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).

46: Friends

Ah, one of the great things about this being an '00s list and not a '90s list, is that Friends which I'd be forced to put likely in the top 10 of the '90s list, I can move all the way down here for the '00s. I had originally thought about leaving it out altogether, but it was on for almost half the decade, longer than I realized, and the finale was kind of a big deal. Still, it wasn't the cultural benchmark it was in the '90s, thankfully.

I have a couple of different things to say about Friends - first, as one can probably tell from that first paragraph, I'm not much of a Friends fan. I've honestly only seen a handful of episodes, which were not particularly good, and I've long believed that as far as mid-to-late 90's sitcoms go, you really have to be either a Friends or a Seinfeld person, and not both, and I've been a longtime resident of the Seinfeld camp. It's like being a cat or a dog person. You can like both, maybe, but you really only identify with one.

My friend Lisa has a longtime theory on why Friends is worse than The Nanny. Basically, according to her, neither Friends or the Nanny are good. The Nanny, or maybe its fans, or the network, realizes this - no one claims the Nanny to be otherwise - it was never water cooler conversation, its phrases never wormed their way in to the pop culture lexicon. If you came here from another country, you could easily avoid knowing the Nanny existed. With Friends, it's the opposite - you couldn't escape Friends - whether it was the constant talk of the on-again, off-again Ross and Rachel relationship, or Joey's oft-repeated phrase "How you doin'", Friends was everywhere during its run. You couldn't get out of it way.

Friends finale was literally the most watched entertainment programming since the Seinfeld finale, perhaps again reinforcing their bitter (well, perhaps not so bitter) rivalry. Of course, Rachel and Ross end up together, and everyone's happy, except I suppose for Joey who later goes off to star in a far less successful spin-off in LA - either no one liked him as much as the others, or time was just up for the Friends-verse.

Friends-mania has largely subsided since then, but if nothing else, it represents, in a way, the part of one decade that always sort of ebbs its way into the next - decades are not stand alone, but rather a continuously changing series of pop culture norms - Friends is the representative of the 90s that managed to creep rather successfully into almost half of the previous decade, as I suppose, I owe Friends to at least tip my hat at it for that.