My 10 Favorite Shows... EVER! Part 2

There are few things more anticipated than the second half of this Top 10 post. Presidents and billionaires alike have called and texted me asking for a sneak preview of the Top 5. Vegas odds makers have set lines based on my About Me section of Facebook. Despite all this media pressure I refuse to put my integrity on the back burner. So bribes and offers of no strings attached sex aside, here it is, without further ado, the Part 2 of 2 of my Top 10 Favorite Shows list, a list called "The most important thing ever to be read by you or your children" by Forbes Magazine. Here it is.

5. Seinfeld

      The list of absolutely brilliant Seinfeld jokes is seemingly endless. It is, in my opinion, the second most quotable show of all time (the most quotable found its way to #3 on this list). A history of browsing through the internet's top character lists shows that both Kramer and George Costanza regularly land in the Top 10, and for good reason. Here's A Great George Moment, and here is A Great Kramer Moment, but these are really just the tip of the iceberg. There was the man in the cape, the bet to see who could abstain from "self-gratification" the longest, the astronauts pen that writes upside down, Top of the Muffin to You, and the episode told in reverse (where they went to India). Seinfeld did for sitcoms what Nirvana did for rock music. Instead of relying on heavy plot, with a theme driving the season (look at How I Met Your Mother or Friends or Raymond, but more importantly the older comedies) Seinfeld, "The show about nothing" chose to rely on episode to episode storyline, with very little carryover. If you don't like Seinfeld then stuff your sorry's in a sack, and watch these clips.
Kramer With Merv Griffith Set
George Does the Opposite of his Instincts
"Not that there's anything wrong with that"
The Junior Mint

Best Character: George is great, but I'm partial to Cosmo Kramer
Best Season: Emmy winning season 4, but really there is no going wrong here 

4. House M.D.

       House is the biggest asshole on television, and its all part of his desired image. He will say anything to anyone to get his way. His motto is "Everybody lies" and he operates under that assumption. The show, if you haven't seen it or heard of it, is about Greg House, a medical diagnosing machine who gets the cases that nobody else in the hospital can figure out. He uses his ever rotating and updating team of doctors break into people's houses and see what they live in because "if they know we're coming they might hide something". He hired the black member of his team (Foreman) because of his troubled youth. He did a background check and found breaking and entering so he hired him, he hired another member (Cameron) because she was "a solid 8", and the third original member because his father was a famous doctor. The show goes much deeper than House being an asshole, he is an asshole because of his constant pain.
      After having the equivalent to a heart attack in his leg, he had a large portion of the tissue in his leg die, and because of that is in constant unbearable pain, which led to his subsequent vicodin addiction. That very same addiction led him to eventually hallucinate and end up in a mental hospital. The show is fairly formulaic, each episode is centered around a case that seems unsolvable. House has to be the most original character in television probably ever, who says anything to anyone and gets away with it because, simply put, he is a genius and they need him.
This is a character study I found of House on Youtube. It is hard to capture House's theme in clips so it was the best I could do.
Best Character: Greg House, obviously. Kutner (played by Kal Penn of Harold and Kumar wasn't bad, but his stint on the show was short lived.
Best Season: Season 4 where he has the "reality tv show" to determine his new team.

3. Arrested Development

      I could quote this show all day. It is the best written comedy ever. They write set-ups to jokes that come into play 5 or more episodes down the road. The narration moves the show along at a very fast pace, which makes it hard for the average viewer to keep track of it. That was the reason  for its cancellation after 3 season (which in my opinion is absolutely criminal). Viewers found it hard to keep up. When you read between the lines that means that the dummy's couldn't understand the political jokes, and all the other jokes happened so fast and without a laugh track that people couldn't tell what was a joke and what was dialogue. It has incredible re-watch value, there are jokes made about jokes that are buried under jokes. I have never shown someone the first episode and not gotten them immediately addicted to the show and sympathetically furious about its cancellation.
      The show was about an incredibly dysfunctional family being held together by Michael Bluth. The former matriarch of the family George Bluth landed himself in jail for allegedly building houses in Iraq illegally through his construction company The Bluth Company (traded on the NY Stock Exchange). Now Michael has to hold the family, who are completely dependent on the company for income and regularly ignore job opportunities, and the company together.
      The things that set this show apart from other comedies are the cast and the writing. The cast was phenomenal, including such stars as Michael Bateman, Michael Cera, Will Arnett, David Cross, Jeffrey Tambor. Guest stars also included Martin Short as the quadriplegic "Uncle" Jack (no blood relation to the family) who refuses to get a wheel chair and instead hires an incredibly strong half deaf Russian, Ben Stiller as a magician and GOB's (Will Arnett) primary magical competition who waits hidden in rooms waiting for someone to say the word 'wonder' and then appears in a puff of smoke prompting everyone to say "How did he do that!?" and Liza Minelli as the cradle robbing neighbor. This show is so good I am going to let the clips do the rest of the talking.

GOB- After he was told to take Michael's job as the company President as his mother's puppet he begins to alienate the employees via his suits
Tobias- The ambiguously gay brother-in-law who ha a phobia of being naked, and instead opts to wear cut-off jeans under his clothes
George-Michael- Michael Cera doing what he does best, awkward. This clip focuses on his incredibly forgettable girlfriend.
The Chicken Dances- an example of the running jokes, the family is so elitist and out of touch with reality that they don't know what sound a chicken makes, but they do their best impressions anyway. "Chickens don't clap!"

Best Character: they are all great, but since I'm forcing myself to pick it has to be Tobias, GOB comes in close second. Side note if Gene Parmesan appeared in more episodes he would have easily taken this

Best Season: Season 2, when Gob is in charge

2. Dexter

      The show about a serial killer that you can't help but root for. He works for the police as a blood spatter analyst by day and kills the people who slip through the systems crack by night. The show centers around his relationships with the people close to him like his wife Rita, sister Debra, step children Cody and Astor, and a slew of co-workers. As a young boy he was adopted by Debra's father Harry, and he saw a darkness in him, so instead of having the system pick up on this and call him crazy he taught Dexter how to lie and fake his sanity. While doing that he taught him how to kill the people who deserved to be killed without getting caught.  This involves tying them to a table in a room lined with plastic, killing them and chopping up their remains and throwing them into the ocean. He says regularly that he has no emotions, and does not care about anything except stalking and killing his prey.
      Dexter is a non-stop ride from week to week. Every episode is entertaining, but the real payoffs are in those last 3 or 4 episodes at the end of each season which make your jaw drop and you unable to speak at all for a half an hour. I'd like to give more detail as I did in Arrested Development, but my goal here is to turn people on to new shows, and giving any plot lines away in this show is high treachery to future watchers. If you watch the first episode of the first season you will be hooked for life, guaranteed.

Best Character: Dexter overall, but the performance of John Lithgow as the Trinity Killer in season 4 was maybe the best season of acting I have ever seen in any show.

Best Season: Season 4 with John Lithgow

1. Lost

      I was once asked to describe Lost to someone who had never seen an episode. I couldn't do it. The show was shrouded in so much mystery that even if you watched for 4 seasons you barely knew what the overall plot path of the show was. This tended to infuriate viewers, but everyone kept coming back. Why? Because this show is like heroin for your optic nerve. Every minute is tense and you find yourself eternally searching for clues to answer questions that simply never get answered. Actually after the show finished they released this clip to close some doors on the questions ****MEGA HUGE SPOILERS IN THIS CLIP****.
      The show started when a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles crashed on a desert island. Immediately the idea of coincidence (Jack's side) vs. fate (Locke's side) becomes a theme. Were they meant to be there or were they simply a victim of circumstance? This show delivered some of the jaw dropping cliff hangers in history. Jack and Locke emerged as leaders of the "tribe", who in short order begin to battle the "Others" who have been on the island the whole time and begin kidnapping woment and children. All over the island are abandoned science stations left by the Dharma Initiative, one of these stations play prominently in Season 2.
      Plenty of people tend to smack talk on Lost. It's simply because they never watched it. I've watched the faces of skeptical people watch the first hour of the show and see how their eyes light up with interest, the first words out of their mouth are "HOLY SHIT... can we watch the next one?". I've taken to extending the "Lost Challenge" to skeptics. I will lend you the first DVD disc of Lost, and if you can watch the first 4 episodes and not be hooked then i will never tell you about the show ever again.

Best Character: John Locke... "DON'T YOU TELL ME WHAT I CAN'T DO" So many different characters are great on this show that it's really close between 4 or 5 characters.

Best Season: 2, 5 or 6. In my defense for being wishy washy and picking half the show's seasons, there is a reason it's number 1, and that is because they are all great.

Honorable Mentions: 24: It is just so action packed an intense that that actually led to its undoing. In the last season i watched (6) i stopped watching halfway through because it was too ridiculous.
Scrubs: Silly and hilarious. If it wasn't as sappy as it was it may have made the list
How I Met Your Mother: after 3 seasons this show seemed like a top 10 lock, but the 3 season since have run into the problem of people anticipating the mother being introduced, and that impatience has hurt it a lot
Community: I'm confident this will be a top 10er. It just simply does not have the necessary volume to make it top 10 worthy. Its the best during spoof episodes.
Fringe: Borderline top 10er, which started slow in the first 2 seasons, but the current season 3 has been phenomenal. If it keeps its current pace look for it to edge in ahead of MASH or Friends.
Weeds: Really funny, but has recently jumped the shark about 5 times.
It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia: Again incredibly funny, i just got bored with it. Possible top 10 potential if i get back into it