17 Shows That Changed TV

TV changed everything: the way we eat, the way we socialize, the way we feel about “reality.” And almost more than any other medium, TV is always changing itself, reflecting current tastes and redirecting current tastes. On TIME.com this week, I’ve assembled a list of All-TIME 100 TV shows. It’s meant to be not just a list of the greatest TV shows (though greatness was the price of admission) but also a survey of what TV can do–what this influential medium is, has been and is becoming. Here are some of the shows that were instrumental in changing TV and, therefore, changing us. Check out the rest at time.com/100tvshows and let the arguing begin.

The 1950s

I LOVE LUCY 1951-57

The sitcom that by now is almost a synonym for classic got that way by doing all the things that everyone at the time knew you weren’t supposed to do. You couldn’t have a female star who was both attractive and funny. You couldn’t have her male lead be an urban Latino whose Cuban accent was thicker than a platter of ropa vieja. You couldn’t build a story line around a (gasp!) pregnancy. Lucille Ball’s contributions to TV’s past are so obvious–Vitameatavegamin, the Tropicana Club, the slapstick routines–that it’s better to note what this show says about today’s future: sometimes the greatest sign of a future classic TV show is that it doesn’t look like classic TV.

THE ERNIE KOVACS SHOW 1952-56

It’s hard to imagine today that a half-century ago, TV was essentially the Internet: a wicked-cool invention that experimentalists would toy with just to see what crazy stuff they could make it do. Ernie Kovacs was the most innovative of TV’s early mad scientists, using his comedy hour to spoof such then new creations as newscasts and ads and employing visual effects like upside-down pictures and tilted sets to appear to defy gravity. Comedy is lying done amusingly, and Kovacs knew that TV–which purported to show all but hid everything beyond the outline of the box–was a divine medium for lies. Kovacs would have been a natural in the age of YouTube; instead he made TV into HimTube.

The 1960s

THE SUPER BOWL (AND THE ADS) 1967-present

Devised as a condition of the merger of the AFL and NFL, the big game quickly became the kind of national communion that only TV could make: a daylong ritual and feast, an event that you watched because you needed to watch that thing that everyone was watching. And in 1984, with the debut of the Apple Macintosh ad, the game became a showcase for commercials and seemed to realize its true purpose: to be a massive, expensive, profligate tribute to the desires of America’s consumers and to the full bellies of its warehouses. Showy, theatrical and full of talking animals, America’s favorite short-film festival erases the boundary between shopping and entertainment, if there ever was one.

SESAME STREET 1969-present

Recognizing that television was going to be an electronic babysitter whether anyone liked it or not, Jim Henson and his Muppets provided a friendly haven that spoofed the media world kids were immersed in when the show wasn’t on. From Kermit’s news reports and Guy Smiley’s game shows to “Elmo’s World,” Sesame Street has been filled with shows within shows, which take the commercial-TV world’s come-ons and apply them to educational building blocks. Along the way, kids have learned about friendship, cooperation and even (through Mr. Hooper) death. The show’s format has evolved over the years, but Sesame Street remains one of the savviest things ever brought to kids by the letters T and V.

The 1970s

THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW 1970-77

When the former Mrs. Rob Petrie made it, after all, onto her own sitcom as a single TV-news producer in Minneapolis, it was liberating for women on TV. But it also liberated TV for adults–of both sexes. Since Mary Richards was not a wife or a mom or (Ã la That Girl) a single gal defined mainly by her boyfriend, her self-titled sitcom was able to be a sophisticated show about grownups among other grownups, having grownup conversations. Moore made Mary into a fully realized person, iconic but fallible, competent but flappable (“Mr. Gra-a-a-ant!”), practical but romantic. Mary was human and strong enough to be laughed with and laughed at, and that was the kind of liberation that mattered most.

M*A*S*H 1972-83

Before M*A*S*H, the line between TV comedy and TV drama was as well demarcated as the DMZ between the two Koreas. This military-doctor comedy daringly combined zany humor–equal parts Marx Brothers slapstick and high-class wordplay–with dark drama, as when the war claimed the life of the base’s first chief, Lieut. Colonel Henry Blake. (The show banned canned laughter in its operating-room scenes, presaging today’s single-camera, laugh-track-free comedies.) Like many great shows, M*A*S*H stayed on the air a few years too long. But it proved that comedy could be serious, drama could be funny and both could cut like a scalpel.

AN AMERICAN FAMILY 1973

Before reality TV involved writers, immunity challenges and Paris Hilton, there was the Loud family. A public-television crew spent hundreds of hours in 1971 with a “typical” California family that proved to be anything but. Midway through the 12-hour cinema-verité series, paterfamilias and executive Bill Loud and wife Pat decided to split up. Their son Lance was casually introduced into the gay social scene of Greenwich Village in what would remain one of the most matter-of-fact treatments of a homosexual TV “character” for decades. The series raised what seem like–in the Big Brother and MySpace era–quaint questions about how taping reality alters reality. But ethically justifiable or not, it remains one of the greatest documents of American life, American media and the steadily vanishing distinctions between the two.

The 1980s

HILL STREET BLUES 1981-87

The Prisoner told serial stories before Hill Street, and The Fugitive hung a years-long chase on its otherwise self-contained episodes. But Steven Bochco’s cop drama popularized serialized story arcs by proving that audiences would have the patience to stick with a story longer than 60 minutes. Hill Street demonstrated that a TV show could make a virtue of messiness with plots that didn’t resolve neatly (or sometimes at all) and heroes who crossed ethical lines. Through conflicted Captain Furillo, abrasive Buntz and biting-prone Belker, Hill Street showed us imperfect cops delivering imperfect justice in an imperfect world–and did it to near perfection.

MTV 1981-92 era

In a way, a list of the most influential shows misses the point of how people watch TV in the cable age: they watch networks–HGTV, ESPN, Nickelodeon–as much as they do shows. MTV, in the pre–Real World era, was the first network to teach viewers to watch this way. Quick-cut and compressed, music videos were not just a new way of selling music; they changed TV series (the pitch for Miami Vice was simply “MTV cops”) and influenced movies (graduating directors like Spike Jonze, David Fincher and Michel Gondry). The best clips from MTV’s all-video ’80s heyday–from Michael Jackson to Talking Heads–capture the power of the music rather than replace it. MTV taught us to see with our ears and listen with our eyes.

THE COSBY SHOW 1984-92

Since Seinfeld, “hugging and learning” has come to stand for a certain kind of namby-pamby network comedy. But while there was hugging on The Cosby Show, Dr. Cliff Huxtable’s love for his kids was filtered through the wry, no-guff sensibility that Bill Cosby developed on his comedy records. And the learning was literal, as the through line of the series was son Theo Huxtable’s struggles with dyslexia. (The plot became poignant with the 1997 murder of Cosby’s son Ennis, on whom Theo was based.) It’s a sign of how quickly Cosby changed TV that in just a few years, it would be the standard that The Simpsons rebelled against. But by introducing TV viewers to upper-middle-class African Americans, the show gave us a realistic sitcom family that America actually could learn from.

THE SIMPSONS 1989-present

The Simpsons is the TV equivalent of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (once parodied in the opening couch gag). After it came along, nothing was the same, and it established a generation’s cultural references and sensibility. (Is there any situation without a usable Simpsons quote?) Starting out as a family cartoon, it grew a cast of hundreds that spanned celebrity (Rainier Wolfcastle), religion (the de-diddly-vout Flanders family), business (C. Montgomery Burns) and immigration (Apu). But maybe its best and favorite subject has been TV itself–“Teacher, mother, secret lover!” For all the series’ ups and downs, it is still the Best. TV Show. Ever.

The 1990s

TWIN PEAKS 1990-91

David Lynch and Mark Frost made something really weird happen, and I’m not talking about Laura Palmer’s murder, a dancing dwarf or a Log Lady. They turned prime-time TV into a giant indie art-house theater, and regular American channel surfers by the millions became its denizens. The story of a teen girl’s death–and the pie-eating, deadpan-soliloquy-spouting FBI agent investigating it–carried on the theme from Lynch movies like Blue Velvet of sordid secrets and ancient horrors hidden behind a façade of wholesome Americana, proving that TV could equal or surpass film in its storytelling ambitions. Twin Peaks may have had the shelf life of a freshly poured cup of coffee, but it was damn fine nonetheless.

BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD 1993-97

To those who would call this MTV cartoon the boob tube at its most puerile, I have but one rejoinder: You said boob. This show’s fart-knocking, frog-smashing anarchy alone might have put it on the list, but B&B was so much more. It was a surreal comedy (“I am the great Cornholio!”). It was one of TV’s great inside critiques, peeling back the MTV fantasy of unattainable cool and personifying the sugar-buzzed idiot children who paid the channel’s bills. Like creator Mike Judge’s later Office Space, King of the Hill and Idiocracy, it was an unsparing, minutely observed and surprisingly good-hearted picture of consumer America. And to the list of great philosophical dialectics–good/evil, yin/yang–it added another: “That sucks”/ “That’s cool.” Beavis and Butt-head were always on the right side of that one.

THE SOPRANOS 1999-2007

To get a sense of how The Sopranos changed television, get a pen and make a list of the 20 best TV dramas before 1999. This Mafia saga showed just how complex and involving TV storytelling could be, inspiring an explosion of ambitious dramas on cable and off. In Tony Soprano’s world, it wasn’t the Mob that kept pulling you back into old, destructive patterns; it was your family–your controlling mother, your maddening wife, your feckless kids. Meanwhile, the big-F Family drama of the declining Mafia business offered popcorn entertainment alongside the deeper insights. Some fans may have hated the series’ ending, but the fact that the show’s last moments obsessed us demonstrates that America never stopped believin’ in the power of this story.

The 2000s

SURVIVOR 2000-present

In reality TV, 90% of success is in the concept, and Survivor’s remains the master equation: isolation + cash prize + hot-weather clothing = entertainment. Still, the 10% that is execution separates the best from the rest, and Survivor remains a constantly surprising and enthralling game, both socially and physically. Even after seven years, there’s no clear single best way to win the political game: Is it better to be liked or respected, a master athlete or a master strategist? Whether or not it sheds any light on how people behave in real society, it remains the most engrossing example of how people really behave in the fake society of a high-pressure TV contest.

24 2001-present

It’s tempting to discount this show after its admittedly terrible sixth season. But think back to how new and bracing the format that’s now routine once was. Created before Sept. 11 and debuting just weeks after, 24 captured the country’s edgy mood, and not just because it was about terrorism. With its breathless real-time format and multiscreens, 24 reflects the same information-overload media culture that gave us the zipper and screens within screens on cable news. The computers work a little too well, the Los Angeles traffic is suspiciously light, and Jack Bauer never has to take a leak, but Kiefer Sutherland gives Jack psychological weight in the most outlandish situations, racing against a ticking clock that tolls for us.

LOST 2004-present

It’s a misnomer, actually, to call Lost one of TV’s best shows. It’s a fine show on the level of character and writing, but what makes it a classic is that it’s the finest interactive game ever to appear in your living room once a week. An elaborate fractal pattern of intersecting stories concerning plane survivors on a not-quite-deserted island, a secretive international organization and a monster made of smoke–Lost only begins with the 60 minutes you see on TV. Its mysteries, clues and literary-historical allusions demand research, repeated viewing, freeze-framing and endless online discussions. And in a medium in which executives assume that viewers will flee anything that remotely challenges them, Lost proves that millions of people will support a difficult, intelligent, even frustrating story–as long as you blow the right kind of smoke at them.