CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 1/19/07

The Best TV of 2006

edited By david michael wharton

To prepare you for the upcoming February sweeps, the writers and staff of Creative Screenwriting Magazine and CS Weekly turn our attentions to the small screen and give you a cheat sheet for what you should be watching.

This year we've seen the final demise of a slew of Lost rip-offs, the premiere and death of a new slew of Lost rip-offs, and an ungodly procession of ill-conceived game shows. Fortunately, there are some diamonds in the roughly 48,976 indistinguishable procedural series, and we here in the Creative Screenwriting are once again bringing you our picks for the best TV 2006 had to offer. We will control the horizontal, we will control the vertical…

Peter Clines, writer, CS and CSW
1) Heroes
Created by Tim Kring
Move over Lost, my girlfriend and I have new must-see-TV that we compare notes and theories on with all our friends. A "realistic" view of people developing superpowers, Heroes shows us the denial, fear, and sheer joy that could result from these gifts, sprinkled amidst a time travel story that shows The End in episode two and lets viewers wonder how they'll get there.

Jason Davis, DVD Manager, CSW; writer, CS
1) Battlestar Galactica
Developed by Ronald D. Moore
Based on the series created by Glen A. Larson
Plumbing the depths of the human condition as the last surviving members of the human race flee their robotic persecutors, Ronald D. Moore's re-imagining of Glen Larson's 1978 Star Wars knock-off continues to question its audience's morals and ethics in ways television too often evades while serving up the best drama on the box.
2) Veronica Mars
Created by Rob Thomas
Successfully spinning more plates than even the most talented sideshow performer, season two of this teen noir masterpiece presented the most satisfyingly convoluted mystery in the history of the medium before surviving the merger of UPN and the WB to offer a third year of less epic enigmas.
3) Dexter
Developed for television by James Manos, Jr.
Based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay
Showtime's adaptation of Jeff Lindsay's novel casts a serial killer as its hero while crafting a season-long mystery offered up in self-contained episodes that satisfy standalone appetites while providing a taste of something more elaborate.
4) Life on Mars
Created by Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan, and Ashley Pharoah
Despite a heavily edited American airing, the U.K.'s tale of modern police officer Sam Tyler, who awakens in 1973 after a car accident, proved a compelling example of an intriguing concept combined with richly written characters.
5) Big Love
Created by Will Scheffer and Mark V. Olsen
HBO's new drama demonstrates that polygamy might not be as much fun as it sounds, with inter-spousal fights, the pressures of a secret lifestyle, and the ever-present threat of a crazy old cult leader showing up in the dead of night to drag you back to the compound.

Danny Munso, marketing manager, CS Publications
1) 24
Created by Robert Cochran and Joel Surnow
Some of the shocking plot twists didn't make a lot of sense, and we still don't know who the guy in the glasses is, but the fifth season of this show deftly alternated between thrilling and thought-provoking, something a TV show on Fox has no business doing.
2. Extras
Created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant
Gervais and Merchant's brilliant follow-up to The Office (that would be the original British version) doesn't delve into the pathos of that classic series, but when you have scenes with Kate Winslet talking dirty and Patrick Stewart pitching his idea for an adult film, you don't need to.
3. Veronica Mars
This is not a vote for the slightly dumbed-down third season, but the heart-stopping second-half of season two, which concluded with one of the best hours ever produced for the medium. If only the network would stop interfering.
4. Monk
Created by Andy Breckman
The obsessive-compulsive detective keeps getting better each year, with the writers realizing that the how'd-they-do-it mysteries should take a back seat to the wonderful stable of characters they've created over the past five years.
5. Late Show with David Letterman
Before Dave kowtows to his guests, the first 25 minutes of his show plays like the old (read: brilliant) days of Saturday Night Live. If only the real SNL (and its dramatic knockoffs) had writing like this.

James Napoli, writer, CS, CSW
1) The Wire
Created by David Simon
In this best-ever fourth season, David Simon, Ed Burns, and their writers fashioned an utterly remarkable and heartbreaking exploration of education, hope, and the entrenched system that makes both of them very tough to achieve.
2) Deadwood
Created by David Milch
Though the show has been cancelled (with rumors of a couple of TV movies slotted to finish out David Milch's vision), this was a stunning third season, replete with meaty dialogue, impossibly dense themes, and the trademark anticlimax, showing us all that it was commerce, not the outlaw, who would eventually win the West.
3) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart/The Colbert Report
Okay, so not exactly shows which bring up issues for screenwriters, but more often than not laugh-out-loud funny and, aside from The Onion newspaper, the only place in America where honest-to-God satire is able to reach a wide audience. [Ed. note: I beg to differ on James's opening note. If you want to see how to write quality, gut-busting humor on a daily basis, watch and analyze this show.]

Dennis Sampson, writer, CSW
1) Rescue Me
Created by Denis Leary and Peter Tolan
The show's weakest season is still far better than most dramatic television. Characters continue to evolve and their relationships remain as volatile and unpredictable as…well, real life.
2) The Office
Developed for American television by Greg Daniels
Based on the British show created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant
A single-camera sitcom that can proudly carry the torch Arrested Development left behind when it went off the air. More about people and human nature than sitcom-y farce, the show finds the funny and the sentiment merely by holding a mirror up to its audience.
3) 24

Five years going and this series still delivers the tension-filled adrenaline high missing from not just TV shows, but from movies as well. In Jack Bauer, the series has given us television's most compelling character since Special Agent Dale Cooper.
4) Battlestar Galactica
The finale to season 2.5 is up there with the best cliffhangers in recent memory. The characters continue to remain supremely defined and true-to-form as the show fuses political issues with space opera. Season three, however is off to a slippery start, so that's why this show is at the bottom of my TV list.

Den Shewman, editor-in-chief, CS and CSW
1) House, MD
Created by David Shore
Great characters in a great procedural, and a bastard of a brilliant leader whom I try to emulate (ask my writers, they'll agree, at least with part of that).
2) Scrubs
Created by Bill Lawrence
Not just sucking up to one of our feature interviews in the new issue of Creative Screenwriting Magazine, Jason Davis had been touting Scrubs' charms for years to me. I've finally become a fan of the series odd mix of single-camera comedy, near-Family Guy-like fantasy interludes, and just enough drama to hit you in the gut. The great thing is that the drama is all done very quietly, deriving from the comedy in an alchemical transformation at the end of each episode. Watch their Wizard of Oz episode ("My Way Home," w. Garrett Donovan and Neil Goldman) and tell me if you don't agree.
3) Friday Night Lights
Created by Peter Berg and Brian Grazer and Jason Katims
Based on the novel Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger
I have no interest in football. I never saw the original Friday Night Lights film based on H.G. Bissinger's bestseller. But this series is the TV equivalent of The Rookie: quietly capturing real life not as Hollywood sees it, but as real people live it. Characters that aren't caricatures, tragedies that don't get wrapped up in 46 pages, and great acting that makes you want to move to Dillon, Texas just to sit in the stands and cheer.
4) Doctor Who
Re-created by executive producer Russell Davies
Based on the long-running BBC series
Admittedly, I've only watched the three Steven Moffat-scripted episodes ("The Empty Child" two-parter from season one and "The Girl in the Fireplace" from season two), so I can't claim to be an expert (hey, I don't watch a lot of TV, okay?). But based on the quality of those 120 minutes, I've put both seasons' boxed sets on my shopping list. American TV would be lucky to have any of those episodes just once in a season. "Girl in a Fireplace" is one of the best pieces of TV I've seen in a while, and that's coming from a guy who up until now had no background (nor even interest) in the characters.

Sean Siska, writer, CS, CSW
1) The Wire
For the past five years every single person that watches this show has been telling you that it's the greatest thing on television. There is a reason for this.
2) The Office
A healthy balance of heart and cringe-inducing humor makes this the best comedy on television and (I can't believe that I would ever write this) undeniably superior to the BBC original.
3) Veronica Mars
The titular high-school detective is now in college, and it's great to see her and the other characters in her life evolve in organic and surprising ways. Entertainment Weekly must pay its television critics in marijuana; there's no other explanation for them to suggest that this show has slipped in quality.
4) Battlestar Galactica
The best SF always tackles real-world issues and this show does that in spades, but it also maintains a sense of high-octane, rollicking adventure.
5) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart/The Colbert Report
Funny and informative, it's amazing how consistently good these companion shows are night-after-night.

David Wharton, managing editor, CSW
1) How I Met Your Mother
Created by Carter L. Bays and Craig Thomas
Sure, single-camera sit-coms like The Office and Scrubs are getting lauded for revitalizing a dying format—and deservedly so—but meanwhile this little-show-that-could is quietly taking all the derided trappings of the multi-camera, laugh-track sit-com and running with it, thanks to smart, witty scripts and a pack of quirky, believable characters. People have called it the new Friends, but thanks to its willingness to experiment with structure, I'd rather christen it everything the American Coupling could have been, but wasn't. This season has hit its stride with instant classics such as "Swarley" (w. Greg Malins) and "Slap Bet" (w. Kourtney Kang), and the chemistry between the ensemble really sells the feeling of an actual group of friends. Suit up!
2) Veronica Mars
Lost writers, take notes. Over its first two seasons, Veronica Mars has served as a textbook case of how to balance serialized story-arcs against self-contained episodes. Season two was an intricate quilt of crosses, double-crosses, triple-crosses, and hey-we-were-just-kidding-it-was-really-just-a-double- crosses. The show not only combines silly mysteries such as searching for a classmates' dog with heavy material such as rape and murder, it makes the lighter material gripping and often uses it to expose new insights into the grittier plotlines. Perhaps the third season on the new-car-smell CW hasn't quite lived up to the standards set by the truly remarkable second-season finale, but any show that sports such quotable dialogue, a whip-smart and wicked-funny protagonist (Kristen Bell's Veronica), a delightfully frustrating male fatale (Jason Dohring's Logan Echolls), and hands-down the best TV dad ever (Enrico Colantoni's Keith Mars) will still have my attention for however long the CW doesn't cancel it.
3) Battlestar Galactica
My compatriots above have already done a great job singing the praises of this show, but chugging through its third season it still continues to live up to exec producer Ron Moore's vow to make a great show that happens to be science fiction, not just a great science fiction show. Some potential viewers still can't bridge a genre gap guarded by spaceships and shiny robots, and that's a real shame. Deeply flawed, deeply human characters (even when they sometimes aren't human) combine with daring, fearless storytelling that honors the legacy of the original Star Trek and The Twilight Zone by using the language of the fantastic to comment on the all-too real. And the "Adama Maneuver" from the second-season finale "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II" (w. Mark Verheiden and Anne Cofell Saunders) takes credit for being the only televised moment in 2006 that literally brought me out of my chair.
4) Heroes
Another show Lost should study. Uneven, occasionally bordering on silly, but this sucker moves. Heroes has already introduced and satisfactorily explained nearly as many mysteries in its first batch of episodes as Lost did in its entire first season. Perhaps most importantly, this show is just plain fun. It unfolds with the same sense of wonder that its break-out fan favorite Hiro views his new powers. Sure, the large cast of characters is unequally served when it comes to characterization, and the framing narration occasionally wanders into latter-day X-Files ponderousness, but as long as it can keep up its breathless pace and the sense that, by golly, these writers actually have a plan—ahem—Heroes could be the serial that people are still talking about long after Lost has gone the way of Oceanic Flight 815.

And a special "Most Improved" award to:
30 Rock
Created by Tiny Fey
I hated the pilot. Hated it. Yet I nevertheless checked back in on the show when it became a part of NBC's rejuvenated Thursday-night line-up, and boy am I glad I did. 30 Rock has improved dramatically (or should that be comedically?), every line out of Alec Baldwin's mouth is pure magic, and as long as the show keeps providing me with belly laughs along the lines of Dr. Leo Spaceman or The Rural Juror, I'm in for the long haul.


The Best of the Worst

The Nine
Created by Hank Steinberg and K.J. Steinberg
"For those of you who missed it, here's a quick sum up of every episode of The Nine that aired…

Scene 1
A: You remember what happened in there, don't you?
B: Yeah.
A: Alright then.

Scene 2
C: Look, I know what you went through in there.
A: No. No, you don't.
C: Because you won't tell me!
A: It's…complicated.

Copy and alternate until you have a full script. Then copy the script a dozen times."

Lost
Created by Damon Lindelof, J.J. Abrams, and Jeffrey Lieber
"Is there any clearer indicator that these guys have no idea what they're doing with the exploration of the Others in Season 3? Okay, so Henry/Ben needed a surgeon to remove the tumor on his back. And lo and behold, master surgeon Jack Shepherd fell out of the sky the next day. That Jupiter-sized coincidence is not the problem here (if anything, we can consider it set-up). What is the problem is that Henry/Ben decides to mentally torture and cage his would-be savior until the good doctor wants to perform the operation. Huh?"

Nip/Tuck
Created by Ryan Murphy
"There needs to be a term for a show that jumps the shark and then keeps jumping it. The storylines have reached way beyond the point of ludicrousness, bordering on hilarity. Someone has to pull the plug."

Smallville
Created by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
Based on the DC Comics character created by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel
"Funny, I was going to say the same thing about this show…"

David Michael Wharton is managing editor of CS Weekly and a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine. He's recently into the whole brevity thing.

Battlestar Galactica courtesy The Sci-Fi Channel
Veronica Mars courtesy the CW Television Network
The Office courtesy NBC Universal

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