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).

38: Dancing with the Stars

Celebreality was certainly one of the biggest genres to emerge out of the 2000s (or subgenres - out of the more encompassing reality genre). Starting with shows like The Surreal Life, which laughed at them, and reveled in their outright weirdness, these shows generally employed the Dist of D celebrities - maybe even F celebrities sometimes if that were a real term - is Shifty Shellshock, the lead singer of Crazy Town, and participant in Celebrity Rehab's first season -really a D celebrity? (really?)

Now I don't mean to suggest that Dancing with the Stars had A list celebrities - far from it (people are really clamoring to see more Rocco diSpirito on TV after the failure of The Restaurant (along with the failure of the actual restaurant featured on that show)) - but it changed two things - one, the show wasn't geared along the premise of simply laughing at celebs and thinking about how their life is pretty pathetic - sure it could be funny to see some of these people dancing ridiculous moves that their body types did not support, but in a far more innocuous way than laughing at someone on celebrity rehab. Second, there was one area where it really did get more or less A-list celebrities - the sports world - sure Mel B isn't exactly out there tearing up the music charts (though some of their music celebrities were legit - Mario has had hits through most of the decade) but Floyd Mayweather Jr. is generally considered one of the best fighters of the last decade - Emmitt Smith and Jerry Rice are the all-time leaders in rushing yards and receiving yards respectively and Jason Taylor and Warren Sapp are defensive stars in their own right. The Olympians they've used aren't random shot putters or equestrian stars (oxymoron?) that no one knows - they're gold medal winners from the big events that people actually care about - Kristi Yamaguchi, Maurine Greene, Shawn Johnson.

Now, I've been wrong before many, many times about shows. So maybe it's not a surprise that I was completely shocked by the success of Dancing with the Stars. Still, I don't think I was the only one - when Survivor came out - whether I liked it or not, I recognized it as something kind of new - and even when Apprentice came out I could understand what was buzzworthy - but with Dancing with the Stars - it seemed like a tiny twist on a similar theme - getting together retread celebrities for some random competition - something that could maybe hold its own on Saturday nights during summers but nothing groundbreaking. And yet the show was a giant, stupendous hit, and has more or less continued being a fairly big hit for almost five years now. I have total faith that its run is slowing now, but we're already far past being really impressive territory.

This show is the reason that networks continue to take those concepts that make you say "who greenlighted this?" and actually put them together ("Here's the pitch: We take the two things Americans love most - celebrities and dancing) . Sure, nine out of ten of them may bomb completely, but if one out of ten gets you a Dancing with the Stars, it's something you'd be foolish to ignore.