I’ll be starting on a Short Takes piece later today, but I’ll probably hold it until Monday in “hopes” that the PTC will have a little something for me which they haven’t as of Sunday morning. Meanwhile, I know you’ve probably seen this list before, or at least part of it since most media sources have it as TVLand’s Top 50 TV Icons, but there were 100 on the full list, and if you go to the TVLand site for the TV icons they start with the bottom 50 and then goes to the top 50, so there. 1 Johnny Carson 2 Lucille Ball 3 Oprah Winfrey 4 Bill Cosby 5 Walter Cronkite 6 Carol Burnett 7 Mary Tyler Moore 8 Jerry Seinfeld 9 Homer Simpson 10 Dick Clark 11 Roseanne 12 Dick Van Dyke 13 Jackie Gleason 14 Ed Sullivan 15 "Not Ready for Primetime Players" 16 David Letterman 17 Bob Newhart 18 William Shatner 19 Andy Griffith 20 Carroll O'Connor 21 Kermit 22 Milton Berle 23 Barbara Walters 24 Michael Landon 25 Heather Locklear 26 Farrah Fawcett 27 Regis Philbin 28 Howard Cosell 29 John Ritter 30 Alan Alda 31 Sarah Jessica Parker 32 Henry Winkler 33 Ellen DeGeneres 34 Bob Barker 35 Michael J. Fox 36 Diahann Carroll 37 George Clooney 38 Bea Arthur 39 Jennifer Aniston 40 Sally Field 41 Jon Stewart 42 James Gandolfini 43 Flip Wilson 44 Susan Lucci 45 Sarah Michelle Gellar 46 Lassie 47 Simon Cowell 48 Jimmy Smits 49 Calista Flockhart 50 Larry Hagman 51 Bob Hope 52 Ron Howard 53 Ed McMahon 54 Florence Henderson 55 Fred Rogers 56 Betty White 57 Charlie Brown 58 Don Knotts 59 Ted Danson 60 Merv Griffin 61 Pee Wee Herman 62 Redd Foxx 63 Ed Asner 64 Phil Donahue 65 Pamela Anderson 66 Kelsey Grammer 67 Tom Selleck 68 Don Cornelius 69 Barbara Eden 70 Bob Denver 71 Rosie O'Donnell 72 Cher 73 Tony Danza 74 Joan Rivers 75 Peter Falk 76 Candice Bergen 77 James Garner 78 Art Carney 79 Angela Landsbury 80 Adam West 81 Dick Cavett 82 Ted Knight 83 Isabel Sanford 84 Cartman from South Park 85 Rod Serling 86 Jerry Mathers 87 Phil Hartman 88 Gavin MacLeod 89 Robert Guillaume 90 John Stamos 91 Dennis Franz 92 Judge Judy 93 Neil Patrick Harris 94 Melissa Gilbert 95 Richard Dawson 96 Shannen Doherty 97 In Living Color cast 98 Meredith Baxter 99 Delta Burke 100 Marcia Cross Not a bad list particularly in the Top Ten. I’m not sure you can even disagree too much about position in the Top Ten, and certainly Carson is the TV icon. Now what people will say twenty years from now is an entirely different question. I frankly doubt that many people will know that much about Johnny or Walter Cronkite in twenty years (in much the same way that twenty years later Johnny was making occasional jokes to Americans about Wayne & Shuster, which we Canadians didn’t get), while they will know and probably appreciate Lucille Ball, Bill Cosby and probably Mary Tyler Moore. Sic transit gloria mundi – all glory is fleeting; lists like this moreso. The further down the list you go, the more controversial it becomes. As usual, the list is overloaded with people who were prominent in the past twenty to twenty five years. More than half fit into that period. Realistically what are Callista Flockhart, Shannen Doherty, and John Stamos doing on this list? Where are Jack Webb, Jack Benny, and Edward R. Murrow? Marcia Cross is considered a TV icon from a show that has been on for three years and a bit (Desperate Housewives) but James Arness, who was on Gunsmoke for twenty years isn’t. There are many more of course; I for one am still trying to figure out Meredith Baxter – loved her since Bridget Loves Bernie but a TV icon? Position is another thing. You can argue position (outside of the top ten of course) for days or weeks. There are some pretty egregious positioning errors (in my opinion of course). Rod Serling deserves to be in the top fifteen rather than the bottom fifteen, and Ron Howard should probably be higher for portraying Opie Taylor and Richie Cunningham, than Sarah Michelle Gellar for playing the evil Kendall on All My Children and more significantly Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are a lot more of these of course. Biggest thing about most of these TV Icons though is most of them couldn’t do it without writers. Cronkite? He’d be okay – this is a correspondent who landed with the 101st Airborne at Eindhoven and hauled out his portable typewriter to start doing dispatches as soon as his glider landed. Ed Sullivan and Howard Cosell would have been fine too, not because they were both good writers – they were – but because what they did either didn’t need writers (who needs a writer to say “And now here on our stage”) or because what they did was largely improvisation in the first place. You could put Oprah, Bob Barker, Regis Philbin, Judge Judy, Phil Donahue, and maybe – maybe – Dick Clark and Don Cornelius in the same sort of class. I think Carson could do it by himself but it wouldn’t be easy on him. Ellen Degeneres is doing it on her own, and the less said about that the better. Some of the people who did stand-up before they became sitcom stars might be able to do a little but I doubt it; stand-up and sitcoms are two different kinds of writing. And of course Lassie. Lassie didn’t need writers to bark. He did however need writers to give him things to bark about and to tell his handlers when to get him to bark. For the rest, without the writers it would all be dumb show and they know it. But it’s all subjective after all. If the Writers’ strike goes on much longer – and while the news that the parties are going back to the table on November 26th is a potentially promising sign, I’m fairly convinced that a big reason for AMPTP returning to the table is the overwhelming public support that the Writers’ Guild has received (more on that theory in the Short Takes piece) and things may collapse fairly quick – I’ll come up my own list, but again that’s going to be entirely subjective and more or less ephemeral. Meanwhile, argue about this one, vote in the poll about the strike (first returns fit my expectations, and more on that in the Short Takes piece too) and click on the Free Rice link too.
"Top 100 TV Icons?"
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