Television: The Best Television Of 1999

1 THE SOPRANOS This HBO drama reinvented the Mafia genre with Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini, in front), a besieged, postpatriarchal, Prozac-popping capo not truly the master of his family or his Family. But the show didn’t stop there. Structured less like an episodic series than a seamless suite, it redefined TV storytelling. Watch it weekly, and it’s an addictive saga; watch several at a stretch, and its rich vocabulary of metaphors and motifs submerges and resurfaces with novelistic grace.

2 FREAKS AND GEEKS (NBC) Television has rarely got adolescence as hilariously, soul-crushingly right as in this bittersweet paean to Midwestern childhood circa 1980. With a cast that actually looks and sounds like kids, not Gap models, Freaks takes teen-show stereotypes–nerd, burnout, clueless parent–and fleshes each out with humor and heart.

3 BARBARA WALTERS AND MONICA LEWINSKY (ABC) Walters’ three-hankie national catharsis turned the impeachment marathon back into the good old-fashioned tabloid scandal it was meant to be. Ridiculed and infantilized in the media for months, Lewinsky was surprisingly sympathetic, confident, unrepentant and, well, telegenic.

4 STRANGE JUSTICE (SHOWTIME) Historical TV movies must be staid. They must tie up loose ends. Above all, they must take no artistic risks. Showtime’s Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas docudrama broke all those rules, telling the Rashomon tale that launched the he-said-she-said decade with arresting images and a stubborn refusal to take sides.

5 CNBC DAYTIME Like CNN and the Gulf War or Court TV and O.J., the financial-news net defined the boom era with its sharp, zesty, sports-jock-style coverage. In 1999, the business of America was business news, and cnbc’s ticker–seen in bars, gyms, airports–was the frantic eeg of a stock-crazed, mercantile society.

6 MONSTER.COM’S WHEN I GROW UP A good Sunday-football ad is about dread–over money (investments), mortality (insurance) and, here, going back to work on Monday morning. In the employment site’s Super Bowl spot, straight-faced kids recited career “dreams” (“I want to be forced into early retirement”) that spoofed not only the rat race but other ads’ phony, chicken-soup-for-the-sell affirmations.

7 AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY (PBS) Ten hours inside the lives of an interracial family, this affecting documentary showed the import and irrelevance, arbitrariness and inescapability of race. With TV “diversity” limited to Friends for one part of the nation, Moesha for another, this picture of ultimate integration was overdue.

8 SEX AND THE CITY (HBO) Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and friends patrol Manhattan like a Fantastic Four whose weapons include sarcasm and Prada. Maturing this year from a raunchy romp into an arch cultural dispatch, it’s a refreshing story of professional women who don’t need the love of a good man so much as want it.

9 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: SEASON FINALE (WB) Like the Littleton shootings–which prompted its postponement, one of TV’s several craven post-Columbine p.r. gestures–Buffy’s wry, touching season ender exposed the demons in a prosperous suburb. Werewolf Oz’s words after the climactic battle scene–“We survived…high school”–were a resonant caption to the year of the troubled teen.

10 THE WEST WING (NBC) Attention, networks: There is dramatic life outside precinct houses and hospital wards. Aaron Sorkin’s White House series is a love story of people and their jobs that overcomes its speechifying tendencies and tics (half the action takes place as characters stalk down corridors) with verbal gunplay, public-policy triage and an appealing lack of cynicism–about, of all things, politics.