Emmys' Most-Winningest Best Drama Serieses

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