A left-leaning poll creates a foul new canon.
Throughout the Aughts it was television, not movies, that routinely promoted the so-called values of the cultural establishment. That’s the real message of last week’s New York Times poll of “The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century.”
It’s no shock that the “paper of record” should try to formalize a canon based on television media, or that casual readers respond to it as authoritative without questioning the poll’s far-left premise. Let’s examine it.
After the culture broke in 2004, TV conquered cinema. Pop narrative became content, and the culture shattered — with the concurrence of journalists who wrote about television in the intellectually grave mode previously reserved for cinema. The giveaway can be spotted when the Times says of its poll-topper Breaking Bad, “There was a science to the show’s thrills and heartbreak. But above all, there was art.”
The word “art” is a sophomoric attempt to take junk seriously. So when The Times polled “hundreds of stars, showrunners, craftspeople, executives and other industry experts,” asking each to pick the ten best series that have premiered since January 1, 2000, it was the publication itself adjudicating the results as “art.”
Fact is, before that “golden age of television” canard about the Nineties, the top ten shows would be considered trash: Breaking Bad (2008–2013), The Wire (2002–2008), Mad Men (2007–2015), Succession (2018–2023), Fleabag (2016–2019), Game of Thrones (2011–2019), Veep (2012–2019), 30 Rock (2006–2013), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–2024), and Atlanta (2016–2022). Each program presumed to challenge sociological and ideological assumptions — justifications for lawlessness and a shift toward immorality, with topics devoted to greed, class, sexual license, race, and the media itself. Consider them an ideological offense designed to alter a nation’s perception of itself.
These are fantasies about exercising social power; commonplace domestic tales rank lower on the list. All of these middle-class, middlebrow productions demonstrate the vanity of the ruling elite; they’re an index of progressive values. Only a befouled culture could produce such rot.
In a speech by the late Senator Bob Dole (often called Dole’s “Hollywood Speech”), he warned that “a line has been crossed . . . when Hollywood’s dream factories turn out nightmares of depravity.’” TV in the 21st century has proved him prophetic: Breaking Bad offered an immoral “chemistry-teacher-turned-drug lord Walter White (Bryan Cranston)” as a dubious Everyman hero — a dismissal of the white working class that White embodies. Its depravity was mirrored in the closest competitor, The Wire, which saw black America (Baltimore on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.) solely in terms of a criminal class — a vision the Times called “a miracle.”
Through snarky admiration for The Wire, the Times inadvertently defined its absurd essence: “White people dreaming up Black life.” That’s giveaway No. 2: The list is not just explained, but Obama-splained. (Cable-subscription TV is favored, whereas the network shows are just poor cousins of the same.) This reflects Obama-era hivemind elitism in which the perfidies of Breaking Bad and The Wire, the sophistry of Mad Men, Succession, 30 Rock, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, the feminist cynicism of Fleabag, the political sarcasm of Veep, the treacherous pseudo-mythology of Game of Thrones, plus more black pathology in Atlanta are all normalized in terms of the new century’s “hope and change.”
The Times doesn’t have to explicitly mention Obama’s widely broadcast love for The Wire because its stereotypes are already baked into the Timesian mindset. Yet the poll does mention “the Obama era” in its introduction, even praising “30 Rock and Veep, the other essential satirical achievement of the Obama era.” This confession without alibi defines the way Millennial culture has warped from “art” to obvious politics and propaganda.
That slick, disorientating, amoral identity implied by Obama’s “not who we are” credo — which he uses to scold Americans for their supposed Islamophobia and other wrongs — is apparent in every show in the Times list, establishing the industry’s new standards of representation.
Conspicuously low on the top-100 list is David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, a series not nearly as good as its 1990s predecessor, which was conceived as a critique of TV melodrama and a validation of the daytime soap opera, the Dickensian serial genre that primetime snobs underrate. Although Lynch’s reboot was genuinely off-putting, it was more artistically daring than the usual TV dreck, and it even confounded contemporary film critics. (France’s Cahiers du Cinema voted it the best film of 2017, and the British Film Institute ranked it that year’s No. 2 film, but it’s ranked as No. 47 at the Times.)
Journalists and poll participants are unable to recognize that media entertainment no longer enlightens or edifies; they’ve come to accept and celebrate the dregs of our culture. Each Times TV pick is demoralizing, just like the 26 Best Picture Oscar winners of the 21st century.