That would be "incredible" for some senses of "incredible".
(Though I do think that the #1 on the list,
"Matrix Ping Pong", does deserve the adjective.)
It should be plain that I don't like television much at all,
and I think that I do watch, and have throughout my adult life watched, much less television than most people.
Nevertheless, I have never been fortunate enough to live in a cave, and I have been exposed to a great deal of television programming, and, I am ashamed to admit, have sometimes watched it of my own accord.
In my childhood I was a faithful viewer of some cartoons, in youth I watched a great many idiotic sitcoms, and in adulthood have sometimes killed a few hours channel-surfing.
In total, I'm sure that I've wasted the equivalent of several years of my life watching television.
However, I'd like to mention a few things that I've seen on television that I though were quite good. These are not just "made me chuckle" or "well done, for that sort of thing", but "If you don't see this you'll really be missing out on something."
(I'm talking here about things that were produced for television -- I'm not counting the many very good mmovies that I've seen on television.)
- Daybreak (Bloodstream in the UK, based on the play Beirut by Alan Bowne.) Produced by HBO.
This quite literally changed my opinion from
"television consists of nothing but a vast toxic wasteland"
to "television has the possibility to be something other than a vast toxic wasteland."
- I, Claudius,
the BBC production.
Really, between this and Dune,
all you need to know about how aristocratic governments function.
- The X-Files -- An "honorable mention" here for the series as a whole, for its discussion of scientific values as applied to the mysterious and threatening (and sometimes "not applied" - that's human nature), for its interesting character dynamic, and especially for the show's very high production values. But one episode in particular shook me: I think of myself as a pretty cynical person, and as I've been saying I dislike television, and I would have thought it impossible for television to scare me, but in the episode "Anasazi" (Season 2, episode 25 - the season finale)
our heroes find a boxcar filled with the mummified bodies of alien-human hybridscreated in a joint alien-USA-Nazi project.
That was dark. That shook me.
- House. I quite like it overall.
Gregory House MD is a real human train wreck -- horrifying to watch yet fascinating at the same time. (I've been told that I'm actually quite a bit like him! -- Why I may be [I hope] interesting to read, but you probably wouldn't want to know me in real life.)
Frankly, I'm sure that in real life House would not only have lost his license to practice medicine by now but would be in prison -- the man is really out of control.
In particular, the episode "House's Head" (Season 4, episode 15 -- the first part of a season finale two-parter.)
One of the things that I dislike about
most movies and television programs is that they're so extremely unrealistic --
in real life
most police officers never fire their weapons in the course of duty,
most friends and families of crime victims don't actually pursue and apprehend or kill the perpetrators,
most amateur sleuths don't actually encounter a new murder every month, most science and medical labs don't actually look like they spent 80% of the budget on interior design (frosted glass, wood panelling, high-end designer furniture, and what the Hell is up with all those colored lights?), etc, etc.
I frequently find myself saying, "Give me a break -- nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of law enforcement/medicine/whatever."
I found "House's Head" to be extremely unrealistic yet somehow effective.
Again, the attempt here to use "scientific" or science-like procedures to
sort out crucial facts
from a surrealistic blooming, buzzing confusion was for me a gripping metaphor for the experience of life in general.
(I'll also mention that I found Anne Dudek's performance captivating in the second part of this, "Wilson's Heart".)
I might add a few more items to this list if I remember any, but really, no more than a few.
That's pretty much it, folks. Perhaps twenty hours of programming out of the thousands that I've watched over my lifetime.
