THE GREATEST SHOWS ON EARTH

Sophocles' Antigone. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Mozart's Jupiter Symphony. Sherwood Schwartz's Gilligan's Island. All great works of art have one thing in common: They endure. To generation after generation, they deliver universal truths so searingly powerful that they burn themselves into our collective unconscious- even if, on TV, those truths are seldom more profound than You bet your bippy. The classics are timeless. They are immutable. They remain as fresh and poignant today as when first created. Some even have catchy theme songs. In the pages that follow, Entertainment Weekly presents a crash course in the greatest works of cathode-ray-tube culture. We rank the 101 essential shows; we tell you where you will still find them; we construct a classic cast of TV archetypes (The Buddy, The Neighbor, The Brat), with the help of the actors who best embodied them; and we offer some thoughts on why old shows are still important to Western Civilization. In short, here is everything you need to know in order to be truly TV literate. And there won't even be a quiz... this time.