I don't have a whole lot to say about the list of the 101 Best-Written TV Shows as selected via online voting by members of the Writers Guild. It's a list about which we can all say, "They think that is better than that?" We can all find a few shows on it that we can't believe would make the Top 500 and name a few that oughta be in the Top 10 but didn't make the list at all. (My list would, unlike the official one, include S.C.T.V., Naked City, WKRP in Cincinnnati, He and She, The Trials of O'Brian, My World and Welcome To It, The Bullwinkle Show and East Side, West Side. And no, I didn't vote. I think they sent me a notice but I didn't pay a lot of attention to it…)
I also don't understand a lot of their credits, noting the creator(s) of some shows, pilot writer(s) on others, and I see some simple mistakes. That was Jack Mendelsohn who worked on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, not John Mendelsohn, for instance. I would imagine a lot of people are angrily phoning the Guild about things like that.
But hey, it's just a list that will probably achieve its objective, which is to remind people that TV shows are written by someone and not, with a few exceptions, ad-libbed by the performers. Even Whose Line Is It Anyway? and You Bet Your Life had writers even if they didn't call them that. I never take these things too seriously…especially when apples and oranges are being compared. Which was better-written? The Sopranos or Seinfeld? I'll tell you but first you tell me how you begin to compare those two shows…