16 Great TV Shows, Part 8: The X-Files

Part 1: The Wonder Years
Part 2: The Simpsons
Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Part 4: Seinfeld
Part 5: The John Larroquette Show
Part 6: ER
Part 7: Newsradio


The X-Files is a show that I often compare to one's first serious girlfriend. You become infatuated with her, you give her everything and in the end she breaks your heart into a thousand pieces.

Despite that, your car keys are in your hands within seconds of receiving a "U up?" text, no matter how bad it ended last time.

By my count, this series broke my heart AT LEAST four times:

1) The revelation of what happened to Mulder's sister. Seriously, what was that?

2) The finale, which somehow managed to spend half its running time in a courtroom and still offer no real answers that hadn't already been revealed by the show. This was capped off with the Smoking Man coming back AGAIN, and a really unsatisfying open ending with Mulder and Scully on the run.

3) X-FILES: THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE, when they tried to tell a movie about paranormal investigates working a case with no paranormal elements.

4) The finale of the recent revival. Another open ending, this one a major cliffhanger, coming on the heels of mytharc stories that only made the conspiracy even MORE incomprehensible.

But it's coming back again next season and I can't wait.

I'm not sure even I appreciated how different The X-Files was when I started getting into it at the top of its third season. I knew that it was cooler looking than most shows on TV and had a vibe and a concept that hadn't really been done before, a sort of sci-fi procedural about FBI agents who investigate the paranormal. The more I learned about TV history, the more I realized that at most points in the past, if a show like this had been done, it would have leaned into the silliness. (EERIE, INDIANA - another excellent show - is probably a good citation of how the paranormal was usually treated with a wink rather than solemn seriousness.) There are a lot of things that define The X-Files, but it's serious-as-hell tone probably ranks near the top. It's determined to take its cases as seriously as Clarice Starling takes hunting Buffalo Bill.

Another rarity for the time was the utter lack of closure that many cases got. Try to imagine the reports that Mulder and Scully must have filed each week and you realize that rarely do they even get as far as taking a suspect into custody or finding an explanation for events that would be taken seriously by any bureau. This is probably the cusp of TV challenging its audience by not tying up everything neatly.

Genre TV had been ghettoized for a long time. Look up the history of any genre show from the 80s or early 90s and odds are that most of them were relegated to first-run syndication. Network TV wasn't inclined to take sci-fi seriously, nor did they see their audience as particularly sophisticated. The X-Files changed all that. Not every attempt to clone the series worked (Fox had a LOT of stone-serious sci-fi failures in the back half of the decade), but it seemed to let the genie out of the bottle. You can draw a straight line from The X-Files to LOST, and in turn, the wave of genre TV that the latter show spawned.

So what keeps me coming back to The X-Files despite increasing dissatisfaction with the creative direction? David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. I was never a hard-core Mulder and Scully "shipper" in that I was desperate to see them hook up, but their relationship was always the core of the show. Mulder never met a circumstance he didn't have a bizarre left-field explanation for, a complete opposite to Scully's conviction to finding answers in science. In retrospect, it's notable that though they had a conflict of methods, they were always professional. Today I wonder if writers might make the mistake of amping up the conflict between the two to the levels of a buddy cop movie. These two were partners, first and foremost, and that harmony was always more fascinating than whether or not they were schtupping. Also, on all counts, its the more interesting and less obvious tone for their dynamic. Conflict is the essence of drama, but that doesn't mean that opposing characters need to be irrevocably polarized in order to be fascinating.

Personally, I always preferred Scully to Mulder and though I'm in the minority, I really liked Season 8's notion of finally making Scully more of a believer and pairing her with the no-nonsense former cop John Doggett. I could have seen that partnership lasting a few more seasons had the show been able to make a clean break from the Mulder era.

So this leads perhaps to one of the biggest impressions the show made on me: Know when to resolve long-running storylines. What really caused the show to stagnate was its insistence on tying EVERYTHING back to the main alien mytharc. Thus, each subsequent year, that mythology acquired more baggage and more detritus. Had they tied off the storyline definitively in season 6 with the end of the conspiracy, the show might have moved forward. Certainly the full-time departure of Mulder at the end of Season 8 should have been the cue to tie off the uber arc and let next season begin with Scully, Doggett and Reyes investigating entirely new paranormal storylines.

The X-Files's lack of closure once made it a breath of fresh air. By the end, it was just an exercise in frustration. The show is scared to leave an element this big behind and so it makes the storyline confusing and impenetrable for even those of us who've followed it from the start. It was a little like if Buffy spent seven seasons with The Master as the Big Bad behind it all. At a certain point, a writer has to be willing to close the door on some threads and play a few new notes.

When I was younger, it was the mytharc episodes I loved the most. Those were the episodes that really seemed to matter because they dangled the possibility of revelation and change. In reruns, however, knowing that the path that show takes leads only to a lot of red herrings and narrative cul-de-sacs, I now favor the well-crafted standalones.

I didn't need The X-Files to tie everything up in a neat bow, but the occasional resolution would have gone a long way to restoring audience goodwill. This is probably one of the few shows on this list that has nearly as many "don't do this" lessons as "steal from this."

But what do I know? As I said, I'll be there on premiere night for the next limited-run revival. I just can't quit Mulder and Scully.

Part 9: Law & Order

Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street

Part 11: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Part 12: Gilmore Girls

Part 13: Everwood

Part 14: The Office

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why

16 Great TV Shows, Part 7: Newsradio

Part 1: The Wonder Years
Part 2: The Simpsons
Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Part 4: Seinfeld
Part 5: The John Larroquette Show
Part 6: ER

It occurred to me that this post might be a bigger hit if I had it translated into Japanese, and then translated back from THAT to English.  And if that joke makes no sense to you then you're probably not cool enough to have seen today's show: Newsradio.

Why Newsradio? Why not Cheers or Frasier or Friends or any other sitcom that lasted nearly a decade and was at the top of the ratings the entire time?

That's a good question. All three of those would definitely make it into my TV canon, but when I took a good hard look, I couldn't honestly find the mindblowing "holy shit" moments that I got with some of the other shows on this list. All of those shows are examples of the sitcom at the peak, and frankly, all of them probably endured longer than Newsradio.

Created by Paul Simms, Newsradio is set in a New York AM radio station. As with most workplace sitcoms, the characters drive the story as much as the workplace, and man does this show have some great characters.

Writer Lesson 1 - You don't have to make "the straight man" the boring foil for other characters. Dave Nelson has just started at WNYX as the news director and immediately has to deal with kooky billionaire boss Jimmy James, ambitious reporter Lisa Miller (who thinks SHE should have Dave's job), pompous blowhard radio personality Bill McNeil, abrasive radio personality Catherine Duke, flighty assistant Beth, useless and spazy reporter Matthew Brock, and surly handyman Joe. Writing logic that Dave then should be the "normal" guy who we relate to and empathize with while he navigates these loons, right?

If you watch the series in order, Dave relaxes pretty quickly. He seems like an all-business type at the start, but the writers gave him a nice sarcastic side, particularly when dealing with Jimmy James and Bill. There's the expected comedic exasperation, but he's capable of getting in a good zinger and it not feeling out of character. This opened the door to later reveals like how Dave is an accomplished tap dancer.

Writer Lesson 2: To hell with "will they or won't they" - TV loves unresolved sexual tension. It lets characters dance around their attraction for each other for months, maybe entire seasons on end while keeping the audience in suspense about if these two crazy kids will get together. Generally, shows delayed this as long as possible because Moonlighting went down the drain once the lead characters hooked up and the sexual tension was dissipated. (I've heard convincing arguments that the show's decline was unrelated to the story turn and that the two merely correlated.) Dave and Lisa hook up in the second episode, immediately upending the will-they-won't-they of Ross and Rachel and letting any romantic tension between them come from that existing relationship. It's a good lesson in breaking sitcom rules.

Writer Lesson 3: Egotistical characters are fun to write for, and the more pompous you make them, the more outrageously awful behavior the audience will accept.Technically Bill should be the office villain, but Phil Hartman (RIP!) plays him with such an overblown attitude that it utterly diffuses the nastiness of moments like rudely smoking around his co-workers, being an utter jerk with his cane, getting pushy with Jerry Seinfeld during an interview, openly insulting his guests on the air and basically attacking Dave at every turn. Making your bad guys funny can be a good antidote to viewer hate, but Hartman's overblown genial delivery somehow turns Bill McNeal into the "I don't give a shit" office asshole we all secretly wish we could be. It also takes the character far enough that we believe the rest of the staff would put up with him because he's basically toothless.

Writer Lesson 4: Don't be afraid to go very weird and broad. They did one episode that was "What if the station was on the Titanic?" and another one that remade the setting as a sci-fi premise. Those are the most extreme examples of weirdness, but there are other out-there plots like a comatose Jimmy James being kept in the breakroom while he recovers, Jimmy deciding to run for President, Lisa having serious federal crimes on her RAP sheet (all offenses are SAT-related). Jimmy James always seemed to exist on another plane of reality from the rest, and so he could lead the show into weirder corners that Dave and the others couldn't. Some of this is about not being afraid to go weird, and some of it's about having a character that gives you license to go there. Jimmy James is a comedy gift for those reasons.

I feel like you can kinda draw a straight line from this show to 30 Rock, which elevated this sort of surreal style to an art form. (I almost considered putting 30 Rock on the list, but all of the reasons I came up with pretty much traced back to here.)

I miss this show, but not as much as I miss Phil Hartman. And Stephen Root needs to be working more often.

Part 8: The X-Files

Part 9: Law & Order

Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street

Part 11: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Part 12: Gilmore Girls

Part 13: Everwood

Part 14: The Office

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why

16 Great TV Shows, Part 6: ER

Part 1: The Wonder Years
Part 2: The Simpsons
Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Part 4: Seinfeld
Part 5: The John Larroquette Show

I've searched my memory as best I can and it appears that ER is the first true one-hour drama that I watched regularly (so long as you exclude the Star Trek shows.) I came to the show somewhere in the middle of its first season, after it had already cemented its place as the number 1 drama on TV and one of the most buzzed about series. It's another point in my history where I can firmly mark my changing tastes, as ER proved to be the gateway drug into further dramas like Law & Order and Homicide: Life on the Street.

I've written several posts on ER already, which I'll link at the end of the article. In the interests of not repeating myself, today I'll focus on what initially got me into the show and kept me watching all the way until the end. (The first four years are the best, season 5 is a major step down, but it gets its mojo back in season 6 and mostly sustains quality until Anthony Edwards departs in Season 8. After that, it became a steadily declining show for me, but it recovered immensely in season 15, which stands with the best of the run.)

I had no interest in medicine, so I didn't think a show about a hospital had anything to offer me, not even one created by Jurassic Park writer Michael Crichton. Stupid me, good characters can be found ANYWHERE. That's a pretty basic lesson, but as a 14 year-old I was still learning the distinction between where a show was set and what it was about. I didn't need to understand emergency room procedures or surgery in order to be drawn into how the day to day life affected the characters. Best as I can recall, the first character I was really drawn to was Eriq La Salle's Peter Benton. Between him and Homicide's Pembleton, I wonder what it says about my high school years that I identified with the guy who stands apart from the flock and often acts like he's suffering fools on a regular basis.

I've been beating this drum in earlier posts but pace also played a role here. If you watch the ER pilot now, it feels almost sedate, but at the time it seemed to race from scene-to-scene. TV was becoming more cinematic on every level, writing, directing and acting. I sometimes wonder if the most significant development to happen to TV in the 90s was the prevalence of Stedicams. Being able to race alongside the actors for longer takes completely changed the staging and urgency of scenes, and encouraged a more natural performance style. It really help translate the urgency of an emergency room to the screen in a way that wouldn't have been feasible just a few years earlier.

This was where I also started noticing how the writers would relate what was going on in a character's medical cases to what was happening in their personal lives. Sometimes it would be subtle, other times it'd land with the conspicuousness of an anvil. Either way, it was generally deeper writing than I was used to seeing, particularly when a story arc stretched over several episodes and it only gradually became clear how an experience was meant to change, say, Carter.

Another lesson - the audience is smarter than you give them credit for. The show rarely stopped mid-trauma to translate the obtuse medical-babble, and in doing so, it revealed how much can be gleaned from context and inflection. If Dr. Greene went from being a soothing voice of calm to an urgent, clipped tone, we knew whatever he'd just seen on the read-out was grim. If he gives an order and two med students look up in disbelief, we know that he's going out on a limb. The dialogue is speaking the language of the medical professional but the performers are speaking the language of drama. How you build a scene is just as important as what the scene's about.

My "I didn't know they could do that!" moment was when the show's writers would build one of the episode's major plots around a critical patient we got to know and like... and then kill them. In the era of Peak TV, this is a lot less novel, but back then, medical shows didn't regularly kill off the patients we cared for. They might be put in jeopardy, but one way or another they'd pull through. Equally unusual was when we WOULDN'T find out the result of a critical trauma case. (The Season Four finale is a good example of this, with an entire family's life hanging in the balance as we fade to black with their fates forever unresolved.) Basically, ER showed me it was safe to not wrap everything up in a neat little bow, even if it had its own way of playing safe.

There are a great many 90s dramas that should be required viewing for writers who haven't been exposed to them. Shows like ER were a critical evolutionary step on the way to the darker, morally ambiguous cable dramas of the 21st century.

Other Posts:

A Look at the ER pilot - Part 1
A Look at the ER pilot - Part 2
A Look at the ER pilot - Part 3
A look at the episode where Carter and Lucy get stabbed

Part 7: Newsradio

Part 8: The X-Files

Part 9: Law & Order

Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street

Part 11: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Part 12: Gilmore Girls

Part 13: Everwood

Part 14: The Office

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why

16 Great TV Shows, Part 5: The John Larroquette Show

Part 1: The Wonder Years
Part 2: The Simpsons
Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Part 4: Seinfeld

Show of hands, how many of you even remember The John Larroquette Show?

C'mon people, it ran for FOUR seasons on NBC!

To be fair, the reason the show is on the list is almost entirely because of its wonderfully dark first season. Created by Don Reo, the show starred John Larroquette as a recently-sober night manager of Crossroads, a depressing bus station in St. Louis. And let me be clear, this is a dark setting rife with tension. John spends most of the pilot trying not to drink as he deals with depressing crisis after depressing crisis. Darryl "Chill" Mitchell played the lunch counter owner who might have been stereotyped as an "angry black man" but became a fleshed out character as a comic foil for John. Liz Torres played John's assistant and the great Chi McBride was Gene, the station janitor who had no problem standing up to John. Their first encounter comes as a horrified John emerges from the bathroom and says, "It looks like you've really got your work cut out for you in there." Gene, in a "are you kidding me" tone says, "I don't go in there!"

Most of the characters had an edge of some kind, and for the first season, the show resisted softening them too much. John's 12-step recovery was a focus of several episodes, and you don't usually see broad laughs wrung out of a guy at rock bottom trying to put his life back together. It was also surprisingly literate. I'd be hard-pressed to come up with another sitcom that devoted a whole runner to author Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.


I have this theory that NBC bought the show assuming that it would be another Cheers-like sitcom, with the bus station acting like the bar that all these quirky lovable losers hung out in. Cheers was a place where everybody knows your name, but Crossroads was where no one wanted to be. But it works because real comedy can come out of conflict - and it existed on every level on TJLS. Characters hated the depressing night shift environment, where you were just as likely to get shot as have to deal with the station's regular homeless bums and hookers.

The cast of people with color meant that the show could also address racial issues and tensions. No other NBC sitcom was trying to mine dark laughs out of the problems that a guy who looks like "Chill" has when driving his car through a white neighborhood while playing gangsta rap. The song's only lyrics, "Kill Whitey," is one of those jokes that I'm not sure I should laugh at for its naked antagonism or shake my head at for being too broad. On the other hand, when NBC had a full night's worth of sitcoms set in New York with nary a person of color in the cast, Larroquette stood out because it actually acknowledged race existed. I can't think of any other NBC shows that went to that well.

No, wait. There was the painfully unfunny Rhythm and Blues, which was about a white DJ being hired by an all-black radio station when he's mistaken for a black guy. I swear to you this was a real show.

A show like The John Larroquette Show couldn't last for long, and if you want to see a perfect example of how network meddling can rob a show of its distinctiveness, check out the overhaul the show got in Season Two. With a year of sobriety under his belt, John's recovery was far enough that his backstory as a former alcoholic receded into the background. Suddenly he was working the day shift, robbing the show of the darker danger and atmosphere it had. The elderly bum got cleaned up and started shining shoes at the bus station, and the streetwise hooker got clean and bought the station's bar. The edgy show about life's losers at a crossroads in their life morphed into just another show where funny people hung out in one location most of the day. That's the development process - take what's distinctive and make it acceptable to the masses.

I wish I could rewatch the first season, but it has yet to come to DVD. My memory of the show is that it boldly followed its voice that first year and was successful in spite of - perhaps maybe because of - it made viewers uncomfortable.

Part 6: ER

Part 7: Newsradio

Part 8: The X-Files

Part 9: Law & Order

Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street

Part 11: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Part 12: Gilmore Girls

Part 13: Everwood

Part 14: The Office

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why

16 Great TV Shows, Part 4: Seinfeld

Part 1: The Wonder Years
Part 2: The Simpsons
Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

C'mon, as soon as I praised story density and pace in The Simpsons, you probably saw this one coming.

I came to Seinfeld at the top of its 4th season, which you might know as the one which kicks off with a trip to LA and eventually leads to a storyline about Jerry and George collaborating on a pilot. This was the year the show moved to the post-Cheers slot at midseason and EVERYONE discovered it. It had been a cult hit prior to that, but this was its breakout moment and it felt instantaneous. I'm not sure if that could even happen today with a network show.

Created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, Seinfeld had been a timeslot competitor with Home Improvement, and that seems like the perfect metaphor for the instant switch in my sitcom tastes at the age of 13. I'd grown bored with family sitcoms that followed the same predictable formula each week, set largely in the same living room/kitchen stages, with the same stale conflicts. Seinfeld was like none of that. Instead of plots like "Tim forgets date night with Jill and goes to a monster truck rally" there were stories like "George jeopardizes the future of their pilot by staring too long at an executive's daughter's cleavage." If you look at those loglines, you can at least see how Home Improvement's story can easily breakdown in an A to B to C story. If someone tells you the Seinfeld conflict, you go, "Is there a show there? Is it funny?"

They found humor in all the little moments that everyone else overlooked, and so much of the comedy was specifically tied to character. During that year, NBC reran an early episode called "The Pen" that was about Jerry and Elaine visiting Jerry's parents in Florida. My hand to God, the first five minutes of the show - before we really hit anything resembling the A-story of the episode - was my grandparents to a tee. It wasn't even the dialogue so much as the tone and the nuances of their attitudes. And in true Seinfeld fashion, the main story gets instigated by a minor conflict. (Jerry admires an astronaut pen that belongs to his father's friend. The friend offers it to Jerry. Jerry declines saying he couldn't possibly take it. The friend insists, Jerry accepts. Problem: the friend didn't want Jerry to accept and word spreads that Jerry took his pen, setting off tension in the retirement community.)

So my first lesson from Seinfeld: you can find a story anywhere.

Second lesson: When you're mining humor from characters, the more specific and unique the characters, the funnier they are. This maybe holds even truer with one-off guest characters. Think of how many one-episode Seinfeld characters are instantly memorable.

Let's talk about story density. If you watch the series in order, you see the structure get gradually more complex and ambitious. Early episodes sometimes have two major plots that don't interact much, but gradually, the stories would start to converge in unexpected ways. Eventually, it got to the point where each of the four regulars had their own story and those stories would cross and interconnect in Rube Goldbergian ways. It's hard to find that much ambition on TV today, let alone 25 years ago.

Again, this was the period where the pace of television really sped up. Scenes were shorter, dialogue came faster, the entire rhythm of the scenes was faster paced. You could blame short attention spans, but what you're really gaining is the ability to tell more complex stories. With a lot of television, the rule is "Get in, get out," keep things moving. (There are exceptions, of course. Better Call Saul really luxuriates in its measured pace. You don't find a lot of leasurely-paced comedies, though.)

This was also the first time I can remember a sitcom that was more or less telling a serialized story across the entire season. Though there are a number of episodes that don't deal with the pilot, it's a recurring thread through much of the season. (And that's not even counting branching threads like George's relationship with Susan.) It was a nice novelty to be watching a sitcom that didn't mostly pretend that last week's episode didn't happen. I know my reaction to the NBC pilot subplot was, "Wait, you can do that?"

Seinfeld blew up the sitcom formula in so many ways, many of which have been the topic of many books and thinkpieces, but these are the elements that mattered the most to me in learning about story. It's one of the few shows that I don't think I'll ever burn out from watching reruns. I'm sure there are some episodes that I've sat through 20 or 25 times and they never get old. It also is a clear forerunner of another favorite of mine, Curb Your Enthusiasm (which does not appear on this list.)

Other Seinfeld Posts:

"The Golf Ball" - building to a Seinfeld-like payoff
The Seinfeld finale and why putting your lead character on trial can backfire

Part 5: The John Larroquette Show

Part 6: ER

Part 7: Newsradio

Part 8: The X-Files

Part 9: Law & Order

Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street

Part 11: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Part 12: Gilmore Girls

Part 13: Everwood

Part 14: The Office

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why

16 Great TV Shows, Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Part 1: The Wonder Years
Part 2: The Simpsons

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine helped me recognize the authoritarianism of the Bush Administration for what it was.

That's quite a feat considering when the show left the airwaves, Bill Clinton was still in office, but by that time, DS9 (created by Michael Piller and Rick Berman) had devoted at least half of its seven-year run to storylines about ethics during wartime. I've already written two posts about how a 1996 two-parter called Homefront/Paradise Lost dealt with the debate of security from terrorism versus individual liberty. Produced during peacetime, it was easy to see that the right answer ALWAYS is "Side with your principles. Never embrace any fascist security policies against your own people in the name of fighting the enemy because then they've already destroyed you." It was all about how paranoia and fear can be misused by power-mongers for their own purpose.

I guarantee you that if this episode was produced in 2004, it would have been attacked by all manner of conservative media and Fox News for being "unpatriotic." It absolutely feels like a pointed and direct criticism of post 9/11 America, even though it preceded the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks by almost six full years. That is the power of storytelling, to confront social issues in a way that keeps them relevant even decades removed from the context that inspired them. Wartime ethics was such a focus of DS9 during the Dominion arc that it became surreal to see the same sorts of questions emerge about the Iraq War and the hunt for Bin Laden. I already knew which side I was on because the storytelling forced me to examine my own values years later.

And yet, one of my favorite episodes is "In The Pale Moonlight," where the message is almost unquestionably "The ends justify the means." At this point in the series, the Federation is getting hammered in the Dominion War. Captain Sisko realizes that their only chance might be to convince the Romulans to abandon their non-aggression pact with the Dominion and join the Federation and the Klingons in the fight against them. He hopes he can convince them that the Dominion is just biding their time and will eventually turn on the Romulans after crushing their other foes. And he's probably right. Problem: all efforts to turn up evidence of this plot come to naught.

So with the help of Garak - a Cardassian former spy-turned-tailor - Sisko produces fake evidence of the plans and arranges for a Romulan senator to visit the station in secret. There he offers his argument and a fake recording of a Dominion meeting where they discuss the invasion of Romulus. One problem: the Senator figures out it's fake and plans to go back to his government with the news that the Federation attempted to deceive them. If that happens, they might enter the war AGAINST Starfleet and the Klingons.

Fortunately Garak has a solution. He plants a bomb on the Senator's shuttle and blows it up, killing five people. Sisko's incensed when he finds out and confronts Garak, but Garak says that it's worked out perfectly. The Senator's meeting was secret, and so the Romulans will assume the hit came from the DOMINION. Better still, when they recover the data rod with the fake recording, they'll assume anything imperfect about the recording will be the result of the explosion. It will look like the Senator uncovered vital intel and was killed for it, adding to its authenticity. And aside from those lives, all it cost "was the self-respect of ONE Starfleet officer."

He's right. The Romulans join the Klingons and Federation, and their forces are enough to turn the tide. Because of this, the Dominion stands a better chance of being defeated.

Over the course of the episode, to make this scheme happen, Sisko has been a party to bribery, extortion, forgery and assassination. And as he tells us at the end. "I can live with it."

This never would have happened on Star Trek: The Next Generation, where the only lead character to come even close to making morally questionable choices was Worf. On TNG, either Picard would have swayed the Romulans with an unrealistically persuasive speech, or there would have been a last-minute recovery of a real recording. The Enterprise crew were good guys who never had to get their hands TOO dirty. Morality on Picard's ship is black and white, while Sisko lives in a world full of shades of grey.

And that's what made DS9 more fascinating to me as a teenager. It seemed determined to test the boundaries of what Star Trek could be, both inside and outside the narrative. Characters sometimes made horrible choices and weren't always exonerated by their circumstances. They failed, they learned, they grew. It made them feel more like people rather than stiff representatives of a point of view who rarely changed week-to-week. As a long-time viewer, it was rewarding to see long-term stories build. Seemingly disconnected threads would come together in a tapestry that eventually used the backdrop of the Dominion War to explore all sides of their characters.

Don't get me wrong. I love TNG. It has some of my favorite hours of TV. But if we're talking about the show that made me go, "Damn, I'd like to write THAT," it's Deep Space Nine all the way. Over the years, the show explored issues like terrorism, faith, religious fundamentalism, homosexuality, and much more.

DS9 also stoked my TV writing interest in another way. One of the writers, Ronald D. Moore, used to answer fan questions on an AOL discussion board on a fairly regular basis. It's hard to remember this in the age of Twitter, where every writer and writers' room has their own twitter account, but there didn't used to be this sort of ongoing dialogue with TV creators. Moore was one of the few, and DS9's Robert Hewitt Wolfe was one of the others. Beyond that, there weren't many peeks behind the curtain outside of magazine articles.

Moore ended up answering a lot of questions about the process of writing and producing TV. I learned a lot about breaking and developing story from those Q and As, lessons I applied a few years later when I started producing my own half-hour drama series in college. I wrote Ron Moore a fan letter at that point and was stunned a few weeks later when he tracked me down to call me at home. That full story is here if you want to read it.

And of course, Moore went on to create the revival of Battlestar Galactica, a show with absolutely became a commentary on Bush-era politics, this time intentionally. It's hard not to see BSG as a descendant of DS9, and a reaction to Star Trek: Voyager.

Deep Space Nine will always be a big part of my journey to becoming a writer. It's just great drama dealing with great ideas. Star Trek has never produced anything else like it.

Part 4: Seinfeld

Part 5: The John Larroquette Show

Part 6: ER

Part 7: Newsradio

Part 8: The X-Files

Part 9: Law & Order

Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street

Part 11: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Part 12: Gilmore Girls

Part 13: Everwood

Part 14: The Office

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why