A Brief Reflection After Reading The Ringer's 100 Best Episodes of the Century List

I ran this TV blog here for about eight years, ending it in 2017 after the conclusion of Grimm, and then bringing the archive back online solely to write about the 20th anniversary of LOST, for which this blog owes its existence and name. Over the years of TV watching and blogging, one would guess that a TV blogger would know an infinite amount of TV shows and episodes and that any list of the greatest shows in the 2000s or the best episodes of the 2000s would be met with a knowing nod, quibbling, perhaps, with the ranking of The Night Of or Dawson’s Creek, or wondering why Everwood’s “Pilot” failed to make this list. 

I had the opposite experience, aside from the Everwood question, while reading The Ringer’s recently updated Best 100 Episodes of the 2000s list. The Ringer’s list put into perfect perspective how vast and unconquerable the TV medium became and is because of Peak TV and the Streaming Wars. As The Ringer introduction states, “the number of produced scripted shows has plateaued, and consolidation is approaching.” 

Indeed, streamers no longer hand a blank check and a ten episode to order to Hollywood bigwigs because the streaming wars effectively broke the TV industry, if not the entertainment industry. The WGA went on strike during the summer of 2023 to protect their livelihoods and gain fair compensation from streamers. As 2026 nears, the industry is in a precarious place as writers struggle to find work. According to Spectrum1 news, “TV writing jobs fell by 42% in the 2023-24 season, a loss of 1,319 positions across all seniority levels.” Uncertainty pervades the industry, much as it does many other industries in America at the moment. 

I published my TV reviews during the latter half of TV’s Golden Age, four years before Netflix premiered House of Cards, its first original series. Broadcast television was alive and well. HBO produced its prestige dramas and comedies. Cable had its prestige dramas in Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, The Shield, and Battlestar Galatica. I primarily reviewed broadcast TV shows because enough people still watched Arrow, The Vampire Diaries, Grimm, Revenge, and so on, live and would quickly search for a review. 

I used to write and publish fast so that the link would have a chance people seeing it in Twitter search. I was in my mid-twenties, trying my best to build some kind of pop culture writing career through my blog, and I wanted to cover as much television as I could. TV content twelve to fifteen years ago was voluminous, however, and continued to grow in volume like Mr. Creosote, so much so that I accepted my limitations after a few years of writing tedious Fall Preview articles and underwhelming web traffic. This blog dwindled to a niche TV blog, devoted to what I liked, so I only published Everwood, Grimm, and The Vampire Diaries reviews, with occasional essays about Dawson’s Creek or the odd post about LOST and/or Joss Whedon. 

Reading through The Ringer’s The 100 Best Episodes of the Century, again, reminded me of the sheer unconquerable volume of content produced since I stopped writing for this blog in March 2017. The only response to such volume is to find your niche and then your audience. Once in awhile, a Game of Thrones or Severance or Pluribus premieres, and pop culture websites will ride that content wave until the season concludes. Every few years, websites such as The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, and The Ringer publish comprehensive and authoritative list of the best and most important TV in the 21st century--a herculean task in a short-attention-span society, but I assume these lists get the clicks.

As for The Ringer’s list, Vladimir Nabokov used the spine test to measure the quality of literature. If you felt a little shiver between the shoulder blades while reading a book, Nabokov considered it “the highest form of emotion that humanity attained when evolving pure art and pure science.” By that criteria, I’d argue that Fleabag’s series finale, ranked #60, deserved a higher ranking, solely because reading about it, and remembering it, provoked a little shiver between my shoulder blades.