TV Land and TV Guide have teamed for five hour-long specials this week that countdown The 100 Most Memorable TV Moments. Like all these lists, the picks are arguable, especially when one considers the many ways to define "memorable" and the simple vagaries of personal experience. Many aren't memorable to me because I never saw them in the first place.
The specials are well-produced and someone deserves a lot of credit, if only for obtaining so many "talking head" interviews to comment on and describe the memorable moments. There are a lot of nice sleight-of-hand moves in evidence. In many cases, they were unable to obtain (or unwilling to pay for) actual footage of the memorable moments in question. So they switch between a lot of different folks discussing it and intercut still photos…and in many cases, you barely notice that they didn't actually show you the moment. I'll bet a lot of people will watch these specials and think they saw footage that wasn't there.
Tonight's show counted down #21-40 with things like Bill Clinton playing sax on The Arsenio Hall Show, Henry Blake's death on M*A*S*H, Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl, Hank Aaron's home run record and Eddie Murphy doing James Brown on Saturday Night Live. In fact, if you want to see the whole list, they have it up on their website. Here's #81-100. Here's #61-80. Here's #60-41. And here's #40-21.
They're counting down #1-20 on the installment tomorrow night and to keep America in suspense, they haven't posted or released that list yet. However, it's hidden on the website without any active links to it, which means that you can read it if you know where to look. All five hours rerun a couple times on Saturday.