Ernie Kovacs was messing around and goofing off with the medium, TV and video, and even theatrical style physical effects (like animating rooms to music), mostly for kicks and laughs, but the results remain some of the most inventive stuff ever done for the form. Too bad they didn't save more, but in the early days, they didn't even think to record everything or keep everything they recorded.

Before even Archie Bunker, there was this kitchen sink realism from a variety show, though as a comedy sketch. It started as such on Jackie Gleason's variety show, so it was one of the first spinoffs, before the letter.

Rod Serling's mystery allegory vehicle could be heavy-handed as moral tales, but there's no doubt about how it used the TV medium to open up dramatic form to sci-fi and surrealist imagination, the metaphorical play of situation, circumstance, ontological status.

Despite what the show had been with Steve Allen or Jack Paar, it was with Johnny Carson that the late night talk -- somewhat variety -- show became a major institution of TV and cultural habits. Prime time variety shows faded out through the 60s and 70s, but Carson's show, with the later slot and basic talk format, survived them and subsumed the form. Before the Internet days the talk show was also part of the gossip circuit with magazines, and Carson's show was the optimum of popularity and relevance, neither the most involved nor the most fatuous. It was the major form of exposure for actors, musical performers and especially comedians (where, e.g., David Letterman, Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld all became famous), but even public figures apart from the arts and entertainment.

Long before the latex or CG superhero movie craze, the swingin' 60s gave us a take that was quite sophisticated as adult spoof of not just comic-book seriousness, but more generally movie and TV melodrama. Batman and Robin were more like a spoof of Superman or Dudley Dooright with their squeaky goodness: "Gosh, Batman, how come we never get parking tickets"; "Perhaps, Robin, it's because our hearts are pure." The show was so popular that celebrities lined up to play guest villains or just for the cameos of sticking their heads out the window of a buidling Batman and Robin were climbing. The Dutch tilt and comic-book style fight sound bubbles were associated with the show for a long time after.

Six guys who were tired of punchlines changed not just the form of comedy, but television or even moving pictures. Influenced by the stream of consciousness mode of The Beatles movies, they proceeded with their sense of precision disjunction in humor to produce the closest thing to dada TV.

Inpired by Crime and Punishment, and following the form of Malice Aforethought rather than whodunit, this show put you over the shoulder of the murderer, the guest star, through the planning and execution, and then squirming through the dissembling while nagged by an apparently shambling detective. Peter Falk's Cassavetes-honed realism also worked on a formal level, as his appearance usually later in the show punctured the more typical studio TV manner of the rest, and the meeting of actor and character made both an icon.

Based on a British series, Till Death Us Do Part, Norman Lear's production made an even bigger splash as the mirror of the American household. Frank discussions of what Americans frankly discussed at home, often while watching TV, had not been presented quite so before, with either kitchen sink realism or satirical punch. The epitome of it: the sound of the toilet flushing. Watching it now, it can be both astonishing in the way it called out the misinformation and prejudice that was common but covert in pre-Internet days, and disturbing that Archie Bunker has become normalized.

Lorne Michaels, Dick Ebersol and Herb Schlosser wanted a variety show that could be hipper and edgier than mainstream prime time so they put it on late Saturday night. With its assemblage of comedy performers from the best development centers in the U.S. and Canada, musical acts, and celebrity guest hosts joining in the sketch comedy, it became an institution perhaps unlike any that has ever been, especially when it survived beyond its first cast's fame. Like Punch, Le Canard enchaîné, Krokodil, or Peter Cook's The Establishment where the satire movement in Britain in the 60s was launched, SNL became a forum for satire and public comment as well as a unique showcase for comic talent.

The mother of all nature programs. The closest thing to a zoology course in popular TV. While the programs with David Attenborough have progressed technologically, with innovations in photography, to become spectacular epics now, this early broad survey can stand as a comparison for how much all nature programs have dummied down their narration.

Two things came together (and did so during the course of the show): Larry David's discovery of his own form of interweaving plot threads and The Simpsons style breaking up of the setbound sitcom. But what it delivered was really the distinction: observation that came from so much more experience of unmarried, urban life that was previously not represented on the bulk of TV.

Before The Office, The Newsroom, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, q.v., there was this cringe comedy with the late night talk show as its setting, premise and target of satire. As well as the show's shrewd portrait of the background to show biz facade, guest stars would play themselves appearing on the fictitious talk show, and then get to participate in the self-irony. In that constant stream of 90s celebrities, there was also a superb cast playing the production regulars, anchored by the trio of Garry Shandling, the titular host and creator of the real show, Jeffrey Tambor, as show announcer and sidekick, and Rip Torn as the producer. This ran roughly parallel to Seinfeld but was on cable, relatively earlier in direct show development, and didn't have as much of an audience as network TV. Critics loved it, though, and it was the first cable series to be nominated for the outstanding comedy series Emmy.

Inspired by The Larry Sanders Show q.v., Ken Finkleman created a similar satire behind the scenes of a TV news station and the particular contortions of its narcissistic weasel of a producer. Finkleman, like Gary Shandling and Ricky Gervais, wrote the satire and played the target of it. But while the cathartic comedy stands it up there with those, it then takes another progression that is not quite like anything done by any other show. It becomes darker comedy but it's an exhilirating flight. As if a Canadian show wouldn't have it hard enough, the American show with the same name has bumped this out of searches and obscured it more, but this show is far better and more worth finding.

Perhaps the most ambitious show ever, the story of Baltimore police fighting drug gangs follows the ripples of the drug trade each season, to include dock workers, a mayoral election and city politics, schools, and a newspaper. Despite all the careful attention to detail for all those walks of life, the show has a great hook for anyone in the way it portrays how doing the right thing or even just good work is often going against the grain and causes friction. No good deed goes unpunished.

The best series, period, since it came out, this anthology show by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, two members of the team that also brought us League of Gentlemen q.v., is consistently inventive, with different situations and characters each episode linked only by some location with the number 9. It's like repertory theater in the best way, with the two creators usually appearing alongside guest stars. Their particular bent for horror as the basis for comedy is more varied here, with satiric sharpness sometimes to more serious premises, but there are also just pure flights of fun, like two burglars trying to break into a fancy modernist home making for silent-movie slapstick, the argument over a restaurant bill wildly extrapolated, or a karaoke party playing out an office soap opera.