Emmys' Most-Winningest Best Drama Serieses

I think it's cool that TNG won more Emmys than The X-Files.

what do the numbers mean?

How many guest appearances by Abe Vigoda.

I don't like some of these, love others and haven't seen a couple of them except for a few episodes (Breaking Bad and The Sopranos...I know, I know!).

Based purely on how much enjoyment I get out of talking about the show with other people, Mad Men.

I say this with no point other than how weird it feels to say it: I haven't seen a single episode of even one of these shows. I'm obviously aware of all of them, but the only TV shows I ever watched faithfully were all comedies (except Twin Peaks, and Six Feet Under after it was off the air). There are three on there--Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men--I fully intend to watch one day, though, once I find a reasonably priced complete box.

lol how many of those tng wins are for weird makeup and energy cloud effects

It is really weird that Boardwalk Empire has more emmys than Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Also, this is a battle between Sopranos and Mad Men, with Mad Men winning it for me.

Aren't a lot of BE's awards for art direction/costumes/hair?

Well, yeah, but it's still weird.

Am guessing those are relatively recent categories too, so in comparison, Hill Street Blues' tally is even that much more notable.

^^This. I was just looking at Hill Street's awards page on wiki, and it's unreal how dominant it was. In their second season they placed all five nominees for Best Supporting Actor, and they did same for writing the next year. Barbra Babcock won Best Actress for the first season for what was really a reoccurring guest role, which I guess they didn't have a category for yet.

Hill Street Blues was one of those shows my parents watched that I either didn't want to or wasn't allowed to (can't remember). I've seen an episode here or there since then, but it doesn't seem like it would keep me interested considering how different dramatic tv is now from thirty years ago.

TV drama does seem to age much worse than TV comedy.

sez youse

guess what: APPRECIATE THE OLD WAYS.

I still watch and love MASH whenever I see it's on, but that show's half comedy. I can't think of any other pre-1990 drama that I give a shit about, whether for nostalgic reasons or curious ones.

Even Magnum P.I., which was great at the time, seems unbelievably silly now. Especially when it started going off the rails the last season.

Quantum Leap still holds up through the years.

Oh does it? It's been so long since I've seen it that I never think about it any more. I do remember the episode when he came back as his older brother, though (or was it himself?). I never did see the final episode, but I understand that it was kind of a cop out.

Hill Street and Sopranos are the only 2 i'd consider here

I'm voting for Mad Men because it feels like my favorite, but I suspect that once it is done and I try re-watching, it won't seem as good.

I borrowed the first two seasons of Hill Street from my sister and watched them this past summer. Obviously I was into it to go through with such a commitment. IMO it hasn't aged as much as you'd think. The episodes are so packed with storylines your attention rarely flags. It was really well directed and funny as fuck to boot.

Of course, YMMV.

In effect, the best comedy choices were:

Family
Family
Family
Family
Family
Second Family
Chosen Family
Urban Enclave Family
etc.

Whereas these are all:

Work
Work
Work
Work
Work
Work
Mob Work
Meth Work
etc.

I still love the first few seasons of The West Wing (and big chunks of the last season and a half or so), so that probably gets my vote.

I wish the early seasons of ER were available on Netflix/other just to see how it holds up.

work-based (often workplace) dramas are generally set in socially/morally beneficial (or at least officially so) settings: medicine, law enforcement, the military. there seem to be good dramatic/human-interest grounds for that. plenty of material for stories that get at things that are important to us.

dramas with similar orientations, but with an outsider / non-institutional/organizational crew of people-helpers, tend to cast them as outcast saviour types helping the helpless, people the standard helping institutions ignore or miss or refuse to help or actually hurt.

when they come at the same sort of issues more from the side of business and profit, not public benefit, shows tend to go all the way toward a focus on criminality.

i wonder if that's why the non-criminal, more businessy shows i can think of tend toward criminality / gray-area themes more than having much to do with actual business (not known for its lack of criminality anyway). private practice legal dramas, say.

i would be interested to see a good work-up of serious shows falling outside these parameters. and something about what separates non-serious family dramas (one such example) from them - abc family stuff, say. personally i think it has something to do with the tv format - too hard to write compelling material in a long-form run of episodes w/ conventional week-to-week story formatting, maybe harder to do long serialized stories.

^ this stuff maybe is why mad men codes the way it does, as work/family drama that is somehow serious/novelistic/psychological etc - because it manages to find a business, not nec. socially/morally beneficial, but also not primarily criminal, setting to work with against the family one. (but of course it only manages it by making dick kind of a criminal wrt the whole society.)

(vaguely related to the typical western-derived practice of making protagonists of cop/law etc themed shows be lone wolves, chafing at the rules they ostensibly serve, the kiefer sutherland who will do what has to be done for the sake of the law, greater good, etc. but hardly anyone ever thinks dick/don has that kind of license for setting himself apart.)

how you guys like East Side, West Side and Naked City?

i think the outsiders-helping-the-helpless variant (a format often played w/ lots of resonance, sometimes made explicit, w/ christian salvation/redemption stories) is a pretty major feature on tv, and a close relative to the society/legality framework of cop shows and medical shows, so it's interesting that shows like that did not do as well as these winningest ones.

maybe the savior-shows tend to code more as mythical, thus less serious/realistic. when they don't actually contain fantastical elements (michael landon, trying to get back to heaven) or legendary ones (kwai chang caine) they tend to be genre fiction (michael knight, the a-team, buffy).

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top two otm but in the other order