Best. Episodes. Ever.

Behind the scenes of the latest Rolling Stone list, plus a 'Sopranos' documentary, and 'Slow Horses' returns

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I’m more turned on than you are…

We’re making a list, and checking it twice

The big Rolling Stone project I’ve been teasing for most of the summer is finally here: our list of the 100 greatest TV episodes of all time. Go read it — including the introduction, which explains some of our eligibility criteria — and then I can give you a few glimpses of how the list sausage gets made.

• As happened when Matt Zoller Seitz and I began plotting out TV (THE BOOK), a decision was made early on to limit the kinds of shows being compared, just to make the thing more manageable. So sitcoms, dramas, and anthology shows were in, but sketch comedy, documentaries, news, reality TV, etc., were out. There was a brief period where we considered dropping anthology shows, too — at least, the more traditional kind where each episode has new characters, as opposed to something like Fargo — but even if I wasn’t currently researching a Rod Serling biography, I don’t think I’d have wanted a list that didn’t have a Twilight Zone on it. Similarly, we made miniseries and international series eligible, even if there aren’t many examples of each, because there were certain episodes nobody would have been happy to go without. How to place boundaries on these things is always tricky.

• We initially discussed the idea of certain series having more than one representative, with “College” and “Pine Barrens” from The Sopranos pitched by someone as as example. This proved unwieldy, because where do you draw the line at what shows get such treatment, and at a certain point you’re in danger of having the entire list taken up with examples of a handful of series. Sticking to one episode per show made more sense, even if there were still a lot of impossible choices. The Twin Peaks pilot versus the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return was an incredibly tough call, for instance, while it took quite a while to zero in on exactly which episode we’d select from shows like The Honeymooners and The Larry Sanders Show. I’ve written a whole book about Better Call Saul (which you can preorder right now, in case you didn’t already know that), yet I had the damndest time choosing between “Chicanery,” “Bagman,” and the episode I finally picked. Other decisions along these lines proved incredibly easy, though, like knowing that “Flu Season” would be our Parks and Rec representative.

• An ongoing question was how much to weight episodes overall versus classic moments within episodes. WKRP in Cincinnati’s “Turkeys Away,” for instance, has that incredible closing sequence at the end about a Thanksgiving promotion gone tragically awry, but the rest of the episode is just okay, and it wound up being a late cut. The single funniest scene of NewsRadio is Jimmy James reading from his twice-translated memoir, Macho Business Donkey Wrestler, but that’s the B-plot of an episode with a forgettable A-plot. Whereas the episode of that series that we ultimately chose is firing on all cylinders in all of its stories, and has several bits that are in the ballpark of the memoir sequence.

• We did our best to provide diversity of eras and styles within our 100 examples, even if we didn’t always succeed. The list is definitely weighted a bit to 21st century television, but we still have a good amount of representation from earlier decades. (The long list had at least a dozen Seventies sitcom episodes alone.) An ongoing question was about Very Special Episodes that broke with series’ usual formats, versus fantastic examples of the usual formula. In many cases, we wound up with examples that combined the two approaches. Almost every All in the Family is Very Special in some way, for instance, so the topical one we chose isn’t that unusual for the series as a whole. Part of that Better Call Saul internal debate was my concern that the episode I chose occupied too similar a space within the series as the one I picked from Breaking Bad. In the end, though, I just couldn’t leave it off.

• In an early August newsletter, I asked for examples of great episodes from series that weren’t great overall. My original hope was to have at least a third of the list made up of episodes like that, to help illustrate how surprising episodic television can be, where lesser shows can surprise with atypically great installments. That phenomenon is still represented on the list, but when we started making the cut down to 100, I found that those kinds of episodes — say, the Sons of Anarchy where Gemma tells Jax and Clay about her assault, the Westworld about Zahn McClarnon’s character, or the Dexter Season Four finale — didn’t quite stack up with the ones we kept, especially when they were operating in similar tonal or stylistic spaces. That said, while we didn’t pick an episode from the final Game of Thrones season specifically to demonstrate that even terrible seasons of TV can have a great individual chapter, it does that too, I suppose.

• Almost every time I participate in a list like this, there’s at least one omission that leaves me baffled in hindsight as to what I was thinking when I left it off. In this case, it’s the Hannibal Season Two finale, where everyone finds out the truth about Dr. Lecter and a whole lot of blood gets shed over that discovery. If I had a do-over, I’d not only have it on the list, but probably have it in the top 50. But for whatever reason, I culled it from the long list early in the process and never reconsidered it. A bad job by me!

• Some other episodes whose absence pains me, even if I better understand why I didn’t include them: NYPD Blue’s “Closing Time,” Quantum Leap’s “The Leap Home Part 1,” Deep Space Nine’s “The Visitor,” “Three Stories” from House (where we find out how House got his disability), Party Down’s “Sin Say Shun Awards Afterparty,” “Safe House” from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, “White Tulip” from Fringe, “Hitting the Fan” from The Good Wife, “Evan” from Miami Vice, “Password” from The Odd Couple, and… I should stop at this point. There’s a lot of great TV out there, folks!

• Wait, no, I can’t stop! I watched or rewatched a lot of episodes for this, at times for shows that didn’t wind up making the final cut. It feels strange to me, for instance, that David E. Kelley, one of the most prolific and acclaimed TV writers of all time, doesn’t have a single entry on here, but I revisited various famous episodes of L.A. Law, The Practice, et al, and none of them felt quite right. I love The Rockford Files, but that’s more a show about consistent pleasure than about any one particular standout. I couldn’t decide between a handful of Halt and Catch Fire episodes, at a point when the list was in danger of being too weighted towards serious dramas of a particular era, so I decided to omit it altogether. Regrets, I have a few.

• Where Matt and I came up with our faux mathematical formula to determine the order in TV (THE BOOK), and where the Rolling Stone list of the best shows ever was based on votes from our participants, the order here was done along the lines of our best sitcoms ever list — i.e., much more art than science. I knew from the moment we began the project what the number one episode would be. I knew that the second thing would be a Simpsons (though that was another instance where there was a lot of debate as to which Simpsons, with various people advocating for “Marge vs. the Monorail” and others). After that, it was a lot of gut feel, moving things up and down the list, looking at X show being placed above Y show and deciding whether that made sense. Things mostly settled in about a week before the list published, but I made a few last-minute changes, though not huge ones. “College,” for instance, was always in the top 10, but further down from where it eventually ended up, in part because watching the show discussed in the next newsletter item made me feel like an idiot for not having it higher.

• This was in many ways a group project. I only wrote about half the entries once the list was finalized, and there was a lot of discussion and a lot of suggestions from various corners of Rolling Stone, plus periodic conversations with other critics. But I would say that if there is something about the list that annoys you, be it an omission, an inclusion, a choice of which episode from a particular show (say, the aforementioned Game of Thrones pick), or a placement, you can blame me and odds are you will be correct.

This guy walks into a documentary filmmaker’s office…

I am both the best and worst possible audience for Wise Guy: David Chase & The Sopranos, Alex Gibney’s two-part documentary about the HBO drama and its creator, which premieres this weekend. The Sopranos is the defining show of my career, one I have written extensively about for multiple publications, and in three separate books so far. I celebrated its 25th anniversary back in January by speaking with Chase for the umpteenth time. The series means the world to me, and I never get tired of learning about it. But I also know so much about it, and have interviewed Chase so often, that there were stretches where I could practically recite David’s answers to Gibney’s questions before he delivered them, often with the same phrasing he’s used with me and/or Matt. And the majority of the film is repeating information I know well, much of it included in The Sopranos Sessions and/or The Revolution Was Televised.

Rather than turn my review into a long first-person account of the odd experience of me watching it, I did my best to step outside of my extremely specific perspective and imagine how someone who loves The Sopranos but isn’t me would feel about it. I think Gibney ultimately does a solid job trying to cover a lot of territory within three hours. And there are certain segments — particularly when he gets into the casting of Big Pussy, Livia, Tony, and several other characters — where I found myself delighted, both with what I was learning for the first time, and how Gibney and his team were assembling all the pieces of the story. There are some obvious gaps, which is what happens when you try to do a biography and a history of a series, all in one relatively short amount of time, but the highs of this are quite high.

The fart of espionage

Finally, with Slow Horses returning for a fourth season this week, I wrote about how it’s become one of TV’s most reliable current entertainments. And among the reasons I say “reliable” is that this is the show’s fourth season in less than three years. As I’ve mentioned a lot lately, it can’t be overstated how damaging it is when series are away for two years or more between seasons. But even beyond the punctuality, good show remains good.

That’s it for this week? What did everybody else think?