ALICUBI

These days even the Oscars can be a little surprising, but TV Guide's recent "50 Greatest Shows of All Time" was blander than a rerun of The Nanny you've already seen twice. The big news was that Seinfeld had crowded Lucy and Ralph Kramden out of the top slot. But, given that the water-cooler chatterers toward which this critical bombshell was aimed probably still say "Not that there's anything wrong with that" at awkward moments, the choice hardly counts as brave.

The Guide's buffet of received opinions may sate duller palates, but true believers in TV transcendentalism are not so easy to please. We know that boob tube sublimities are not found in blockbusters, but in the eerie flotsam that sometimes infuses that dowdy living-room appliance with real mystery and wonder. Rachel's baby may have been good for a brief sniffle, but that piece of crap you caught at two in the morning on UHF that made you question the nature of reality will live forever in the dusty pantry of your brain that houses epiphanies.

In that spirit, Alicubi presents our Alt-TV Top 50. Some shows make the list because they are so imbecilic that watching them is like experiencing 30 minutes of deep REM sleep: They refresh the mind without ever engaging the frontal lobes. Some were really good but died unwarranted deaths, and we have rescued them out of a sense of cultural duty. And some were just plain odd in a way that momentarily rang the bell of our doors of perception and dropped a flaming bag of dog poop in front of it.

1. GREEN ACRES (CBS, 1965-71). Paul Henning was probably the most successful surrealist in TV history. One could make a strong case for his Beverly Hillbillies, in which the earnest Clampetts excited class-related panic in the choleric Milburn Drysdale. But Green Acres offered a more perfect hell for Oliver Douglas, who in true Paul Bowles fashion sought his Eden in Hooterville, only to find himself engulfed in an alternate universe of incomprehensible rubes who talked to pigs and sold his own tractor back to him. Worse, his wife, a ditzy socialite, sided against him and with the rubes on every existential point of order. The fuming visage of Eddie Albert ("What would I want with a sausage machine!") is perhaps the most enduring video image of the Age of Anxiety.

2. HEIMSKRINGLA! OR THE STONED ANGELS (PBS, 1970). Today PBS is a video airline magazine--quality products, foreign locales, and lots of advertising. But before its public funding dried up in the '70s and '80s, PBS did some weird, weird shit. Tom O'Horgan, the nutcake responsible for Hair, took an old Norse saga and fleshed it out with naked hippies, bad poetry, and old-school video effects (mostly solarization and image trails) courtesy of a company called Videospace. ("We are not a production center," Videospace's founder told the New York Times. "We are not interested in producing anything, but in finding out.") Even without image processing, Heimskringla!'s relentless electronic music, Esalen-ready set pieces (such as the hippies dancing around with a gigantic letter "E"), and general air of subsidized hipsterism were enough to irrevocably scald the senses.

3. LEXX (syndicated, 1997-2002). By the time Next Generation rolled around, popular sci-fi had its formula down. The meat of it lies in the "sci," focusing on warp-matrix recalibration, rerouting power through the main deflector, or whatever other bullshit thing we might think would work because we aren't physicists. It's laid on thick to cover the weak "fi" part, which tends to be a simple good versus evil morality tale, and in the case of Star Trek, propaganda for the US military. Lexx fixed that. The characters are id-driven to the core; a weapon that can destroy planets in seconds is in the hands of a sub-everyman; and in the end, Earth is blown up for kicks. The fact that this show lasted for four seasons proves that there is a god, and that he likes Canadian TV.

4. ERNIE KOVACS. On general principle.

5. PLAYBOY AFTER DARK (syndicated, 1969). You're a little boy in Bridgeport, CT. Mom's asleep and you have the TV on. On Channel 11 you see a POV shot of someone arriving at the door of a penthouse suite. The door opens to reveal Hugh Hefner in a tuxedo. "Oh, hello," Hef murmurs, graciously removing the pipe from his mouth, "So glad you could join us. Come on inside, and meet my guests." The guests include Marvin Gaye, Shel Silverstein, Pat Henry, the Byrds, and, slithering around these celebs, gents in After Six evening wear and chicks in mini-dresses, all carrying cocktail glasses and looking exceedingly comfortable with themselves. I know what I want to be when I grow up! you cry to yourself. I want to be--a bachelor!

6. THE GREAT AMERICAN DREAM MACHINE (PBS, 1971-72). TGADM actually won an Emmy in 1971 for "Best Magazine-Type Program"--sharing that prize with 60 Minutes. Well, they did do news features, but not like Morley & Co.: we recall one piece on nuclear weapons that was punctuated by blasts of Tom Lehrer's "So Long, Mom, I'm Off to Drop the Bomb." Mostly TGADM was about renegade artists going nuts with government money. Marshall Efron, Terrence McNally, Eli Wallach, Albert Brooks, Carly Simon, and others did little films, many of which were pretty funny. (Efron addressed the question, "Is There Sex After Death?" His answer: "No."). Nixon actually got the show pulled off the air, and for that reason alone it deserves a place in the pantheon.

7. KUP'S SHOW (syndicated, 1958-86). Basically Politically Incorrect without the bullshit. The late Chicago showbiz columnist Irving Kupcinet sat around a table with four or five guests and shot the breeze. Guests included, at one time or another, Malcolm X, Barbara Streisand, Spiro Agnew, Judy Garland, and Henry Kissinger. And they were all more interesting on a bad day than Arianna Huffington is on her best.

8. TURN-ON (ABC, 1969). In the '60s, CBS had The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, NBC had Laugh-In, and ABC had bupkis. The lowly network tried to grab some cachet with this bizarre, stream-of-unconsciousness variety show starring Chuck McCann. Sample gag: Cops confiscate some porno. Chief (McCann) asks officer (Hamilton Camp), "Hey, you wanna take home some of this pornography?" "No thanks," says the officer, "I don't have a pornograph." "Poor guy," says McCann--and he starts eating the porno. The whole thing was like that--but not for long. Turn-On lasted one episode--not because it got bad ratings, but because all the advertisers pulled out. (At least one station pulled it mid-show.)

9. ADAM-12 (NBC, 1968-75). Dragnet's too easy. When Jack Webb migrated his grimy, noirish LA policier formula to a open-air patrol-car format in the late '60s, high weirdness ensued. Former baseball star Kent McCord and former 77 Sunset Strip pretty boy Martin Milner cruised the freeway for crooks and places to get lunch. ("Wanna get something to eat?" was a recurring conversational gambit.) Where Dragnet's Friday and Smith were grim, weary dogs sniffing out "just the facts, ma'am," McCord and Milner were aging UCLA frat boys out for a spin. Louis Brandeis said "sunlight is the best disinfectant," but Adam-12 proved it: Its relentless opening-up flushed all the stink, and most of the interest, out of the police procedural. Thus Manson manques looked like student newspaper reporters gone to seed, and hard-boiled dames seemed like cocktail waitresses on their way to a well-earned holiday at Wind and Sea. If you became a cop because of Adam-12, you'd probably be happier as a beachcomber with a stun gun.

10. BRANDED! (NBC, 1965-66). Before Larry Cohen made outrageously paranoid movies like It's Alive! and Q, he made outrageously paranoid TV shows like this one. Kicked out of the 19th-century US Army on a bogus charge of cowardice, Jason McCord, played by a tortured-looking Chuck Connors, drifted around the Wild West. One would think he'd eventually find a little town where no one had heard about his court martial, but McCord had stupendously bad luck. No matter how isolated the backwater, within ten minutes of his arrival McCord would run into someone who would spit in his face and call him yellow. Then McCord would have to prove himself by rescuing a kitten or something. Once he'd done this, instead of settling in with his newly admiring neighbors, he'd head off to another town where someone else would spit in his face. Even in those days, one would think, there had to be an establishment where McCord could plunk down some greenbacks whenever he got the urge to have his face spit into, and have it done by a professional.

11. YULE LOG (WPIX, 1966-1986). Every year on Christmas Eve, New York station WPIX ran an eight-second loop of logs burning in a fireplace, over and over, for several hours, so tract-house dwellers could pretend they were in an English manor drinking mulled wine. You could watch, numbly, all night; it's only when you began to think about it that the nightmares began.

12. UNCLE FLOYD (syndicated, 1974-present). Alleged children's show, shot in a Quonset hut in Jersey. Slightly rancid vaudevillian Floyd Vivino, his obnoxious puppet Oogie, and grotesque accomplices do bilious skits like "The Dull Family," in which a birthday is listlessly celebrated with absurd gifts (including an ice-cube tray). Sets, camerawork, lighting all impeccably ghetto. Slackers jumped on this early, and the Ramones and NRBQ have done guest spots. Not as much fun now as when Floyd was drinking, but don't let that stop you.

13. SKAG (CBS, 1980). The little guy always gets a raw deal on TV! Well, middlebrow TV writer Abby Mann wasn't gonna take it, see! So he cast Karl Malden as Pete 'Skag' Skagska, a used-up blue collar guy who suffered an unpleasantly realistic stroke and found out what a bunch of bastards he was surrounded by. His son wouldn't come home from college to comfort him because he's "busy"; his daughter fucked a lot of guys ("No one's gonna make a pig out of my daughter!" roared Skag). His old boss and the bureaucrats were out to screw him. There was no place for the little guy in this stinking lousy world! Don't nobody care? No.

14. THE REN & STIMPY SHOW (Nickelodeon, 1991-96). To paraphrase Christopher Wren, if you would seek their monument, look around the Cartoon Channel. John Kricfalusi found a way to make limited animation bearable: Hyperextend everything--noses, eyeballs, the distension of the brain from the skull--and make jokes about snot. Far less talented folks are now raking it in with this formula while Kricfalusi subsists on earnings from Japanese commercials. Life is unfair.

15. SCTV (syndicated, 1976-83). Let's not be embarrassed by quality. The concept was always sound: a TV network populated entirely by characters invented by Second City comics. But how it grew! SCTV started out mainly making fun of other TV shows, but by the 1980s, the show reached critical mass and developed its own internal logic. "The People's Golden Global Choice Awards," a media ego-fest so crooked that the attendees wound up rioting, wasn't just a chance to bring a lot of celebrity impersonations together--it was the logical result of Guy Caballero's limitless greed, Bobby Bittman's unbounded ego, and Edith Prickley's maniacal drive. They did skits about TV by doing skits about themselves. Thus SCTV (the imaginary network, not the show) became showbiz, and showbiz became SCTV.

16. THE AVENGERS (ABC, 1966-69). British Secret Service agents John Steed and Emma Peel slinked cheerfully around Old Blighty, cracking wise and kung-fuing crooks. The wisecracks were obviously why they kept the job. Steed and Peel enjoyed each other's company without being overtly sexual, and since they were the coolest people around, that made them seem a bit like vampires: superior people sharing a centuries-old joke.

17. TEST PATTERNS (approx. 1948-1984). Before TV became an all-night affair, stations would broadcast these target-like images between the end of the Late Late Show and the beginning of The Modern Farmer. They were meant to calibrate screen resolution or something, but were sufficiently totemic-looking that, accompanied by endless, shrill test-tones, they could send a viewer (particularly one that had just awakened from an alcoholic stupor at 3 a.m. to find the TV still on) into a fugue state halfway between terror and ecstasy.

18. MY MOTHER, THE CAR (NBC, 1965-66). We still remember the theme song: "Everyone knows in the second life we all come back sooner or later..." Yes, it was a sitcom about rein-car-nation: Jerry Van Dyke's mother returned to earth as a 1928 Porter automobile (voice by Ann Southern). In one episode Jerry took a hot date to a drive-in movie--in his mother. Uncredited script doctoring by Luis Bunuel.

19. QUANTUM LEAP (NBC, 1989-93). Scott Baukla leapt back and forth in time, receiving a new incarnation at each destination. We only saw what he looked like to others in brief mirror-scene interludes; thus, we'd be watching Scott Bakula while knowing that all the other characters (except fellow timetripper Dean Stockwell) were seeing, say, Henry VIII, or some chick. (For extra yucks they'd sometimes put Bakula in a dress.) An acting exercise played out long-form, with surprisingly entertaining results.

20. THE CONTINENTAL (CBS, ABC, 1952-53). Ever wonder what those odd Christopher Walken SNL skits were about? In TV's early days, oleaginous, smoking-jacketed Renzo Cesano sat in a townhouse suite, said, "Don't be afraid, darling. You're in a man's apartment..." and read love poetry as thousands of future sex offenders masturbated piteously.

21. THE DEAN MARTIN SHOW (ABC, 1965-74). The obviously drunk Martin crooned, made crass jokes, and leered at The Gold-Diggers, TV's most pointless, underclad female chorus. As one New York Times TV listing writer used to like to say about stuff like this, "You want Hamlet, read it."

22. IRON CHEF (Food Network, 2000-present). Phenomenon too recent to appraise fairly, perhaps, but it is inconceivable that future generations will not look at this and wonder what drugs we were all on. International chefs race around hot stoves and against time to win the approval of a Miss Saigon chorus boy and his badly dubbed guests.

23. DR. WHO (syndicated, 1963-89). If you're going to travel through space and time and fight daleks, why not use a phone booth, wear a stupid hat and scarf, and be incredibly English?

24. THE WEDDING OF TINY TIM AND MISS VICKI (The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, NBC, December 17, 1969). Keep in mind that Tiny Tim had only one novelty hit, "Tiptoe Through The Tulips," and that Tonight was one of the most popular shows around. Why did Carson devote 15 minutes of airtime to the traditional, white-gown wedding of a flash in the pan and an non-entity? Perhaps because they could--Tiny Tim (a.k.a. Herbert Khaury) let them. Perhaps because they wanted to--TV programming decisions were less strenuously overthought in the '60s than they are now. Or perhaps TV, like nature, is a chaotic, unpredictable force that seems to be our friend most of the time, but occasionally smites us with fury.

25. THE GENERATION GAP (ABC, 1969). Game show in which old fogies were quizzed on modern stuff, and young hipsters were quizzed on early 20th-century history. All looked like morons. A more sinister portrait of intergenerational conflict has never existed.

26. COLONEL BLEEP (syndicated, 1956-1959). Very limited animation series in which space soldier Bleep--accompanied, inexplicably, by a caveman (Scratch) and a little boy in a cowboy outfit (Squeak)--fought a robot (Dr. Destructo) and a pirate (Patch). Wonder if there's a plushie sub-kink for this?

27. CLUTCH CARGO (syndicated, 1959). Very, very limited animation series--characters were represented by drawings. When they had to talk, garishly made-up human lips appeared on the drawings and mouthed the words. Plots immemorial, effect spellbinding.

28. HOGAN'S HEROES (CBS, 1965-71). Wacky Nazi POW camp. Proof that, on TV at least, there's no such thing as bad taste.

29. SEVENTH HEAVEN (WB, 1998-present). Aaron Spelling has a lot to answer for, but this family values panderfest was such a cynical conception that I imagine even the progenitor of Tori Spelling must suffer the occasional sleepless night over it. But it may be that the cultural chickens have come back to roost: Without any but a few noticing it, the saintly Camden family has become the most dysfunctional clan on TV. The elder daughter's a self-hating fuck-up, the eldest son has stabbed his preacher Paw to the heart by converting to Judaism, the middle children are simpering clods, the youngest daughter is a preternaturally manipulative monster who makes Damien from The Omen look like Dennis the Menace, Mom bakes cookies maniacally, and Paw still trusts in the Lord.

30. WAIT TILL YOUR FATHER GETS HOME (syndicated, 1972-74). Excruciating Hanna-Barbera cartoon notable for one reason: it strangely resembles today's The Family Guy--though without the sex jokes, and at a Much. Slower. Pace.

31. THE TIM CONWAY COMEDY HOUR (ABC, 1970). It had a brilliant, recurring intro: Tim's guests sat on scene-painted clouds and shot him dirty looks as he incompetently introduced them.

32. FULL HOUSE (ABC, 1987-95). If bad TV = hell, Bob Saget = Satan. (See also America's Funniest Home Videos.)

33. THE SECOND HUNDRED YEARS (ABC, 1967). Monte Markham was a 19th-century pioneer trapped in an glacier. Thawed, he had much fun with his aged offspring and their new-fangled modern ways. Spit-take involving pasteurized milk our only coherent memory.

34. BRACKEN'S WORLD (NBC, 1969-70). The largely-unseen Bracken was a Hollywood mogul whose starlets (attendees of his "talent school") were always getting mixed up with psychos and gangsters and showing a lot of cleavage.

35. THE BANANA SPLITS ADVENTURE HOUR (NBC, 1968-70). Tra-la-la, la-la-la-la! Yes, we all love the song, but have you ever actually watched this unbearable piece of shit? Lots of bumping-into-each-other and going, "boing." In a contemporary review, Cleveland Amory wrote, "Don't start climbing the walls yet, folks." Well, you can climb them now.

36. FOREVER KNIGHT (1992-96, syndicated). Another Canadian masterpiece. Nick Knight (Geraint Wyn Davies) is a vampire detective with Toronto Metro Homicide. Since the 12th century, he has endeavored to become human again, having been "brought across" by LaCroix, a father figure played by the beautifully creepy British actor Nigel Bennett. Bennett turned up later as the villain Prince on Lexx, and made one guest appearance in Friday the 13th, The Series as an undead Nazi.

Knight solves murder cases with his partner, Detective Skanky (really), has flashbacks to his past, and struggles with his soul. His love interest is a dowdy medical examiner: The only mortal that knows his secret, she tries several unsuccessful therapies to cure his "condition."

37. THUNDERBIRDS (BBC, 1965-66). A puppet series about a modular spaceman team. Our favorite was the Thunderbird craft that basically just hung out in deep space. The other Thunderbirds would call the pilot (is that the right word? How about "custodian"?) and ask what was up. "Everything's fine here," he usually reported. Musta been a Teamster.

38. THE JOY OF PAINTING WITH BOB ROSS (1981-95). The late Bob Ross showed and told us in hushed tones how to "make our own little world" with oils. A daub of zinc white applied to a mountain evergreen with the edge of a paint knife made snow. A dry fan brush made windswept clouds. Ahh...art.

39. THE CHUCK MCCANN SHOW (WPIX, 1965-66). Manic kid show, in which McCann read the Sunday funnies while dressed as appropriate comic-strip characters. When he read Little Orphan Annie, for example, he wore a red dress, a curly fright wig, and white cardboard circles clenched into his eye-sockets like monocles, and spoke in a shrill falsetto. If these guys weren't doing crank, nobody was.

40. HE & SHE (CBS, 1967). Richard Benjamin as a cartoonist and Jack Cassidy as a blowhard actor who (fabulously over-) played Benjamin's creation, "Jetman," on TV. Benjamin's real-life wife Paula Prentiss played She to his He, and they were the first couple after Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore to behave as if they got it on.

41. MAX HEADROOM (ABC, 1987-88). The electronically generated title character was famous. He did soft drink ads. He inspired a series of Doonesbury strips. He was on the cover of Time. And he was a flop: The show's bargain-basement dystopianism never caught on, and today Max is in the attic with our Apple II and Crockett & Tubbs jackets (and on Tech TV). On TV, you see, one can be popular without being particularly well liked.

42. TOM CARVEL COMMERCIALS (approx. 1980-1989). The Carvel Ice Cream chain was owned and operated by Tom Carvel, who apparently thought the absolute best person to do the voice-overs on his shitty commercials was himself. In tones rich with phlegm and false bonhomie, TC incompetently impersonated novelty ice-cream cake characters ("I'm Fudgy the Whaaaaale!") and told lousy jokes ("Now I know you can't eat a banjo"). Makes one appreciate the cool professionalism of Dave Thomas.

43. ANITA HILL TESTIMONY (Clarence Thomas Senate confirmation hearings, 1991). "He said, 'Hey, who put the pubic hair in my Coke?'" We stared at the well-spoken woman reading this line to the Senate committee members, and thought: We must be hallucinating, because it's impossible to believe this is happening on TV. It was the last time we remember thinking that.

44. THE YOUNG ONES (syndicated, 1982-84). Bloody brilliant! S'gaw a punk rawker, innit? Fnar fnar fnar! Bloody 'ell.

45. LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN (NBC, 1982-93). We don't mean the comfortably snide piece of shit that runs under his name now, but his earlier talk show, on which he alienated and enraged guests--that's right, actually caused discomfort, not a winking simulacrum of it. We recall Watergate lunatic G. Gordon Liddy, shooting death-rays from his eyes, and Letterman laughing at him. At the end, when Letterman asked Liddy how he expected to be remembered, Liddy said, "as we all will be--as a diet for the worms." Letterman looked into the camera and, with a huge grin, said, "There you have it, folks--G. Gordon Liddy says, 'Tomorrow we'll all be dust.'" I miss that guy.

46. O.J. SIMPSON VERDICT (1995). As we filed into the office with our co-workers to watch this, we thought: We're either going to see a man sentenced to death or life in prison, or see a murderer go free. Either way, this was a terrible mistake.

47. NIGHTLINE (ABC, 1980-present) I'm Ted Koppel, and this is my hair.

48. JOHN LENNON AND YOKO ONO ON THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW (syndicated, February 14-18, 1972). Showbiz host Douglas somehow got Lennon and Ono to do a full week and pick guests. Among these was Jerry Rubin. "I understand you've come out against drugs," said Douglas. "Oh, no," said Rubin, "not drugs--just heroin!" Douglas then pantomimed hari-kari--a wonderful Borscht Belt rejoinder to an Age of Aquarius punchline. Think: is such a thing even possible today? Does anyone like John Lennon even exist? Mike Douglas types, of course, exist in abundance. But unlike the real one, they would never take this kind of chance.

49. SIGN-OFF "STAR SPANGLED BANNER." Again, TV used to have a curfew, and stations would show hokey montages of amber waves of grain etc. and play the National Anthem before switching on the Test Patterns. Cold fear gripped your soul as you realized that your electronic friend was leaving you, like a dying parent, with an inspirational message.

50. AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS (ABC, 1990-present). The horror! The horror!