The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME

"First, I apologize. I know I left some of your favorite shows off this list. How do I know that? Because I left some of my favorite shows off this list. The happy and unfortunate fact is that there are far more than 100 great shows, and more created every year. Lists are incredibly important: they are how we define what matters to us, what we want entertainment and art to do, what we expect of our culture."
—TIME TV critic James Poniewozik

ABC's Wide World of Sports

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The gazillion dollars spent on David Beckham notwithstanding, the idea of sports making Americans aware of the larger world is something of a contradiction in terms. We are the country that plays football with our hands and has a two-nation sports league that holds a "World Series." But for decades Roone Arledge's ambitious anthology assembled games from hurling to jai alai, gave weekend couch potatoes a global perspective long before ESPN, and set the standard for nonfiction TV production. WWS showed American fans that there was more to "the constant variety of sport" than the NBA, NFL and MLB—even if that poor "agony of defeat" ski jumper had to sacrifice himself to get their attention.