It’s been a hard slog this year - 2006, by many accounts, was a bum year in entertainment - film certainly didn’t step up. Music didn’t either. Did television? Certainly I watched more television in 2006 than I did in 2004 or 2005, but was that merely a function of my having more free time in which to watch television? Or is television actually getting smarter, better, more original? The brief heyday of the ABC serial (Lost, Desperate Housewives) died out with almost as much of a bang as with which it arrived, leaving a confusing television landscape - literally hundreds of procedurals following the gruesome CSI model of stylized reenactment, reality television programs that are not necessarily baffling in their conception but in their endurance and acclaim (Dancing with the Stars? Really?).

If my references of ‘what’s current’ seem a year or two behind, please - forgive me. There’s a lot of television out there, and I’m just starting to catch up.

1. Turner Classic Movies
On any given day, TCM will give you obscure ’30s programmers, silents, foreign classics from the Janus collection, Rob Zombie’s favorite grindhouse pictures, and a huge chunk of heralded classics, all presented without commercial interruption in their original aspect ratios with insightful intros (uh, ignore Robert Osborne when he’s talking about foreign films, though…) and impossibly rare shorts crammed in between features. Simply put, TCM is a treasure.

2. The Office
Choose your pick: the funniest satire of the foibles of the middle class in Bush-era America? The best soap opera mechanics in primetime? A startling (and at times extraordinarily depressing) meditation on loneliness? The Office is all these things and so much more. Intimately drawn, with minor characters whose every apperance is a joy and a constant interest in complexity and complication - who could have seen the (entirely realistic) turnabout Roy would have pulled, trying to show Pam how mature he could be? What other show would be brave enough to put between its starcrossed romantic leads a woman (Rashida Jones’ Karen) who’s not only not an obvious strawman, but is as viable and fully drawn a character as anyone the show’s spent the last two years following?

3. Project Runway / Top Chef
Reality television endures - and thrives! How? How after nearly a decade of watching felicitous nobodies have we not grown tired of ‘humans’ and reverted back to ‘icons’?

I think Project Runway and Top Chef are the surest sign of the blending of these two extremes - sure, these are ‘real’ people (as constructed on AVID), but the real wonder of these shows comes from the fact that everyone on it (well, maybe not Top Chef’s Michael…) are extraordinarily talented larger-than-life figures whose work is obviously that of superior craftsmen. That the programs matched the larger-than-life contestants (PR’s winner Jeffrey, TC’s ever-bickering Marcel and Betty) with outsized onscreen personalities like Tim Gunn and Salman Rushdie’s unbearably hot wife is merely icing on the cake.

4. Ugly Betty
In comedy, ’snark’ is perhaps my least favorite aesthetic sensibility. Which is why Ugly Betty, when snarky, is among the most frustating shows on television. Because when it’s not snarky, it’s plainly one of the best. Hovering in the same narrative territory as The Devil Wears Prada, Ugly Betty is as sure a sign as any of the possibility of long-form television narrative, blending (like our #2 entry) low comedy, moving melodrama, near-modernist aesthetic sensibilities (this show’s production design - moving between playful fantasy and lived-in naturalism, is but one quality making it the single best-looking show on TV). At its heart are a gaggle of talented ensemble players and the unbelievable America Ferrera, whose Betty is the perfect human grounding for a show that constantly flirts with dangerous levels of camp. Now, how do we get rid of Kevin Sussman’s irritating Walter?

5. House
If I had done this Top 5 last year, House would pretty much have been entries number one through five. It was the only show I watched last year, and it remains one of the only I watch this year. Suffice it to say, Season Three hasn’t been House’s best season - too many of the episodes have been manic over-the-top (the incest episode, in particular, was egregiously wacky) and David Morse’s Tritter is so frustratingly one-dimensional in his prickish desire to take House down that he makes for the worst sort of mustache-twirling villain.

That said, Laurie has never been better as his addiction to Vicodin makes him even more and more a slave to his own uncontrollably dark impulses, the extended narrative about Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) trying to become pregnant is shockingly moving, and the continuing development of Chase (Jesse Spencer) as a House-in-development is subtly and convincingly rendered.

And did you see that episode with the teenager who had EVERY INFECTION POSSIBLE? Wasn’t that great?

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