I have ranked the top 68 television shows of the '00s, and will be presenting them, one-by-one, starting with 68 and working down. The rankings are more or less based on the show's popularity, it's cult status, it's critical acclaim, and my personal liking of it, with a heavy dose of arbitrariness added in. If a show was a big enough phenomena, I'll keep it on the list - but if I don't like it, I may drop it some spots. One other caveat - these are primetime shows (I apologize if I put a cable show that wasn't, I thought they were all primetime shows - the main point of this is just that no talk shows, no Colbert and Daily show that would be on otherwise).

29: Six Feet Under

This show has been on my mind particularly of late, as I've been watching through it currently - I'm midway through the third season. So I'm not going to look up anything in the last two seasons, because there's no point in ruining them for myself, but there's plenty to say about the first two and a half.

I knew the concept of Six Feet Under - it's about an family (the Fishers) who run a funeral home and their various lives, and the gimmick that at the beginning of each episode, we see a person die, and that person later has a service at the funeral home (Fisher and Sons.). In the first episode, I also knew, in the first five minutes more or less, the patriarch of the family dies in a car, crash thus setting up the return of the eldest son Nate from Seattle to run the funeral home with his brother David. As silly as it sounds, I was worried that the show would be simply so depressing I wouldn't want to keep wanting to watch many episodes in a short period of time.

That's not really the vibe though you get from the show. By no means is it an upbeat show - I would say on the whole there's a lot of depressing little moments - but the feel too the show is not wholly dark - the characters have happy times, and even some of the terrible bad times are not portrayed as utterly grey as they could be. And, honestly often the characters get on your nerves - they're crazy, irritating, immature, self-pitying - but maybe that's going too far, because they're really not all that bad. They have their good moments too, particularly in regard to each other. The relationships between members of the family Fisher

Though, sometimes it becomes a race between which character is driving you most crazy at the time - right now it's Ruth, the matriarch.

You get desensitized in a weird way from watching all the deaths at the beginning of the episodes. Instead of a downer, sometimes it becomes a game of figuring out how the person's going to do, or who's going to die (one episode betweens with a pair of construction workers sitting on a beam high up, eating their lunch - I figured one would fall or be pushed off, but instead his lunch box fell and killed a passer-by). It is interesting to me (though probably easy to guess when thought about for longer) to figure out which of the rare deaths actually affect me - not usually the gimmicky deaths or the accidents as much as the deaths from disease - one in particular where a husband died from cancer and was having morphine hallucinations.

Anyway, it sits pretty much where I thought - it's good, quite enjoyable, but not quite as good as some of my absolute favorite HBO shows.