Classic TV

1959 · 5 Seasons · CBS · Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror

The Twilight Zone remains the gold standard for anthology television, a show so far ahead of its time that its themes about conformity, prejudice, technology, and human nature feel more relevant now than when they aired over sixty years ago. Rod Serling used the framework of science fiction and fantasy to smuggle in social commentary that network censors would have killed in any other format, and the result is a body of work that has entered the cultural vocabulary permanently. Not every episode lands with the same force, and the fourth season's shift to an hour-long format disrupted the show's tight rhythm. But at its best, The Twilight Zone is television that operates on a level very few shows have ever reached, before or since.

1971 · 10 Seasons · NBC · Crime / Mystery

Columbo shows you the murder in the first ten minutes, killer's face and all, and then delivers the purest pleasure in television, watching a rumpled man in a raincoat dismantle a genius who thinks he's already won. Peter Falk's lieutenant is one of the great characters in the medium's history, a performance of such perfect calibration that fifty years later the show has become a full-blown comfort-watch renaissance. The formula never changes because it never needed to. Just one more thing, as the man says, the ABC revival years run softer than the immortal 1970s run, and nobody holds it against him.

1985 · 7 Seasons · NBC · Comedy

The Golden Girls put four women over fifty in a Miami kitchen and produced one of the sharpest joke machines in sitcom history, a show that remains funnier line for line than most comedies made since. Bea Arthur's withering Dorothy, Betty White's serenely dim Rose, Rue McClanahan's man-eating Blanche, and Estelle Getty's purse-clutching assassin Sophia form television's perfect comic quartet, and the cheesecake-fueled friendship underneath gave the laughs their staying power. Some period jokes have aged badly and the plots recycle, and none of it matters at the kitchen table. Thank you for being a friend was a mission statement.