The three most important TV shows of the aughts

By: Jason Phillips

As an educator in communication and media, one of the most frustrating things for me is the way audiences and creators alike blindly accept the logic that the current ways of doing creative and economic business are the best ways to go about it. “You have to do it that way” is something I hear a lot. Why? Think about how many TV shows fail each year. Many more than succeed. Think about how many recording artists sell barely 100,000 albums. And say a film makes $50 million. That’s considered a solid haul…and most don’t make that much. Well, that’s only 5 million butts in the seats. Hardly mass approval of Hollywood ‘convention.’ Truth is, the balance sheet says, no Virginia, convention DOESN’T work.

To that end, I thought I’d blog about what I consider the three most important television shows of the aughts. And, of course, each defied conventional logic about storytelling, marketing, and public tastes. All three have made a lot of people a boat load of money by NOT doing it the way the TV biz says you have to do it.

1. South Park – The show began in the late 90s, but hit it’s creative and commercial peak in the new millennium. The show’s ratings, while never stellar, have held amazingly solid for 13 years. Beyond making a home for the ‘crude’ humor of successors like Family Guy, the show refused to accept the Big Brother-esque dictum that…gasp…you can’t DARE offend anyone. Nobody will watch if you do! It would take less space to name the groups, causes, and public figures South Park HASN’T taken shots at in it’s run. In an era of sanitized music, film, and TV, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone carved out a mini-empire by doing it their way…and by taking no prisoners in the process. Further, the show stands, in my mind, as the single most important form of cultural critique in my lifetime. There is really something classical and Aristotelian in how the show takes whatever is relevant at any given moment, mercilessly dissects each side’s pretensions and assumptions, and ends with a cogent, logically and morally sound conclusion…and one that is usually quite conservative (albeit laced with fart jokes). Trey Parker deserves no less than to be mentioned in the same breath as the greatest philosophers and social critics of all time, you know, all the dead guys you study in your boring classes…and he takes a back seat to none of them.

2. Lost – Audiences have to have TV dumbed down for them. So goes the mandate from television executives. Well, enter the Lost boys, Damon Lindleof and Carlton Cruse…two veterans of television who said, ‘no, you know what…we’re gonna confuse the hell out them…and we’re gonna make them chase clues all over the internet, all over video games, all over books, and all over supposedly ‘real’ commercials. We’re gonna make the audience work. And we’re gonna reference obscure literary and cultural works that dumb people just don’t get. And if they don’t like the plan, then they just won’t watch. Well, watch they did. The myth is that lots of viewers left as the show’s mythology became more tangled, disperse, and intellectual. But here’s the math: the show has “lost” (pun intended) 4.5 million viewers from season one up until now. That’s really about average for most long-running shows. Nearly the same as, say, a stalwart like SVU. It’s about half the loss of Desperate Housewives, it’s partner in big 2004 TV premieres. The show has actually held it’s ratings as good as, if not better than, most shows of similar age. And it did it while telling stories that got ever smarter, more complex, and that defied all conventional logic about how to build a television show and a mythological universe. Lindleof and Cruse proved that, when it comes to television, if you build something smart and difficult, but good, then the viewers will come. Further, the show’s intense and fearless treatment of issues such as community, religion, the consequences of war, and the tension between fate and free offers a nearly perfect snapshot of the social and political concerns of the aughts. Indeed, Lost stands, in my opinion, as the ultimate choice if we had to pick a TV show for a “time capsule” to teach future generations about this decade.

3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Joss Whedon is just smarter than you or me. Let’s get that out of the way. The 1992 film, which was a shell of his original screenplay, put the television show behind the eight ball when it premiered in 1997. Indeed, the title alone, with it’s suggestions of camp or comedy, probably cost the show viewers all along. But Joss understood that a show built on a title or a ‘bumper sticker’ slogan has no juice anyway. No, his creation built (really, rebuilt) his original idea from the ground up, and expanded it with poetic genius for seven years into the aughts. Before Buffy, you weren’t supposed to blend comedy or drama. Audiences want it clean cut one way or the other. But Buffy and her allies were likely to crack a joke AND shed a tear in the same scene. Pure genius. Of course it would work. Because it reflects how we all experience life: Complicated, contradictory, and never clean or simple. Someone should have had the guts to try it before. The show also revolutionized the way women, in particular women heroes, were treated in popular culture. It’s not a coincidence that the U.S. got it’s first female Speaker of the House a mere three years after Buffy saved the world one last time. Finally, the show is the mother of the current vampire craze in popular culture. Joss made vampires cool again. More importantly, he made them relevant artistically and culturally. And, for you Twilight fans, compare Buffy and Bella. Buffy wins every time: in strength, in heart, and in an understanding of how to be a young woman in a male-dominated world. And, for the Edward lovers in particular…vampires don’t sit in trees. Angel and Spike…those are vampires WORTH swooning over. And, here at GC, Joss directly inspired a certain professor to make a web series. Hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I’m a better person and educator for having gone through it. Thank you, Joss…for everything.