The TV Bracket

Without a doubt, the strangest phenomena that I've experienced in relation to television was a partly facetious exercise that turned very real: a bracket made by a friend on Twitter to determine the best television show of all time, culled to a bracket of (if I'm not mistaken) 128 from a very long longlist. From the beginning, it was hopelessly divisive and maddening, which gave people such as myself who weren't nearly as invested a good deal of schadenfreude. Too many turning points came as the competition tightened, but the most surreal moment of all came late: in the round of 16, The Good Place, which was given a top 10 seeding by public voting and which overperformed even with that, somehow came from behind to defeat The Sopranos. Fortunately, the number 1 seeded Twin Peaks barely held on to best it, and no other matchup came close to that shock, but it seemed to define the entire proceedings as some odd mix of campaigning, possible bot manipulation, and plain recency bias. The bracket ended as it was almost certainly destined to: on the final matchup between Twin Peaks and Sesame Street, two immensely incongrous final competitors, the bracket runner left Twitter to a mass of confusion and never resolved the bracket. In essence, the bracket summed up all the contradictions that make up television for me, all of the odd patterns of reception and viewership without which television could not survive.