From
I Love Lucy to
Lost and everything in between, we're counting down TV's finest. Where does your favorite rank? Come back next week to see numbers 80-1!
100. THE BRADY BUNCH
"The Subject Was Noses" 2/9/1973Thirty-six years later, strangers and celebrities alike still ask Maureen McCormick to say it. “When I did the Country Music Awards,” says McCormick, who played Brady babe Marcia, “Billy Ray Cyrus really wanted me to say it.” It, of course, is “Oh, my nose!,” the three words that accompanied TV’s purest moment of schadenfreude—when Miss Perfect got smacked in the honker with an errant football. “The whole crew was dying to hit me,” McCormick says (Christopher Knight, who played Peter, actually got the honor). McCormick still thinks that swollen schnoz was unrealistically exaggerated, and she should know: The night this fourth-season episode aired, she was leaving a
Brady Bunch rehearsal when she was in a car accident. Her nose smashed into the steering wheel. No broken bones, she recalls, but damage was done: “There was blood all over my outfit!”
99. FAMILY GUY
“Blue Harvest” 9/23/2007A “Star Wars” parody that included Adam West, Clark Griswold, Rush Limbaugh and Helen Reddy. How could it not make this list?
98. BREAKING BAD
“Peek a Boo” 4/12/2009This poignant heartbreaker hit us with the impact of an ATM falling on our heads.
97. MARY HARTMAN
“Chicken Soup” 3/4/1976Feed a cold, drown a neighbor? The original desperate housewife unwittingly served a lethal bowl of soup to a neighbor whose appetizer had been Seconal and whiskey—all at a time when passing out in broth just wasn’t done on polite TV.
96. RESCUE ME
"Baptism" 4/7/2009After a 19-month hiatus,
Rescue Me’s producers knew they needed a big reentrance. “I said, ‘We’ve got to serve notice to our viewers that we’re back,’” says cocreator Peter Tolan. “Baptism” did just that by circling back to the very root of the series—9/11, and the way it continues to haunt the firefighters both physically and spiritually. Topping it all off was a stunt-casting masterstroke: Mr. Nice Guy himself, Michael J. Fox, playing an acid-tongued paraplegic every bit the match for Denis Leary’s fiery Tommy Gavin. “It was unlike anything he’d done before,” says Tolan of Fox. “We had people saying, ‘God, I want to see this guy again.’ It was a great gift.”
95. SUPERNATURAL
“No Rest for the Wicked” 5/18/2008The show went to Hell—literally—when Dean settled his deal with the Devil in Season 3’s brutally good finale.
94. ALLY MCBEAL
“Cro-Magnon” 1/5/1998Was it creepy? Charming? Some weird combination of both? Ally’s computer-generated dancing baby filled a need we didn’t even know we had.
93. BIG LOVE
“Come, Ye Saints” 2/22/2009Never mind the shrine—it was the light shined on the psyches of our favorite polygamists that earned our big love.
92. PARTY OF FIVE
“Intervention” 2/19/1997The Salingers’ confrontation packed more punch than a season of
Celebrity Rehab.
91. BEVERLY HILLS, 90210
“Spring Dance” 5/2/1991Brenda gives it up to Dylan. If you have to ask what “it” was, you must’ve skipped sex ed.