For Your Viewing Pleasure And Enlightenment

I know what you're thinking: Another top ten list? Isn't that just a little too easy? Well, not this one, because it comes from the folks at Mensa. You know Mensa - "The society welcomes people from every walk of life whose IQ is in the top 2% of the population, with the objective of enjoying each other's company and participating in a wide range of social and cultural activities." This would include such frivolous activities as watching TV. Well, how about that?
The friendly brains over at Mensa named their top ten brainiac TV shows, and here's what they came up with: "Frasier", "The West Wing", "Boston Legal", "Jeopardy", "Cosmos", "House", "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation", "All In The Family", "Mad About You", and "MASH". For those of you keeping score, NBC and CBS each had three shows in the top ten, Fox had a couple, PBS and Carl Sagan had one and so did Alex Trebek in syndication. ABC went bugger-all for Mensa's top ten. Maybe they could turn that to their advantage in their Fall ad campaign: "Thank you for watching ABC, the network that won't tax your brain."
Aren't you wondering where all the science fiction went? "Twilight Zone", "Star Trek" or "Doctor Who"? What about "Monty Python's Flying Circus"? I was routinely sent scurrying to the library to find out why a "summarizing Proust" competition would be so hilarious. "Larry Sanders" and "Sportsnight" were both very hip and very funny, but not worthy of the Mensa stamp of approval. Go figure.
I'm proud to say that I was a fairly loyal viewer of a number of those shows while they were on, and I still enjoy a good Jeopardy-fix every now and then, but since I have never had my IQ measured, I may not know what subtleties I am missing in "House" and "CSI". As far as "Cosmos" goes, I always thought that was Carl Sagan's way of "dumbing down" the universe for those of us clinging to the double digit realm of our intelligence quotient.
But "Mad About You"? I admit that I spent the first few years of my marriage hoping that my relationship would be as cleverly scripted as Paul and Jamie Buchman's. I also confess to a fondness for Paul Reiser that dates back to "Diner" and a minor crush on Helen Hunt that dates back to the seventies when she played Murray Slaughter's daughter on an episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show". I suppose that I might have gone along with this pick if the show hadn't ended up in the realm of "the invisible baby". Once these two finally procreated, they didn't really seem like they knew what to do with it (the child, that is). The friendly folks over at "Jump The Shark" dot com tell us that an overwhelming number of viewers agree with me, that the arrival of "Mabel" constituted the effective end of the series.
But I guess you don't have to be a genius to know that.