Some particularly egregious nerd face can be found in the fourth season of Six Feet Under, episode nine "Grinding the Corn."

My friend created the idea of nerd face when referring to Big Bang Theory - the current time's foremost purveyor of the phenomenon - basically treating television (or film, I suppose) nerds with the most stereotypical brush possible - they don't know how to dress themselves, they have glasses, they're socially awkward and can't function in society, they collect action figures, they love Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

In this episode, the death of the week is a comic book store employee, who dies while trying to reach on top of a series of shelves for a rare comic, only to have the shelves fall on him, crushing him to death. His friends who set up his funeral are shown as total outcasts - weirdly explaining the origin story of superhero Blue Tornado when it comes out to Nate and David, and later ineptly breaking in to steal the issue the deceased wants buried with him, folding immediately when the more masculine Nate and Rico threaten them. At the funeral itself, it's a room full of carbon copies of the two characters, glasses, t-shirt with strange reference on them, who are subject to mockery by David for their alleged inability to fit into society.

Anyway - you get the idea - sure, all of these things exist, but isn't it time we got some actually well developed nerd characters who might like Lord of the Rings and or superheros but aren't total freaks

It's just one episode, but someone needs to call it out when it appears, on behalf of the Anti-Nerd Defamation League, or somesuch.

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).

24: Deal or No Deal

Of all the absolute crazes over a show, the craze that emerged at the beginning of the run of Deal or No Deal is possibly (probably?) the stupidest. Not so much because it's the worst show, so to speak, but because, and I honestly mean this in the least pejorative way possible, it's really stupid. Just about never before has so little happened over the course of an hour of TV programming (maybe some of those super stretched out American Idol elimination hours, but you get the point). The premise was relatively simple - there are women holding 26 suitcases, each worth an amount of money, between one cent and one million dollars. The contestant slowly eliminates cases, with the idea that if he or she went all the way, there would be one box remaining, and the contestant would walk away with that amount of money. However, to hedge his or her bets, a mysterious banker offers the contestant a deal after every few cases are eliminated, depending on the values of the cases which were eliminated - for example, if the eliminated cases had relatively low values - it's most likely the offer will be higher than if the eliminated cases had relatively high values. There's absolutely no skill whatsoever - the choice of cases is random - the only thought process is calculation the expected value of the remaining cases and comparing it to the banker's offer along with one's personal risk aversion.

Deal or No Deal truly did create one of the great villains in game show history - the banker (doesn't it just sound evil? If only it had been popular a little longer it might have picked up on the investment banker and banks in general hatred wave of the bailouts) (at least second in outright villainy to the insane Inquizitor). The banker was shrouded in mystery - a silhouette who we only knew through the offers he placed via Howie Mandel. Was he a capitalist big wig trying to make a buck off the working man with sinisterly lowall offers, or merely trying to help take away some risk so a contestant could at least bring back something to show for their efforts? Who can say - you decide.

The eponymous catch phase is mentioned by Mandel each time the contestant must choose - whether to accept the banker's offer (Deal) or not (No Deal.) This decision is replete with a button - pressed when the contestant wants to make the deal. The unsung heros - the models - Wikipedia has an insanely (yes, I think it's insane) comprehensive list of the models used along with which case they held (imagine what an opening that would be at parties: "I held 17 originally, but was moved later to 21.") There was even a model search in which viewers could vote for models who tried out in various episodes. Of course, as well, this was a total resurrection of Howie Mandel's career (making him the second big-time OCD game show host) even leading to his starring in an insane Candid Camera-style show called Howie Do It (let's all groan at once.)

I want to say it's oddly compelling, but it's really not. It almost is - I mean it has the ingredients to be the show that you shouldn't want to watch but you actually can't turn away from, but it just never quite did it.

Somehow, this was big (and internationally - it started out in the Netherlands and spread to over 20 countries - among them Tunisia, Malta and Bulgaria) - and when I explain this to people in forty years, they're going to laugh and say why was this so popular, this is ridiculous, but it was true, and we were there.

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).

25: Chappelle's Show

Hard as I might try, it's impossible to exaggerate the absolute sensation Chappelle's Show was during the relatively short airing of its two seasons in 2003 and 2004 and just after when the DVDs came out. In 2005, soon after it came out the first season DVD sales were the best of ALL TIME for a TV series. Now, I understand DVD was still a relatively recent medium and there were only so many shows on DVD, but still compared to all the other shows which had drawn far bigger ratings, it's an extraordinary accomplishment.

There were some all time great sketches - the racial draft - where each race was allowed to draft to take people who were of mixed race and assign them to one race for once and all -

There were phrases that became part of the language on places like college campuses (at least mine) - the Charlie Murphy True Hollywood Stories Prince and Rick James sketches in particular - "I'm Rick James, Bitch", "Cocaine is a Hall of a Drug," "Game, Blouses" among them.

His Lil Jon sketch in particular was huge, and perhaps a product that could only come out of exactly that time - Lil Jon's brief reign in american pop music came at the same time Chappelle's Show lasted - my friend wondered if college students today would even know enough about Lil Jon to have the sketch make any sense.

The Samuel Jackson beer ads (based on a Sam Adams that was iconic enough that anyone at the time would recognize it but not iconic enough that too many people would probably remember it now), in which Chappelle appears as Jackson, looking like his Pulp Fiction character, aggressively and with foul languages attempts to persuade the viewers to try his beer ("It'll get you drunk!).

Oh, and I couldn't finish the entry without mentioning the Wayne Brady sketch - after being insulted by a bit in which character Negordamus claimed that white people liked Wayne Brady because he made Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X - Brady was asked to come on and do a sketch - basically the idea was a parody of his squeaky clean images, in which Brady does drugs, terrorizes Chappelle and recites memorable quotable lines such as "I'm Wayne Brady, bitch," and the immortal, "Is Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a bitch?"

As I'm writing, I just think about more notable sketches, but these were more or less the absolute biggest, and I'm honestly just reminiscing and recapping to anyone who has seen the show. But really it was because as I remember them now to myself, they were both good, and they were big, and if you haven't seen them, you should see them, if not for their quality than for the massive pop culture phenomenon they represented. Like every sketch show, it had its share of flops, but for just two seasons there was a remarkable number of successes, especially consider the number of total sketches was cut by the appearance of musical acts and the seemingly interminable amount of commercials.

With a success like this, the show should have gone on forever, or at least until popularity gradually faded away. It was not to be though, as Chappelle, and I don't know a better way to explain this, and I apologize if it's technically incorrect - freaked out over some combination of the stress of making the show and its impact on his stand up career and his life and who knows what else and that was it, the show was over - but maybe it's better off anyway, that what existed of the show remains, as a moment in time.

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).

26: King of Queens

If aliens come down and want to know what television comedy was like in the 00s, King of Queens might be the sitcom to show them. No one, I don't think, claims it's the funniest show or the best show, but it might be the most representative (and part of the proof of de-evolution CBS Monday night sitcom progression from Everybody Loves Raymond to King of Queens to Two and a Half Men).

It's a show that as a sophisticated east coast (well I know the show is based on the east coast also, but that's not the point) TV viewer and fan of Mad Men and Bored to Death I wanted to hate, but I just can't (Two and a Half Men, though, another story.) I don't watch it very often, nor do I flip to it generally when it's on, but I've seen episodes and it's hard not appreciate it's relative mastery of the traditional sitcom genre. Now, when I say relative mastery, I don't mean like Seinfeld (not a traditional sitcom in a lot of ways, but still multi-camera and laugh track and all that) or even Cheers - I mean more in a way that it is has the pure essences of sitcom - man (Doug) , husband, is selfish, immature, and not the smartest, wants to play cards and watch sports with his friends but has a good heart and really loves his wife deep down - woman (Carrie) is smarter, sarcastic, and really keeps their lives together while working at a legal secretary (at least the woman have jobs now.

The offbeat, strange character humor, which would often come from kids in a show like this instead comes from Carrie's father, Arthur who is craaaaaaazy, doing also sorts of eccentric things and not getting along with Doug in the process, although of course, somehow over time they grow warmer and learn to respect and live with one another.

Not to mention the achievement as being the definitive go-to example of fat-husband with hot wife - perpetuating the classic double standard that fat guys (well, TV fat - Kevin James is is large by any standard, but could get a lot real life fatter) can get attractive thin wives, but pretty much it never works the other (I suppose I have to give the new CBS Monday show Mike and Molly (and yes, this is just about the only credit I'm giving it) credit for having both protagonists being actually, and not TV, large and equally so).

Probably the strangest, biggest attempt at quirkiness (aside from Patton Oswalt, of course) is the recurring bit of having Lou Ferrigno as their neighbor (part of the Hulk's 00s revival, along with his appearance in I Love You, Man). Patton Osawlt as friend of Doug's Spence is the highlight of the show the few times I see it, playing a character pretty much based on himself, the stereotypical nerd character, but hey, Patton Oswalt's funny (also random aside - does anyone else hate it when a character has a link on wikipedia (Spence, Oswalt's character in this case) which just links back to the show page (King of Queens, here) - why would there be a link then? WHY!?).

Random fact I learned in that King of Queens has one of the great classic sitcom tropes - character written out of show with absolutely no explanation - Carrie had a sister who also lived with her and Doug, Sarah who magically disappears after the first season.

Anyway, yeah, King of Queens - the type of the thing CBS does (I was going to write best, but I think that might be giving too much credit to CBS.)

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).

27: John and Kate Plus Eight

The world of family-with-lots-of-children-television doesn't end with Jon and Kate - 19 Kids and Counting and Table for 12 were inspired by Jon and Kate (as we speak there's a new one - Sextuplets Take New York, and Quints by Surprise debuted earlier this year - I swear I wish I was making these up) (and all on TLC, it's true - it's essentially become your one-stop shopping home for family-with-lots-of-children reality shows). However, none of them have exploded onto the national consciousness like Jon and Kate Plus Eight.

I got most of my first hand experience with Jon and Kate through my friend Leslie who was obsessed with it, and in particular with the way Kate constantly nagged Jon, and what Jon had to put up with (though she was quick to label Jon as something of a scumbag for his behavior after their separation), in particular one notable clip in which Kate yelled "Jon" with a particularly indolent naggy tone, which soon entered our vernacular.

The merging of crew with family was apparently so thorough that permanent light fixtures were installed in their house to make filming easier and the crew was treated as family - further blurring the continuing line between how "real" reality tv ever is.

Jon and Kate made for fantastic tabloid fodder - the almost inevitable breakup-over-tv (their separation was announced on a June 2009 episode) celebrity tragedy and maybe a general lesson on why-not-to-get-married-and-have-lots-of-kids-when-you're-fairly-young. People were into it - this was an US magazine story, on TV, and you knew it was going to air on an episode of the show after it happened. The episode in which they announced their separation was the most-watched on the season. When it came down to it, that's what people really wanted - not that they wanted to see the divorce necessarily, but at least to some extent what fed the show was the train wreck/car crash at NASCAR element - with all these pressure, and these people, something has got to go wrong. Certainly, it was in part a chicken and egg situation - only because people were interested at all from day one was there enough fodder to feed the machine - but once it started going, that was it. Jon and Kate post separation are probably as popular (well not personally, but in a selling magazine sense) than they ever were before.

Jon and Kate Plus Eight (now simply Kate Plus 8, sadly - Jon's name wiped from existence in the title) was a definitive pop culture phenomenon and defined a segment of reality television.

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).

28: Jackass

Jackass

I had maybe for a second questioned the staying power of Jackass before the last couple of months, but if I had, I had made a huge mistake - it had been four years since the last Jackass movie, but Jackass 3-D went off without a hitch - grossing 130 million so far with a boffo opening weekend win.

The show itself, it's hard to believe (it was hard for me to believe when I saw it) only lasted two seasons - from 2000-2002. The series' stars - most notably Johnny Knoxville, but also Steve-O and Bam Margera became household names (at least in households having people under the age of 30) and even got their own spinoffs - Viva La Bam about Margera and co. (which I knew about) and four (four! - Dr. Steve-O - who turns "wussies into men" for all of 7 episodes,Blastazoid, which beat that with only 2 episodes aired, Homewrecker, with 8 episodes, kind of a Jackass-meets-Extreme Home Makeover take off, and the actually successful Wildboyz, which was kind of more Jackass, post-Jackass, except with wild animals, with Steve-O and Chris Pontius). There were only 25 half hour episodes of Jackass! To have the kind of impact it had with so few episodes is incredible (though to be fair it's with the help of now three movies, each of which has grossed more than its predecessor).

Jackass has a what in some ways has always struck me as strange so-stupid-it's-brilliant-art type stigma (or I guess stigma has a negative implication (though some might thing arty is negative too) we'll presume some sort of positive stigma can exist for these purposes) - Jackass 3D debuted oddly enough at the Museum of Modern Art and counts Spike Jonze among its producers.

The premise is simple - the show is a bunch of people performing stunts on themselves, leading to injuries, and hopefully, hilarity. Some stunts from just the third film include - playing tetherball with a beehive, launching Steve-O in the air while he is inside a portable toilet, pulling a tooth out with a Lamborghini, and using super clue to take off chest hair.

These things were of course not acceptable to stodgy politicians - who deemed them poor moral examples for today's youth - unsurprisingly, video game lovers most hated politician Joe Lieberman was at the forefront. It was rather insubstantial in the long run though.

I admit, I don't really get it. I feel like an old person saying this, but yeah, it just seems pretty dumb. I'm not going to go so far as to claim it could never be entertaining in short spurts, or that some of the pranks couldn't be amusing, but more or less I did miss the boat here. It's bound to happen though, that you don't get on board with cult pop culture items (obviously Jackass is more than a cult, but the point remains) - god knows I never could figure out what's so great about Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Alas, it's a thing, and a big one, and I at least appreciate their pushing the boundaries of what can be shown on TV, anyone who does that gets some extra credit in my book.

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.

I hate myself for this, and but humor is the best thing in the face of depression right...

It looks like after Tuesday's elections, he's no longer still the one...groan.

2010 was a banner year for New York Times television reporter Bill Carter - master of the most niche of specialties - late night battles. Sure, while most people were focusing on the sometimes outlandish, sometimes riveting, and sometimes both battle between Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno for the storied Tonight Show, which had its share of winners and losers, one man was winning no matter what happened, and winning more the longer it took and the more heated it got - Bill Carter - the definitive expert in late night television battles. He benefited on two friends - one, the battle between over the Tonight Show brought to mind the battle in the early '90s, particularly as Jay Leno was a key combatant in both, and Carter was asked tons of questions about that battle, and how it compared to the current one, and secondly, he was given plenty of material for a second late night book, bound to generate buzz, based on the fact that he is the reigning expert on all issues late night television. The War for Late Night, his new book comes out this week, and if it's lucky, will even inspire a made-for-tv movie of its own.

So, kudos to you Bill Carter - you deserve to have your expertise tested and rewarded every 18 years or so. Just one question - where's my Craig Ferguson book?