I'm not shocked seinfeld is so high in terms of quality. I am kind of surprised since I figured most results would skew younger. I watched some random seinfeld episode that just happened to be on and I legit laughed quite a few times. It was the one where the white girl had a chinese last name. Awesome awesome stuff.

I watched quite a few eps of seinfeld growing up. It ran pretty from junior high to a couple of years out of hs for me.

Borgen should be up there in the underrated shows. Not that it's actually under-appreciated, just that most people will be unaware of it because it's Danish. It's a superb political drama, better than the West Wing in some ways.

breaking bad 184
the wire 157
lost 80
sopranos 78
AD 63
seinfeld 58
deadwood 56
GoT 47
justified 39
mad men 36
homeland 35
BSG 32
archer 31
curb 28
friday night lights 26
shield 26
24 20
oz 19
firefly 17
impractical jokers 15
continuum 14
survivor 13
sherlock 12
buffy 10
chuck 10
community 10
dexter 10
office 10
arrow 9
bing bang theory 9
chappelle 9
friends 9
veronica mars 9
rome 8
simpsons 8
south park 8
twin peaks 8
6 feet under 7
flight conchords 7
scrubs 7
shameless 7
star trek tos 7
cheers 7
30 rock 6
eastbound 6
elementary 6
freaks and geeks 6
league 6
louie 6
paris hilton bff 6
terriers 6
spartacus 6

I like that The Wire is going so strong given that it's off the air for almost 6 years.

Never heard of it. But speaking of Danish TV I saw the German-dubbed version of Lars von Trier's Kingdom and that was some crazy **** I can certainly recommend. Too bad the actor who played Helmer died.

How is Spartacus so low on the list? unacceptable. One of the best television series ever.

Some others that I like

Jericho
Firefly

I liked Jericho, but the acting was horrible in that show.

haha I liked Jericho too.

simple you can only pick 5.

My top 15:

Game of Thrones
Firefly
Band of Brothers
Stargate SG-1
Breaking Bad
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Lost
The Pacific
Arrested Development
Oz
Chuck
Veronica Mars
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Death Note
Downton Abbey

10 years ago Lost was the equivalent of Breaking Bad.

But breaking bad only got really hyped during s05. Since s01 Lost already had a HUGE hype. I remember thousands of theories about the story after s01 ended, specially regarding what was in the hatch.

I'm so tempted to rewatch the whole thing. I remembered how awesome the first few seasons were. The writers should be ashamed of themselves for putting out that last season. What a brutal way to end what could've been a legendary tv series. Only reason why I haven't rewatch it yet.

I just remember when watching Lost how exciting it was and how I couldn't wait until the next episode (mainly in the earlier seasons). I'd constantly be thinking 'wtf' and trying to think about what was actually happening and couldn't wait for the show to explain what was happening (to see if I was right) in the next episode (or 10 episodes later).

I didn't have that with Breaking Bad (though admittedly I watched it after the fact and didn't have to wait a week between episodes). Having said that I think Breaking Bad is a better show, but it didn't have the same excitement 'wtf' factor.

^ exactly

Yes, the end of Lost was a disappointment mostly for people that didn't expect this show couldn't possibly end with a "clean" closure, due to its very nature.

But if you look at the journey Lost has been, nothing is comparable. Only a very very few shows have made people talk/argue so much. If any at all. Its THE show of the 00's, even more so in Europe where we didn't give The Wire much interest. In Europe, Lost has gotten more exposure, love and talks than The Wire, The Soprano and The Shield combined.

Even though Breaking Bad is obviously a superior show, I'm pretty sure the mark Lost will leave is just as big.

the big mark that lost leaves the on the world is what a huge mistake it was to like the show

That's if you kept on watching for 5 years after the first season only because you wanted to understand everything that had been going on, what was the island all about etc.

Lost was all about the journey, not the destination. And it was a hell of a journey.

Anyway, what's relevant to this thread is that it's THE show of a decade, from a worldwide perspective. The Wire is only higher on 2+2's list because this forum is mostly NA.

I never watched LOST due to it falling in an unfavorable time period for me, but I remember very well what it was like watching my industry friends talk about it at work. I remember the first season a lot of people, whose opinions I respect, just absolutely gushing over it. Then, in the second season (or third season), a lot of those people started rabidly complaining about how it was going off the rails. I think by season 3 I was on facebook, and it was all over everyone's news feeds (both positive and negative response). But then gradually (maybe in season 4), fewer and fewer of my industry friends would talk about it on their news feeds, to the point where no one talked about it anymore (I remembered only a handful of people commenting about the finale). That's kind of how it went for a lot of people I think. It went from being a ground breaking event show to something people just stuck with. Because of how people started talking about the show (when I actually could have started watching it), I never did.

So, while LOST definitely had a huge impact on an era that doesn't even exist anymore in a positive way, it also had a huge negative impact, that probably far outweighs any positive people still have for it. That show ruined storytelling for television. TV eventually became "how can we fake out the audience this week?". For about 3 years after LOST departed, everyone was trying to come up with the next LOST, and they all failed...badly, none even got close to renewal. I think Alcatraz could have broken through (possibly the last LOST sort of clone), but it started throwing up unanswered mysteries, and the audience started throwing up the middle finger.

The main thing to take from shows like LOST is that when it appears you're making it up as you're going along, that's just a terrible thing for audiences. They want to know that you know where you're headed, even if you make mistakes on the way to getting there. That show (from my understanding) never knew how it would end, and it basically just brushed off its storytelling mistakes and plot holes with "don't worry, we'll pay it all off at the end", which was obviously just a big lie (I worked on a bunch of stuff related to LOST featuring those two guys in the final 2 seasons, and I'm about 100 percent convinced they were completely trolling the audience the entire show, which I personally thought was funny as they laughed all the way to the rabid fan bank).

The funny thing is that Carlton Cuse's current show is Bates Motel. The first couple of episodes of that show on A&E were filled with all kinds of juicy mysteries, and then boom, all of them were wrapped up in 1 or 2 episodes. It was almost like A&E saw the first two episodes, and said they loved the idea of the show, but he wasn't going to get to pull that LOST s***, and leave the mystery out of it.

Whenever audiences feel like they're being toyed with today, they just change the channel. We need to hit a new era of television where audiences are willing to allow themselves to be toyed with occasionally. No one wants every TV show or movie to be like every David Mamet con artist movie (examples: House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner). The big difference is that the viewer knows they're getting a con game when they watch a movie or TV show like that, but most of these shows never give any idea that they are screwing with you until you've wasted a ton of time on it. And when there's so much great choice out there today, they won't waste their time at all if they get even an inkling that they're being screwed with.

Again, the formula is that if you have an unpaid off storyline for more than 3 episodes, you should consider it dropped, and that stuff pisses the s*** out of audiences. So, to me, the real lasting legacy of LOST is making the audience too sophisticated and ultimately poisoning them from any kind of interesting television in the future. It was absolutely a massive cultural impact, both positively and negatively. And, in my opinion, no one will be talking about that show in 20 years. There are a lot of shows today that wouldn't be possible had it not been for that show, but they'll never tell you that.

Oh, I just saw Kam/Vermin's interaction. Kam, your thoughts are based on very European storytelling, while Vermin's are very much based on American storytelling. European Cinema has long decided the journey is what matters, not the ending (read French films). American audiences think the ending is more important than the journey. So, you have to have a good ending and good journey to satisfy most American audience members.

I never really thought about it. I'm Swiss and french is my mother tongue, so i've obviously watched a lot of French movies. And American movies, Hollywood productions being obviously everywhere. I'm not quite sure the ending matters less over this side of the ocean, but I know for sure that the audience here is much more fine with a non happy ending or unresolved situation than American usually are. For any mainstream, big production anyway.

Actually I was thinking about it last night, wondering if the inevitable last season's face off between Justified's Boyd Crowder and Raylan Givens could see the bad guy triumph. Figured it wouldn't be received too well in the US while us EU would love it.

I don't think EU care less about the ending in terms of quality, but I do think we're definitely more open minded regarding the evil triumphing over the good, non resolved situations etc.

Justified isn't really a mainstream show, and FX doesn't follow the conventions of its father. I think there's a good chance that any potential showdown between Boyd and Raylan could go any way. Raylan's already way outside a network TV protagonist, so it wouldn't take much to push him over any lines without polarizing the audience. But again, it doesn't have to end with that kind of showdown. I think that show is often about choices people make, and that anything bad happening will be because Raylan made a wrong choice about what to do about what's going on now. Just the fact that they're going to take it off the air next season shows that there *could* be a really explosive ending, but there doesn't have to be.

I also think you'd be surprised at how much American audiences are willing to take in regards to good vs. evil (the popularity/likability of the Boyd character is a very good example of that). Very few people weren't rooting for the De Niro character in Heat, and watching Training Day with an audience was an experience I will never forget (I specifically did that after working on it, because I wanted to see their reaction). That movie Flight was actually a good movie...until the end. I think American audiences just want the ending to play out in one of two ways. The first way is resolution. The other way is believability. American audiences hate the way movies like War of the Worlds ended, but they'll take a "crime does pay" ending any day of the week if it's believable. Keep in mind that there's no way the protagonists in a movie like Ocean's 11 are "good guys", but every single person in that audience is rooting for them. It's what happens when you write characters with depth as opposed to them being caricatures. That's why Boyd is one of the best TV characters in history, and possibly the best bad guy character in the history of television by a wide margin. And don't worry, I'm not ignoring Walter White, it's just that he doesn't belong in the conversation, because no one can identify with him or like him. Boyd, despite being an objectively bad guy, just has a way of going about it that makes him impossible not to like.

alrighty

106 lists were received

this is the top 30 for my Danish forum (the number in parenthesis is the number of first place votes that a show got - only for those with more than 1 vote though)... Get ready to laugh at some of these

1. Breaking Bad 1064 (24)
2. Game of Thrones 604 (6)
3. The Sopranos 540 (6)
4. Dexter 522 (7)
5. Friends 439 (3)
6. Band of Brothers 397 (3)
7. How I Met Your Mother 394 (2)
8. House of Cards 376 (3)
9. Californication 371
10. The Walking Dead 370 (2)
11. Entourage 370
12. The Wire 355 (9)
13. The Simpsons 344
14. Lost 340 (2)
15. Prison Break 340
16. Seinfeld 328 (2)
17. South Park 299
18. Klovn 298 << Danish
19. The King of Queens 257
20. The Big Bang Theory 248
21. Sons of Anarchy 240
22. Homeland 237
23. Suits 235
24. Twin Peaks 221 (5)
25. The Office (UK) 218
26. The Office (US) 208 (3)
27. Matador 205 << Danish
28. The X Files 188
29. 24 176 (2)
30. Modern Family 168

The Wire and Twin Peaks scored really highly amongst the people who had these on their lists, so it's clear that they suffer from not having been watched by very many people.

And just wow @ Breaking Bad dominating that much

it's interesting the wire is 12th. do danish people watch it with subtitles? i could see it being very difficult for non native speakers to understand the slang.

More interesting that it had the highest number of first place votes and still got 12th, meaning (presumably) that the people that actually watched it absolutely loved it, but just not that many of the voters had seen it.

Edit: oops, for some reason on mobile it didn't show the entire thingyman post, so that was already mentioned. Carry on.

Yeah, absolutely spot on :P

Many europeans in their late 20s and 30s didn't learn english by going to school but thanks to the geek culture: US TV shows, video games, various english forums etc. As a result we've learned the english slang as much as a proper english. You'd be surprised lol

I've said it a few times here, The Wire never was really popular in europe, not really sure why, but definitely not because of a slang we couldn't understand.

Understanding The Wire's dialogues was not a problem for me, but i just never really loved the show. It's not even close to making my top 10. A cultural difference maybe. But then again I love some "very American" shows, such as Justified, or Sons of Anarchy, so dunno..