Friday Night Seitz

A mobster and a therapist locking eyes in a silent office, each hoping the other will speak first. A squad car depositing a wayward girl in front of her suburban home at night while her geeky, lovelorn neighbor watches from his perch in a tall tree. A bespectacled woman holding forth on the mystery of life while cradling a fireplace log as if it were an infant child.

These are a few of the images from programs that made our list of the greatest American TV pilots, assembled in honor of the start of yet another fall season.

The pilot is an underappreciated form, more difficult in many ways than a regular episode of a series because it has to establish the program’s particulars (characters, setting, overall aesthetic) without coming off like a tedious information dump. But despite these obligations — most of which fall under the heading of dramatic housekeeping — some shows manage to produce pilots that feel less like homework than a little movie, one that sets up the rest of the series (however long or short it ends up running) with admirable economy and invention. We’re spotlighting 10 such pilots here.

You don’t need much of a setup for this one: It’s a Desert Island List of visual media that I’d like to have with me if I were shipwrecked.

Here are the rules:

1. This list is composed solely of motion pictures and TV shows. Music, books, paintings and other media are not included. It is assumed that you’ll have an indestructible DVD player with a solar-recharging power source, so let’s not get bogged down in refrigerator logic, mm’kay?

2. You can list 10 feature films, one short and a single, self-contained season of a TV series.

This is the top half of my year-end list of the 20 best individual episodes of scripted TV dramas and comedies. This slide show covers items 10 through 1. To read 20 through 11, which ran last week, click here.

View the slide show

If most sports is a game of inches, most TV is a game of episodes. That’s why, at year’s end, I always feel a bit weird compiling a list of the year’s best series: Even a great series can have a bad episode, or a string of them, and even inconsistent or mostly mediocre series can produce memorable, even great installments.

Back in 2005, when I was a TV critic for the Newark Star-Ledger, I started publishing a yearly list of the best individual episodes of scripted TV shows. I’m continuing that tradition here at Salon with a citation of my 20 favorite episodes of scripted comedies and dramas.

For suspense’s sake, we’re breaking my 2011 list into two installments. This week’s covers items 20 through 11 on my list; next Friday we’ll count down the top 10.

View the slide show

We’re living in some kind of new Golden Age of scripted TV, and this year’s best offerings were amazing. I decided to be rigorous and restrict myself to just 10 entries. It wasn’t easy.

These 10 picks represent what I think were the most creative and consistently satisfying scripted comedies and dramas that aired on American TV during 2011. If I’d expanded the list to account for shows that were somewhat more erratic but that produced terrific individual episodes, this list would have had 30 or maybe even 40 titles on it. If anybody’s curious, I may post the expanded list in the comments section.

You may see some of the runners-up cited next week, when I will present a slide show honoring the best individual episodes of scripted series. There might be an article listing the best nonfiction programs as well.

View the slide show

There’s one big problem with compiling a list of great spy movies: How exactly do you define a “spy movie”? Do the spies have to be employed by a government agency? Does the action have to be international, or can it be domestic, even local? Do the characters have to engage in deception and/or information-gathering, or can they mainly be assassins, like James Bond or Jason Bourne? Is the “assassin film” its own separate genre? If movie characters have nothing to do with international politics but engage in surveillance and deception and other classic spy activities, can their story be grouped within the “spy movie” category?