About Damned Time

This will be a nice near-birthday present…

…speaking of which, an interesting question: I can’t speak about Veronica Mars specifically because I haven’t seen most of the first season, but how many quality shows have never had a truly bad episode? The Sopranos is relevant because not only does in tower far above the lower 99% of television shows, but it’s amazingly consistent at that level (although, admittedly, at half of a broadcast network’s shows per year.) And yet, many people would disqualify it because of “Christopher.” And, actually, that’s very possibly right; it’s certainly not good. And yet, having screened it recently I’m not sure that it really qualifies as truly unwatchable. It’s a pretty decent and very well-acted drama interrupted by 20 minutes of characters reading position papers about Important Issues (in this case, ethnic stereotypes.) And yet, doesn’t that describe pretty much every episode of The West Wing, a popular and critically respected show? It stands out partly because the rest of the show is so much better than that, but compared to the rest of the shows on TV, well…it’s still pretty superpar.

There are some other ones that probably can’t be eligible–the BBC The Office had nothing resembling a bad episode, but in 12 episodes that can’t really count. Post-Braugher Homicide was often pretty lame; I haven’t seen all of The Wire. But here’s a question–what about Seinfeld? I may be forgetting something, but while there were certainly many relatively weak episodes, are there any that are truly bad? A lot of people will argue for the final episode, which while pretty weak I didn’t hate the way a lot of people did, but anything else?

I think we can rule out Law & Order and The Simpsons…