower than Baywatch. And that Dallas stalwart Victoria Principal -- shot through a Vaseline gauze that had apparently been applied to the camera lens like caulk to a troublesome crack -- has gotten really, really old.

Still, who could really be surprised? Titans was a stinker and was always going to be -- we're talking degrees of lousiness here, not orders of magnitude. And it got what it deserved -- namely that it got shitcanned in short order, before it could do any lasting damage to the populace.

So we ask you -- what's the greater crime? Being a lousy, poorly-developed series in a moribund genre that was better off left for dead? Or being a critically-acclaimed ratings darling that blows it so bad that it goes from being one of our favorites to being our Biggest Disappointment to finally hitting rock bottom as Worst Hour Series?

We couldn't decide, so we gave the award to both of them. Yasmin Bleeth, meet Anthony Edwards. Cast of Titans, please sit to the right. Cast of ER, sit to the left. The wake will begin shortly.

You wanna talk about your soap operas with no clue just how far out of touch they are with reality? Let's talk ER. Once the indisputed king of television during its breathtaking, burst-of-adrenaline first season, this series has been in an equally breathtaking decline for years. Perhaps the only reason that ER didn't take the moldy cheese outright is that the show has become so enerverating, several of the Vidiots don't even bother to waste a weekly hour of their lives watching Noah Wyle walk into a wall or Anthony Edwards make us long for his "Revenge of the Nerds" days or Erik Palladino... well, do some of his best work, quite frankly.

And that right there is part of the problem.

This year, in addition to switching to "letterbox" format -- which is great, were it not for the fact that almost everybody still has square TV sets -- ER provided us with a series of ridiculous plot twists. From Mark Greene's brain tumor to a spate of pregnancies at County, ER has swept us away from the emergency room itself and into the ridiculously complicated lives of its characters -- few of whom we really care about anyway.

Unless you tune in each week to see if Michael Michele's Cleo Finch finally sheds her face plate and discovers why it is you humans cry.

Is it any wonder that the show's original cast members are bailing out at an alarming rate? (Except for Sherry Stringfield, who bailed out early on in the show's run and is now coming back to offset the current or impending losses of George Clooney, Julianna Margulies, Eriq La Salle, and Anthony Edwards.)

ER is still among the top-rated series on TV -- and will probably be this coming year, Jeff Probst-hosted reality series notwithstanding. But that victory is one of inertia, of an audience too tired to break the viewing habits they've built up over the past few years. There's simply no other explanation.

Sure, all series decline over time. But while we're not as hot on Friends as we once were, it's managed to not embarrass itself as its producers wring the last drips of money from its corpse before tossing it into the recycle bin. ER, wrapped in its letterboxed pretentions and its endless revolving door of characters and plot complications, is beyond embarrassment. It's so bad, we can barely even remember that brief shining moment when it was the best thing on TV.

It's not a horrible disappointment anymore. Now, ER is just a lousy show. And that's worthy of recognition, even if it's of the snide, no-banquet-no-trophy-no-pants variety.

Additional contributions to this article by: Jason Snell.

At first blush, the only things Star Trek: Voyager and The West Wing would appear to have in common is a Wednesday evening time slot and a cast of bipedal hominids. One show is a critically acclaimed, people-pleasing drama on a major network; the other, the red-headed stepchild of the Star Trek franchise on UPN. One concerns itself with dramatizing the business of government; the other is an intergalactic iteration of Gilligan's Island. The list goes on.

So why are these two wed together as the winners of this year's Biggest Disappointment award? Is this another example of the indecisive, bickering Vidiots voting to a draw on a major show category?

Maybe. But we prefer to look at the overall gestalt, the zeitgeist, the whatever-German-word-will-gull-people-into-believing-we're-onto-something-here. We are big fans of the big picture. We like to ask ourselves, "Why? Why did these two shows disappoint us beyond all others?"

The answer comes down to respect.

We really don't ask much of television shows. From a medium that continually employs Tony Danza, how can we? We like the shows that do what they set out to do and do it well, like Gilmore Girls or The Job or Ed. These shows aren't particularly grand in ambition. What they do well is tell a story.

So it once was with Voyager, insist those Vidiots who have not yet recanted their Star Trek fandom. Yes, Captain Janeway and Chakotay were basically the Skipper and Gilligan in a series that lacked the earthy humor of the Howells. But that isn't a bad thing: for years, Voyager drew implicit parallels between the strange and terrible journey Odysseus made and their own trip home. Voyager exploited the strength of the sci-fi genre and used fantastical situations to tell ethical parables; the end of its fourth season, featuring a past enemy of Janeway sending the crew back toward the threatening space of the Borg, is still one of the all-time greats in terms of bringing the metaphorical birds home to roost. Best of all, Voyager continually stressed that maybe, going home wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

For seven years, we watched Voyager -- well, except for the ones who recanted Trek and those think it's just silly sci-fi for the kids -- waiting to see what would happen when a makeshift crew composed of anti-Federation terrorists and Starfleet personnel finally, inevitably made it back home. Would the powers that be recognize that the sum of the crew's achievements far outweighed their former criminal status? Would Captain Janeway be demoted for her occasionally unorthodox leadership? How would everyone adjust to life after coming home?

Unfortunately, the show answered none of these questions. Rather than provide any sort of denouement to the seven-year trip, the series ended with a bogus time-travel plot, gratuitous Borg battles, and a big, fat smack in the face to anyone who had bothered investing any time or energy in the characters over the course of the show. The show's writers and producers addressed this oversight in one moment at the very end, when the crew gathers together before the Stock Climactic Battle and toasts, "to the journey!" Which is sort of like Hawkeye assembling the cast of MASH together and saying, "Hey, how's about a nice round of applause for the Korean War?"

That sort of thing would be fine, except every good travelogue has a chapter about what it's like to be home, and skipping that part shortchanges everyone who patiently waited for years. In the end, Voyager demonstrated how little they respected both the epic story arc they had crafted and the people who trusted the writers to do justice to that story. Heck, even killing the crew off or leaving them stranded forever in the Delta Quadrant would've been more appropriate an ending.

So what does The West Wing have to do with this? After all, Aaron Sorkin's presidential opus is a young'un compared to the creaking Voyager; people don't yet have real history with the show. Beyond that shared time slot, The only thing those two would appear to have in common over the last two years is a marked tendency to play fast and loose with the space-time continuum. Even ardent Sorkin apologists disagree over whether the first season's cliff-hanging massacre at the Moldavian Embassy took place in May or August.

But the two shows are bound by more than facile coincidence. They're united by respect -- or the lack thereof. The first year of The West Wing managed to balance a respect for governing ideals with a funny, fallible reality of actually trying to govern; the people who breathed life into that show had their slapstick moments, but more often, they were vested with an inherent dignity that managed to survive public gaffes and scandals.

This year, however, few of the characters emerged with their gravitas intact. We realize that one of the comedic elements Sorkin frequently employs is contrast -- Hey, it's seasoned, smart people doing dumb things! -- but this year's series of pratfalls, mishaps, and comic misunderstandings were tone-deaf and flat. We do not think Ainsley Hayes's transformation from a smart, sangfroid professional to a drunken Republican sex kitten is hilarious. Josh Lyman slip-sliding his way through the halls of Congress may seem like the height of physical comedy to some -- to us, it was as out of place as Jerry Lewis pratfalling his way through a docudrama. And just how many ways can you take C.J. Cregg -- once a cool and composed professional -- and turn her into a hapless bumbler? Allison Janney wasn't the only West Wing cast member who had to endure indignity after indignity this season -- the show could have easily changed its name to Our President and His Idiot Staff without anyone raising an eyebrow.

Then again, we may not have been in the same frame of mind viewing any of those scenes as the author might have been when writing them.

From the cheap seats, it doesn't look as if the people running the show respect the characters enough to treat them with any measure of consistency. That goes double for plot lines -- a potentially intriguing story where Sam Seaborn's legal prowess has appalling consequences for the government was raised and sunk in one episode, rather than playing out subtly over the course of his subsequent work. We met a marvelous foil in GOP consigliere Ann Stark (well-played by Felicity Huffman), who disappeared after one episode, never to be seen again save for an occasional appearance in the "Previously on the West Wing" segment of the show. And we never did find out what happened to professional irritant Mandy Hampton.

Paying attention to The West Wing yielded few rewards this season. In fact, paying attention to the show often left us with a palpable sense of deja vu; after we watched the episode The Stackhouse Filibuster, many of us realized... hey, we've seen that framing device before! On Sports Night! And that episode where Sam found out his father was having a decades-old affair sure was compelling. Almost as compelling as when we saw it before. On Sports Night!

Those weren't the only instances where we noticed the cross-show recycling. We don't have a problem with re-using good ideas, but such blatant self-copying makes us suspect that the people responsible for the show don't think we're worth the effort to come up with a new twist. Guess we'll know for sure when William Macy shows up as a ratings consultant during sweeps.

We stuck with The West Wing this season because the first season was good. But we have to ask ourselves -- why continue watching a show that has so little regard for storytelling, or makes so little effort to stretch beyond plot devices already road-tested on other shows? Why should we care?

There's a lot of television out there to watch, and much of it is crafted with loving attention to characterization and plot. These shows respect the story, and they respect the audience experiencing that story. In the end, the reason both The West Wing and Star Trek: Voyager get the nod for Biggest Disappointment is because they no longer respected the stories they were telling or, by extension, us.

Additional contributions to this article by: Lisa Schmeiser.

And so we finally have proof. After millennia of speculation, rumor and hearsay, we finally have ironclad evidence that Satan does indeed walk the Earth. In fact, he co-hosted the fourth season of Junkyard Wars. Somebody should call the Pope so he and his boys can do something about it.

If ever there was an example of the ultimate physical manifestation of pure evil, George Gray is it. He managed to take one of the best shows on television and turn it into an unendurable hour of spastic mugging, slope-headed yehaws, and slapstick buffoonery, all with barely a flick of his barbed tail. You can't do something like that if you're a mere mortal. You have to be Hell-spawned, and intent on defiling all that is good.

So, y'know, mission accomplished. Score one for Satan.

To call Gray uncomfortably awful is to do a disservice to rectal surgery. His whole manner is so completely at odds with what makes Junkyard Wars the treasure that it is -- or, rather, that it was -- that his presence can only be explained by the machinations of dark forces. Junkyard Wars is geek TV, and to put someone with the thoughtfulness of a coked up frat boy at the helm shows not only a fundamental misunderstanding about why the show is as wonderful as it is -- was -- but to reduce it to something as base as, oh, Extreme Gong. This is miscasting on a criminal scale. They might as well have used Carrot Top.

Maybe there are people who like George Gray. Maybe there are shows where he fits. But we are not those people and Junkyard Wars is not that show.

Compare Gray to his much-missed predecessor, Robert Llewellyn. While Llewellyn could be a little generous with his too-precious "bodgtastic"-isms, he fit almost perfectly into the vibe of the show -- smart, goofy and enthusiastic. Of these, Gray only manages "enthusiastic" and then just because we count hooting like a moron. (If you caught the U.S.-UK showdown, in which Gray and Llewellyn appeared side by side, the contrast was pretty damned clear.)

Everything that seemed to come naturally to Llewellyn is squeezed out of Gray with all the delicacy and nuance of large turd. Gray has the telegenic grace of a nine-year-old with a mouthful of hamburger, only with slightly less insightful commentary. The whole of his observations on the speed of the drag racers built in one episode: "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" His remarks regarding the vegetable to be fired from cannons in another: "Punkins! Punkins! Punkins!" We're guessing there was more than one "Yee-haw!" in there, but we were busy curling into the fetal position and sobbing.

Thank you, George. We get it. You think this is a sport. You think you're the John Madden of TLC, full of blustery hot air and bursting at the seams with over-the-top energy. Why walk when you can run? Why speak when you can shout? Why grin when you can mug? Why make a cogent point or remain quiet when you can holler, "Punkins!"?

Because it ruins the damned show, you freaking monkey! Because there's something being taught here, because the show is nothing like a sport, because watching people think can be just as -- more! -- amusing than watching you wet yourself. The Americanized version of Junkyard Wars fulfills every stereotype of the Americanized version anything: bigger and more obvious, louder and dumber, more of everything except what makes it actually work. George Gray is the walking personification of that attitude, not only the ugly American, but the big, obvious, loud, dumb American.

And we're not even going to mention his stupid little beard.

Our seething hatred for Gray -- for anybody named "Gray," or named "George," or bipedal -- and what he has done to Junkyard Wars can be summed up in one phrase: he beat Tony Danza. Dim-eyed palooka and perennial TeeVee whipping boy, Danza has done so much damage to our collective psyche that that we refuse to say his name three times in a row, for fear that he will appear from thin air and devour us all. But even supernatural dread was trumped by the gibbering, drooling, eye-rolling, eye-popping, eye-pooping Gray.

Or, put another way: there is only one person in this world who could make us not want to watch beautiful and talented Junkyard Wars co-host Cathy Rogers... and that person managed to get himself on the only show where we get to see her.

Don't try to tell us that Satan wasn't involved in that deal.

Additional contributions to this article by: Greg Knauss.

The Sopranos features nudity, drugs, and violence. Junkyard Wars features guys with welding torches trying to make catapults and hovercrafts. Who could decide between these two shows? Not us, that's for sure.

Why, they're practically the same show, aren't they? On The Sopranos, you've got James Gandolfini's complex portrait of a man trying to be a good husband and father while also being the head of a mob family. On Junkyard Wars, you've got the guy who plays Kryten on Red Dwarf criticizing people's plans for hot rods made out of scrap metal. Why, the coincidences are, well, nonexistent.

Really, the only thing the shows have in common is that they're both on cable. No broadcast channel could show The Sopranos, even without the constant nudity, swearing, violence, drugs, and psychiatry. It's too, for lack of a better word, adult. It's a show that tackles mature themes, and for once, that's not a euphemism for Girls Going Wild on Spring Break.

And Junkyard Wars, aside from being almost pornographic for people who own welding torches, commits the cardinal sin of actually being educational. After watching just a few episodes, the average viewer knows all about the dangers of propellers that turn backwards and masts that won't hold up a sail. We're not sure how we're going to apply this knowledge in everyday life, but our point is that this is a show that throws around phrases like "the Pythagorean Theorem" and "molecular weight". It, too, would never fit in on network television.

Also, both shows have secret themes. While The Sopranos is, on the surface, about the world of organized crime, it's secretly about Tony Soprano's psyche and how his mother messed him up but good. And while Junkyard Wars appears to be about people trying to build vehicles out of junk, it's really about, um, people trying to build vehicles out of junk. Okay, so the shows don't really have anything in common after all. So let's dispense with the lit-major attempts to tie this thing together into a unified whole and just bask in the greatness that is good television. Because let's face it, if we were the sort of people that could make The Sopranos sound like it had the same qualities as Junkyard Wars, we'd probably also be the sort of people who could decide between the two.

The Sopranos is anchored by James Gandolfini's portrayal of Tony Soprano, challenged this year by the award-winning Joe Pantoliano. Although Tony faces the same challenges we all face every day (his son being expelled, his mother trying to have him killed, his bumbling lieutenants failing to kill a Russian and subsequently getting lost in the woods), there's still something compelling about watching him deal with them.

And it's not like Tony's the only thing that The Sopranos has going for it. If you don't like the sight of a man trying to juggle a mob life and a family life -- wait, that's only two things, isn't it? It seems like it should be at least three things if he's going to be juggling things. Let's add "a thriving, if nebulous, career in the waste-management business" to the list -- there are also a variety of character actors with varying degrees of wackiness to watch. If you want someone more on the realistic side, you've got Uncle Junior or Carmela. If you're more in the mood for zany antics, you can't do better than Bobby Bacala or Furio. While we're on the subject, we'd like to give special attention to Federico Castelluccio's portrayal of Furio. Not since Urkel has such precise comedic timing been combined so well with murderous psychopathy.

Meanwhile, on Junkyard Wars, host Robert Llewellyn doesn't actually do anything. He's backed up by Cathy Rogers, who also doesn't really do anything. It doesn't sound like much, but they're really good at it. There is also an endless parade of people with great facility at using power saws to disassemble vehicles. Oh, and if you tune into the wrong week, Llewellyn will be mysteriously replaced by some American guy with a soul patch. Then there are the contestants, but they're not all that interesting either. Frankly, if it weren't for the fact that every episode features showers of sparks and people trying desperately to get junk engines to turn over in time to power their scratch-built combines, we'd quickly lose interest.

Okay, that's not true. The truth is, we'd probably watch even if every episode consisted of nothing but Robert Llewellyn, Cathy Rogers, and six random crackpots with no idea how to build the machine of the week. We know this, because that's really all it is. It's like a reality show, except, you know, interesting.

Additional contributions to this article by: Monty Ashley.

When awards time rolls around, things at TeeVee get heated. This is mainly because the COO won't allow us to run the air conditioners lest we end up like Salon, begging our readers for spare change from under the sofa cushions. It is also because this is when all of us Vidiots start lobbying for our favorite shows and actors for various Best awards. This usually results in brain-bending arguments, lifelong hatreds, and a motley collection of weird fringe series -- many no longer on the air -- and offbeat (read: funny-looking) talent.

This year was no exception (names being bandied about variously were Gideon's Crossing, Michael Ian Black, Alyson Hanigan, and Peter Boyle) but for one category: The Best New Show of the 2000-01 Season. For that coveted award, the field was split only between four shows, each clearly a stand-out such that none could deny them. And CSI, which we're pretty sure only made it that far because Schmeiser gets two votes (you can guess why).^*

And yet we had to choose only one show. Except we couldn't. So we chose two.

All of the Best New Show nominees had this in common: They tapped the mallet a few more times on that stake through the heart of the traditional sitcom. But none of them as much as Ed and The Job, both of which, ten years ago, would have been imagined as standard three-room set, three-camera, shoulder-height, laugh-track, filmed-before-a-live-studio-audience, grade triple-Z crap.

Not today. Not in this world with The Sopranos eating away at that prime-time network audience. Today, the ascending TV series form is the dramedy (a portmanteau term that'd make us gag if we didn't recall that "sitcom" wasn't exactly handed down to us from Cicero).

Ed is the dramedy defined and refined. Fourteen years ago thirtysomething was called a dramedy, but what it was really was melodrama with mumbling and the occasional joke. Ed perfectly mixes humor ranging from sitcom-level contrivance (as when Phil tries to drum up demand for his so-called Fine Corinthian Turkeys) to detailed character-based observations (during most of the scenes between Coach Kerwin and Ed as the coach was being sued for giving a D to a college-bound student). The show manages to swing between near-slapstick and deep, strong emotions. It contains the stuff of life: Love, death, friendship, family.

Better yet, Ed, unlike so many shows, doesn't just pat the heads of these as plot points on its way to wrapping up the storyline. These are the storyline, more often than not. Perhaps there's some silly courtroom thing going on, but who cares? Most times the show is at its best when it forgets about the silly lawyer-who-owns-a-bowling-alley premise, and gets up to eye-level with its characters. Maybe the only excuse for Ed to meet Molly's grandfather, Charlie, was that Ed was a lawyer and Charlie needed a will written up. But what we remember is when Charlie talks about discovering he was gay -- after his wife of 35 years died -- and he says, "Isn't that the damnedest thing?" "Yes sir," says Ed. "That is the damnedest thing."

That's what Ed is about: The damnedest thing.

We're not here to tell you the show is perfect. It's certainly been uneven during this, its first season. In addition to love, death, friendship, and family, there is also Justin Long's Warren Cheswick, whose ejection from the show and subsequent hounding into monastic obscurity was ordered by the Vidiots in a 4-3 vote.

Never mind him, though, or the other sags in the show's line. When Ed worked -- and that was most of the time -- Ed worked. Whether you tuned in for Mike and Ed's running ten dollar gags, for Michael Ian Black's riveting portrayal of a character actor on the edge, or to find out the answer to that age-old question "Will they or won't they?" -- Ed and Molly, that is, not Ed and Carol -- you found something wonderful. And if you didn't tune in, shame on you.

The Job, meanwhile, chose to deconstruct the sitcom from the other direction, and, while it was at it, take apart the hour-long cop drama, too. This would be an impossible case for any but the strongest talents in TV -- and apparently The Job got them. Denis Leary we know is a great, great man. Peter Tolan, Leary's co-writer on the show, hasn't exactly shown great promise in some of his previous writing gigs ("My Fellow Americans," "What Planet Are You From?"), but maybe he's here to write the jokes. The rest of the crew -- ye gods, none of them have done anything worthwhile.

Okay, so The Job is almost entirely Denis Leary's fault. We can live with that.

What Leary has done here is nothing short of amazing: His show could be a sitcom, if it weren't for the fact that it tossed out all the defining sitcom features, like limited sets, stagey blocking, unrealistic lighting, stupid non-plots, poor acting, weak scripts, and the laugh track. In the ritualized Noh play world of the prime time situation comedy, Denis Leary has produced "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." Not just different from what went before, but exposing and exploding what went before.

Also, his show could be a cop drama, if it weren't for the fact that it satirizes cop dramas almost from Act I, Scene I, Shot I. Jettisoned are the portentious plots where noble officers of the law selflessly track down vicious serial killers while schtupping each other in the locker room and hiding all manner of personal mental afflictions. They are replaced by practical jokes involving cadaver feet and the certain knowledge that, whatever happens, tomorrow is just another day on the job.

Leary deserves even more points for his portrayal of a character few actors would attempt, especially on the small screen: A drug-abusing, hard-drinking, womanizing, profane and profligate fuck-up. Can't you just see Michael J. Fox in this role, or maybe Steven Weber? Other actors take chances by playing against type -- usually by aiming for Conflicted Hero or Evil Villain. Leary takes a chance by playing to type, inflating his media persona, adding embellishments, and somehow making this likeable.

So Leary's baby is another fine dramedy mixing humor and reality while demolishing the tottering old ideas of what TV could be. One thing the Vidiots can all agree on: Ed and The Job are showing us how truly excellent television can be, and they are the Best New Shows of 2000-01.

* Because Phil always votes the way she tells him to.^**

** We're kidding, of course. Not even Lisa could bring herself or Phil to vote for CSI.

Additional contributions to this article by: Chris Rywalt.

Every year, when we get ready to make some actress cry, we ask ourselves this question: when we look over our candidates -- our Mariska Hargitays, our Jean Louisa Kellys, our Christine Baranskis -- are we punishing the actress or the role she plays?

The debate surrounding this year's winner was especially vigorous. Were we slamming Emily Procter because we objected to a Republican breaching the cozy liberal womb of The West Wing? Did we diss her because of the many demeaning and dimwitted scenes she performed? Or could she just not act?

We can throw out the first charge: we here at TeeVee have long thought that it wouldn't kill The West Wing to show a Republican who didn't look as though they were going to round up the Gore children and commence slurping the marrow from their freshly-hewn bones. When one looks at what Ainsley Hayes advocates -- indeed, when one reads lines like, "This White House that feels that government is better for children than parents are. That looks at 40 years of degrading and humiliating free lunches, handed out in a spectacularly failed effort to level the playing field, and says 'Let's try 40 more,'" one can see where a strong, level dissenting voice could really complement the show.

So no, we have no problem with Republicans on The West Wing.

As for the second charge -- we're picking on Emily Procter because her character devolved into a daffy blonde, and we're really just lashing out at the folks who wrote her -- we have two words for you: Donna Moss. The show's other shiksa goddess also suffered her fair share of indignities at Aaron Sorkin's hands this season, but Janel Moloney, who plays Donna, wasn't even mentioned when we began balloting. For that matter, if we wanted to throw open the field to any actress who's been the punchline to one of Sorkin's clumsy vaudevillian antics, we'd also include Allison Janney, the lucky recipient of this year's "I'm-not-wearing-any-pants" storyline. But we're not, because both Moloney and Janney have something Procter does not: presence.

This brings it back to Procter's acting. She's got a part with lines that a competent thespian should be able to hit out of the ballpark, but she consistently misses. She's been handed some marvelous moments -- every time she makes the point that she can rise above partisan politics and work toward a greater good, she's being given an Emmy-nominating scene -- and in each of them, one of three things happens:

1. The entire show screeches to a halt while she labors to deliver an interminable monologue.

2. She fades into the background while other, competent actors drive the bus.

3. She gets out-acted by Rob Lowe.

Consider that list one more time.

1. The moment she begins speechifying, we, the viewers at home, can watch Martin Sheen and John Spencer visibly age.

2. She turns into the invisible woman whenever there is more than one other participant in a scene.

3. She gets out-acted by Rob Lowe.

We rest our case.

Additional contributions to this article by: Lisa Schmeiser.