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At the turn of the 21st century, reality crashed the TV party in every imaginable way. Driven by advances in digital video and a seemingly bottomless appetite for contrived spectacle, unscripted competitions took center stage as the dominant couch-potato genre.
Scripted shows also figured out how to make “real” feel compelling. Bleeding into the new decade from its 1999 launch, The Sopranos elevated mundane details of everyday life to tragicomic proportions, thereby serving notice to the industry at large: No matter what the subject — New Jeresey mafia family, nitwit boss (The Office) or vampires drinking bottled blood in a Louisiana saloon (True Blood) — TV’s finest fiction needed to at least feel real. Even time-travel sagas like Lost and Doctor Who tried to throw some real-world science into the mix.
At their best, ’00s TV winners tunneled genuine insights, clever dialogue, complex characters and surprising story twists through increasingly low-cost production tools and into TV’s ever-expanding Land of a Thousand Channels. Read on for a recap of the decade’s most worthy TV experiences.
The Office : Writer-star Ricky Gervais painted a portrait of office dronedom so nuanced that the BBC Two series reverberates half a decade later with pitch-perfect hilarity. By wrapping the pathetic machinations of everyshmuck office manager David Brent within the conceit of a documentary’s “direct address” confessional, Gervais and co-creator Stephen Merchant grounded the humor in a deep understanding of comedy’s golden rule: The richest laughs are born out of the deepest desperation. –Hugh Hart
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Late Night With Conan O’Brien Trip to Finland: O’Brien’s puppet sidekick Triumph the Wonder Dog gave Trekkies a hard time throughout the show’s 16-year run, but it was the carrot-topped geek himself who demonstrated absolute genius at making the most out of nearly nothing: In 2006, O’Brien, told repeatedly that he resembled Finland’s female president, flew to Helsinki in the dead of winter and tried to charm the famously glum Scandanavians before leaping stark naked into an icy fjord. –Hugh Hart
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Lost : Measured by mystique, ABC’s time-traveling island drama ranks as the ’00s X-Files equivalent. Following a movie-quality pilot directed by J.J. Abrams, co-creator Damon Lindelof and executive producer Carlton Cuse dangled clues, postponed resolution, subverted expectations, allowed for sly humor and drop-kicked heavy-duty science theory into a mythology that captivated mainstream viewers and nitpickers alike. Secret weapon: composer Michael Giacchino‘s superspooky score. –Hugh Hart
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Battlestar Galactica : Traditionalists fumed when Ronald D. Moore and David Eick turned 1970s fighter pilot Starbuck into a woman, but Katee Sackhoff’s tomboy energy galvanized the Peabody Award-winning reboot. Exploring the boundaries between man and machine might be nothing new for sci-fi, but the series’ devious ensemble cast, Cylon mind games, deep back story and soap opera dynamics addressed real-world issues of race, religion and war with poignant grace. –Hugh Hart
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Disaster coverage: Calamity brought out the best from cable news networks. On Sept. 11, 2001, TV cameras beamed surreal imagery of black plumes, crumbling towers and blue sky into millions of living rooms, binding, if only briefly, a captive nation. And in 2005, before personalized journalism got beaten into the ground by narcissistic talking heads, reporter Anderson Cooper covered Hurricane Katrina coverage by stepping into the wreckage of New Orleans to produce a series of rage-provoking reports on the government’s shameful response to the natural disaster. –Hugh Hart
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Fringe : After they revitalized Star Trek for the big screen, sci-fi power trio J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci and Kurtzman channeled their fascination with gore and weird science into the most entertaining sci-fi show on television. Exploring outlandish paranormal mayhem, Anna Torv’s FBI agent keeps it dry while Joshua Jackson goes for wry. Meanwhile, the show’s wild-card mad scientist (John Noble) ups the “ewww” ante weekly with his grisly experiments. –Hugh Hart
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Adult Swim: While The Simpsons and South Park set the bar for mainstream animated comedy, Cartoon Network’s cartoon mini-network for grownups let ‘er rip with bizarre concepts including Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Sealab 2021. Exhibit A: Harvey Birdman. In this dizzying procedural spoof, creators Michael Ouweleen and Erik Richter panty-raided Hanna-Barbera’s ’60s ‘toons to machine-gun viewers with viral in-jokes about sex, superheroes and pop culture. –John Scott Lewinski and Scott Thill
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The Colbert Report : Stephen Colbert once punked President George W. Bush during the peak of the war on terror, but that’s just the start. The comic talking head ran for president himself, invaded the Smithsonian, visited Iraq, then lent his name to everything from military charities to newly discovered creatures. Personifying the surreal world in which science and facts play second fiddle to gossip, Colbert could lead us to the ends of the earth — at which point, he would probably strip us naked and make off with our stuff. –Scott Thill
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Doctor Who : Dormant since the BBC shelved it in 1989, Doctor Who returned to huge ratings and unprecedented international appeal, cementing its status as the longest-running science fiction show in television history. Jump-started by Russell T. Davies, the series followed the same concept as the 1963 original while adding big-budget effects and romance. Christopher Ecclestone took on the job of reintroducing The Doctor for one season before giving way to David Tennant and Matt Smith. –John Scott Lewinski
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Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles : Creator Josh Friedman surpassed expectations by focusing on the relationship between Sarah and John Connor after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The series about robots from the future quickly became a metaphor for life as it pinpointed themes of illness and other human experiences. –Scott Pierce
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The Sopranos : David Chase’s saga about a New Jersey Mafia family set a new standard for dramatic excellence. Anchored by James Gandolfini as all-American entrepreneur Tony Soprano, the uniformly fantastic ensemble cast enlived nuanced storylines that shed profound light on the way business, and relationships, get negotiated in contemporary America. Then there were the unbearably suspenseful sequences that inevitably culminated in some poor sap getting whacked. –Hugh Hart
24, Season 1: This real-time thriller galvanized TV viewers when it hit the airwaves two months after 9/11 with a sense of urgency unmatched by anything else on TV at the time. With one hour of by-the-clock action per episode, Keifer Sutherland’s gravelly voiced antiterrorist agent Jack Bauer kept on ticking in this riveting exercise in wish-fulfillment for a shell-shocked nation. –Hugh Hart
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HBO: As the decade’s most potent creative fount, the pay cable network ruled by following a genius-simple precept: Find great storytellers and leave them alone. Emboldened by The Sopranos‘ zeigetist-defining success, HBO upgraded industry standards with a string of series driven by singular points of view. Flight of the Conchords set goofy songs to tiny situations involving two extremely low-key musicians and their witless manager. Deadwood armed Wild West frontier town rascals with straight razors and labyrinthine locutions on par with Shakespeare’s richest characters. The Wire tracked a once-great American city’s decay with heartbreaking attention to detail and Curb Your Enthusiasm mined universal laughs from the hyper-particular obsessions of a self-absorbed Hollywood millionaire. Thankfully, HBO’s always compelling lineup blazed the way for Showtime’s increasingly great programming: Now we’ve got two pay-cable powerhouses to push our buttons. –Hugh Hart
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Freaks and Geeks : What’s it really like to be a high-school misfit? This short-lived cult comedy addressed the question with dead-on accuracy, launching producer Judd Apatow’s career as geek-comedy king-maker. While the show launched in 1999 and sputtered out quickly in 2000, Freaks and Geeks ‘ awesome cast — Seth Rogen, Linda Cardellini, James Franco, Jason Segel, Martin Starr, Samm Levine and more — gave us a fresh supply of young comedic actors even as the show ushered in a new era of rebellion. –Scott Pierce
Honorable mentions include Arrested Development, 30 Rock, John Doe, Degrassi: The Next Generation, Heroes (Season 1), Dexter, Veronica Mars, True Blood, Rome and Myth Busters. What’s your top TV pick from the ’00s? Weigh in below.
Follow us on Twitter: @hughhart and @theunderwire.
