Ok I know this is a pointless and pedantic exercise but really it's just an excuse to share.
On a forum I use in 2019 I was summoned to list my top 30 serial television shows of all-time
Revisiting it now shows a couple of errors and omissions.
I'm going to reassess it and post a new top 50 here.
Hopefully with a little description to make it not just another internet listicle.
Defining serial television as fiction intended to watch in a sequential order for narrative reasons.
This will naturally favour dramatic television but some comedies will be included.
1 The Singing Detective (1987)
Michael Gambon, helpless and stranded and with a skin complaint that makes him look like an angry rice pudding, monologuing to the doctors who are studying him like a fiendish puzzle almost sells this one on its own. but i just love how it all develops and comes together; the real of a man in hospital, his own past, the fictions created in his work, and people manipulating those fictions away from him as he is stranded and ill. it's so big and brave and peerless.
Gambon is world-class in it but I never read much about Jim Carter about Marlowe's dad in his dreams, a pillar of paternal solidity, gently breaking down. Ah this show was pretty much perfect. I even like how 80s it looks.
2 The Wire (2002-2008)
Thesis: television shows weren't meant to, or are incapable of, go(ing) for more than two series without tonally shifting or losing focus or falling prey to the mercenary realities of television, so it is impressive that The Wire is even better than watchable into its fifth series (more shortly) let alone actually still brilliant (seriously, more soon). Working with a similar scope as Emile Zola in documenting institutions and mapping how lives are shaped by them but also retaining a sense of how there are just certain atavistic and self-destructive and almost determined roles that people will step into. balancing these two things - essentially Social Realism and Poetic Realism - is incredibly difficult to do in a novel authored by one person. Again, on television, across several hours of screen-time, and with an ensemble of over 100 characters give-or-take, they did so well to get this right.
Several internet man hours have been spent arguing over which of the five series is best: is it 1 (the initial scene-setting of gang vs. police and their own internal hierarchical issues), is it 2 (set mostly at the docks, which acts as a portal to different criminal avenues and routes back to the streets), is it 3 (a radical permissiveness in policing visits the streets), is it 4 (the benighted education system as Canute at tide) - but it isn't 5. no one ever says series 5.
I say 1-4 are all about as good as each other - that is to say brilliant. However let me stick up for 5. The two major issues are this: the central McNulty storyline is silly and made the show that was increasingly less about McNulty (and stronger for it) become, suddenly almost, about McNulty again. The second issue is that the central institution is the print media, which is treated with a kid glove credulity given the unholy mess of western media's inability to account for anything. The Wire, written by veteran newspapermen, sees print life as a Mencken-esque quest for truth spoiled by a couple of bad eggs and some corporate flim-flam. I'm sorry: it is way worse than that.
Series 5 is redeemed by the real heart of the show: Bubbles, the wretch, coming home. After being heaped upon by every institution both official and ad hoc for 4 series and taking on an emotional burden in the wake of his friend Sherrod's death, Bubbles is at the bottom but coming up. but he's hit a ceiling that his guilt won't let him pass and now he has to confront who he is in a profound and personal sense. This is not 'transcendence' and this is no earth-shift. The world is not different. But when Bubbles is let into his sister's kitchen it is a bigger victory than any of the police scores, romantic successes, promotions, deaths of hated characters put together.
3 Heimat (1984, 1993, 2004)
Three separate chronicles of Germany with an overlapping family: Series 1 the tale of a rural hamlet east of Trier (wine, fields, wind) from 1919-1982, series 2 following the bastard half-Jewish (relevant, i feel, in the series' subtle theme of ongoing denazification and feeling of fatherlessness in the fatherland) son as he goes to Munich for university in the 1960s, and Series 3 following the same son as the Berlin Wall comes down and he returns home to follow his patrimonial course.
Eschewing tight plotting and screwed-together drama for a ludic and accumulative feel, snapshots of existence married to significant events in history, Heimat is a bold and monolithic exercise in historicity. Series 1 focuses on one village as most of its inhabitants grow accustomed to casual Naziism (some because racism, some because social climbing), simultanously fearful and embracing of creeping modernity. It also beats Game of Thrones to the punch of setting you up with a clear main character whose desires carry us through the first two hours before offing them quickly and exploding narrative possibilities. It works because everyone else is fleshed out.
Series 2, I feel, is the most potent because I assume it is director Edgar Reitz's own youth and social circles given the full treatment. It is sexy and over-serious like all young intellectuals can be, indulgent and maybe pretentious to modern ears (I don't know anyone who likes Heimat as much as me). But it is both rich in detail as portraiture with a real sense of how life connects to events.
The character of Juan, another wretch, is one of television's finest.
It has been a while since I saw the third series but I really enjoyed it at the time. Critics were less kind, seeing it as unnecessary or overly comic. In a way its gentleness was a mask that hid more complex global realities, and some of the characters that we liked and rooted for in earlier years grew fat and hateful in time. That is brave stuff, but I do need to see this again before comitting to any real judgement.
4 Our Friends in the North (1996)
It is such a shame that Daniel Craig gravitated toward Bond and the lucrative world of hardman Hollywood acting because there's so much pain and emotion dripping out of his portrayal of Geordie that i can't really articulate it.
5 Cracker (1993-1996, 2006)
This rating is really for the first seven episodes only but, as each episode is either 1hr30 or 2hr15 (each episode was split into two or three and broadcast on back-to-back nights), this accounts for a lot of run time. The actual central character of Fitz (a criminal psychologist played by Robbie Coltrane who specialises in interrogation, hence 'cracker') features less in my thoughts as the years roll by; he is your classic flawed-but-brilliant detective in many respects - an obese alcoholic gambler with a skill. In episode three, in a move I find quite thrilling, the show utterly undermines his skill as he fingers the wrong man, thus complicating the show and saving it from predictability.
However it is the arc and suppurating dynamic between Fitz, his mistress Penhaligon, and the jealous and embittered Detective Beck - the latter of whom commits a fatal error when tracking a murderer down that leads to their boss being killed - that drives the show to its fateful moment where the show should have halted for good. The arc of recriminations and traumas cuts so deep and hard that everything after feels after the Lord Mayor's show. The baton was passed from Jimmy McGovern to Paul Abbott, who gamely carried on with a drastically reduced cast. But the real impact of the show had been made in a fascinating show that makes a compelling case that the 1990s was a strange rip in time regarding intelligent television - the show tackles race, moral panic, and public disasters in a way that I feel couldn't be done now even though its view is progressive and enlightened.
There is a comeback episode in 2006 that didn't quite work.