It’s no mystery why people love Top Ten lists. Here are a few reasons:
They’re easy, like Sunday morning.
They’re to-do lists someone else wrote.
They’re sports for non-sports people.
They’re fun to argue with/about.
I’m sure there are six more reasons, but I’m grinding my teeth already. Because, after several years in the culture mines, I have grown to loathe this yearly tradition. I hate writing Top Ten lists, Top Five lists, Top Three lists, and anything titled The Best of the Rest. Back when I was an editor, I hated assigning the suckers, and if I were a designer, I’m certain I would have hated designing them. When, this year, a group of fellow critics on Twitter spontaneously began to rate their favorite seasons of the best shows (i.e. “Buffy” 3, 2, 4, 5, 1, 6, 7), I signed off in a panic.*
Part of my problem is the false authority of it. As anyone who has descended into the Top Ten sausage factory knows very well, book critics haven’t read all of the books and music critics haven’t heard all of the music. Movie critics are usually on top of things, and TV critics certainly try to keep up, but damn, there’s a lot of TV. My deepest shame is that I once wrote a Top Ten list that didn’t include “Breaking Bad,” because I hadn’t yet caught up, but at least I didn’t fake it, and believe me, it was tempting. In that list, I also put “Community” at No. 1 in order to make a statement about sitcoms—Top Ten lists possessing such hypnotic power that I figured they were best used as lobbying platforms. And “Community” still didn’t get the ratings. Come back, “Community”!
Now, some critics have real integrity about these lists. They do things like weigh qualities such as originality and ambition and coherence, lodge them into an Excel spreadsheet, then use occult algorithms to determine their ratings. Other folks fly by the seat of their pants—the Jackson Pollock spatter style of judgment—and who is to say that this intuitive approach doesn’t make for the better list?
But for me, Top Ten lists bring out the bratty anti-authoritarian, the adolescent who keeps shouting about how it is all just so unfair. I mean, really, which is better, “Game of Thrones” or “Cougar Town”? Does “The Good Wife” plus “Hung” equal “Homeland” minus “Weeds”? Maybe it’s not unreasonable to contrast a particular season of “Mad Men” to one of “Justified”—but how does either option stand up against the brand-new “Enlightened,” which fills me with more emotion than that damned Adele song? Or a tart trifle like “Episodes”? Or a great network sitcom like “Parks and Recreation”? Or “Louie”? Or something flawed but fascinating like “Treme”? Also, would you prefer paella or democracy?
At base, I object to any system that makes me feel like a store clerk in “High Fidelity.” Those guys are not my guys. I mean, I don’t follow basketball statistics. I watch the Oscars for the starlet meltdowns and I don’t expect the “best movie” to be the best movie. I black out when I try to calculate the tip. Please don’t make me tell you the best television show of the year.
Although the answer is obviously “Breaking Bad.”
*And yet I’m ambivalent enough that I made sure to actually list my favorite seasons of “Buffy” in the correct order.
Read more from The New Yorker’s 2011: The Year in Review, at News Desk and at Culture Desk.
