I've done lists of my favorite shows of the 2000s and the 2010s as those decades were ending, but I've always wanted to go back and do one for the decade that I came of age. I turned 8 at the beginning of the '90s and was about to turn 18 when the decade ended, and I was a couch potato then much as I am now. And before streaming and a 24-hour buffet of good cable options, you really had to plan to watch (or tape) the shows that were actually good. That "Must See TV" shit was no joke, if I was out on a Thursday night, I'd have to make sure you caught the rerun over the summer. 

I think I saw The Kids in the Hall for the first time when I was in a hotel room that had HBO, and had no idea what to make of it. I caught the 1995 finale episode when it was new or recent and was just starting to really appreciate the show, and over the next few years I started obsessively watching reruns on Comedy Central. Music is more important to me than comedy, but Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Scott Thompson, Dave Foley, and Mark McKinney are more like my Beatles than any band, I was so starstruck when I finally saw them live in 2014. My brother Zac, who does comedy in Wisconsin, recently got to take an improv class taught by McDonald, I've never been so jealous. 

2. Seinfeld (NBC)
When I was a kid, Kramer's screwball energy attracted me to the show, but now it's George Costanza that I regard as one of the greatest comic creations in television history (I've never been big on Curb, I think I just prefer Larry David's misanthropy filtered through Jason Alexander's charisma and Broadway-honed performing chops). The "show about nothing" rhetoric was mostly a good hook for a show that didn't have a premise-y premise like '80s sitcoms often had, but it was simply about everything in modern life, from work to friendships to dating, keenly observed while removing the "what's the deal?" setups from Jerry Seinfeld's standup that had inspired the show. 

I knew the Simpson family from the shorts on the The Tracey Ullman Show and we watched that first episode in December 1989 and enjoyed it. But I don't think anyone could've predicted the way The Simpsons would grow creatively over the course of the '90s, becoming sharper and funnier years and years after that initial "Do The Bartman" era of capturing the zeitgeist. I couple probably curate a couple dozen perfect episodes out of the last 25 seasons of the show's gradual decline, but in the '90s it was just untouchable. 

I've been focusing so far on the shows that shaped my sense of humor, but I should start covering some dramas too. My father lived in Fells Point, where a lot of Homicide was filmed, and we loved seeing Baltimore depicted on primetime TV and constantly just walking around the neighborhood and spotting camera crews. My dad was an extra a couple times -- if memory serves, once as a uniformed officer and once as a corpse in the morgue -- and one of the houses on his street served as the interiors for scenes that took place in Frank Pembleton's home (it could've been our house if dad had been home the day the location scout was knocking on doors). But it's not just hometown pride talking, Homicide was an incredible show, in ways that I think have been a little unjustly overshadowed by The Wire in the years since then, and the late great Andre Braugher was responsible for some of the best television acting of the '90s. 

A lot of the shows on this list are the ones that I fondly remember my dad taping so that he could watch them with us on the weekends when we visited him, and MST3K was one of those weird little cult shows that none of my friends at school knew about yet. There are a lot of laughs and good memories in the Mike Nelson era, but those first five seasons were really special, Joel Hodgson is a one-of-a-kind comic genius and the true heart of the show no matter what shape it took in his absence. 

Peter Krause's character on 9-1-1 was just killed off, and my first thought was "good, now maybe he can get back on a good show." For some people his best work was on Six Feet Under or Parenthood, but to me he'll always be Casey McColl on Sports Night. The first few episodes of Sports Night had an extremely ill-fitting laugh track, before Aaron Sorkin's verbose style dramedy became a bankable brand thanks to The West Wing, but this is still my favorite thing he ever did, just a fantastic cast and the man could really write when he was on that good cocaine. 

I was 8-9 years old when Twin Peaks was on the air, so I was aware of it, but just kind of assumed it was another prime time soap like Dallas or Dynasty until years later when I got my mind blown by Eraserhead as a teenager and started to delve into David Lynch's other work. But then, part of what I love about Twin Peaks is how much it did function as a soap opera that briefly occupied the pop culture spotlight, including one of the most strikingly beautiful casts ever assembled for a TV series, even as it quickly subverted expectations, challenged its audience, and quickly flamed out. I definitely owe myself a rewatch, though, I haven't watched the first two seasons since Twin Peaks: The Return. 

Northern Exposure was a more gently, approachably mystical and weird prime time show than Twin Peaks, but I love it for a lot of the same reasons, it really turned a fictitious small town into its own world with its own rules. Even when the show's fish-out-of-water protagonist Rob Morrow dipped out early, it remained a great ensemble show. 

I've barely ever watched a full episode of the original Star Trek, but man I loved TNG. I still think Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard is one of the best performances in television history, the intellectual and philosophical values espoused by Gene Rodenberry in Star Trek, especially in TNG, mean something to me in ways that very little sci-fi pop culture of the last few decades does. I don't get starstruck meeting celebrities at work very often, but I will always brag about the time LeVar Burton accidentally stole my phone for 5 minutes (it was sitting in front of me when we worked together on the Naitonal Spelling Bee, and after we discussed something, he picked it up thinking it was his phone, and eventually realized his mistake). I wasn't as into Deep Space Nine at the time, but its reputation now makes me think I should probably revisit it at some point. 

When I did my list of the best TV of the 2000s, I didn't include The Sopranos, partly because I hadn't watched a whole lot of it and partly because I was tired of hearing about how it was the greatest show ever and was feeling a little contrarian. But I've finally started watching it from the beginning, and have to give it up for the greatness of James Gandolfini's performance, even if the one season that aired in the '90s wasn't the show's peak. 

Lately The Pitt starring Noah Wyle has brought back a lot of nostalgia and renewed interest in ER, with some people asserting that the new show doesn't hold a candle to the original hyper-realistic emergency room medical drama. I can't call it, personally, but I am happy to give ER its props, it went on far too long like network hits tend to, but it was an amazing show in its prime. It's funny to think that it probably wouldn't have gotten on the air if its creator hadn't written a book about dinosaurs that had just become a record-breaking box office hit. 

Pound for pound, the '90s was probably SNL's best decade -- more seasons than the '70s, no really rough periods like the '80s, and just an incredible abundance of talent: Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Norm MacDonald, Mike Myers, Julia Sweeney, Chris Farley, Tim Meadows, Will Ferrell, Darrell Hammond, Molly Shannon, Tracy Morgan, the list goes on and on. Even Sandler made me laugh sometimes before he started making his bullshit movies. Even the future stars that were considered kind of underused in their SNL runs like Chris Rock, Janeane Garofalo, and Sarah Silverman were funnier on the show than they get credit for. 

Even after Eddie Murphy ran things on SNL for a few years, the show took a long time to consistently incorporate Black cast members into the show well, and that left the lane wide open for something like In Living Color. David Alan Grier and Tommy Davidson were really amazing on the show, I feel like they almost don't get enough credit these days compared to Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans. 

A few years after things like Pete & Pete and Ren & Stimpy brought an absurdist edge to Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network started airing Space Ghost Coast To Coast, a strange modern comedic take on a C-list '60s superhero hosting a talk show, that really paved the way for Adult Swim and everything that came with it in the 2000s. Rest in peace to George Lowe and C. Martin Croker, voice actors that made me laugh until my sides hurt on multiple occasions. 

In 1995, Dave Foley and Phil Hartman had just finished legendary runs on sketch comedy shows already mentioned above, and immediately moved on to one of my favorite sitcoms of all time. Just an incredibly funny ensemble, with Stephen Root as the eccentric rich boss whose arbitrary whims drive everyone else crazy, something that would make every workplace comedy a little more realistic. NewsRadio has the unfortunate legacy of being the show that elevated Joe Rogan to national prominence, but to the show's credit, Newsradio consistently depicted his character Joe Garrelli as a paranoid, gullible fool who believed in every conspiracy theory he ever heard. 

Now, I love He's The DJ, I'm The Rapper and "Summertime" and Independence Day and I Am Legend, but The French Prince of Bel-Air is Will Smith's masterpiece, he was never better than on here. The man's just a born entertainer and he moved so naturally between being the protagonist and the comic relief, putting real dramatic gravitas into storylines that would be hacky after-school special territory on most other shows of the era. 

Given Conan O'Brien's work in the writer's rooms on some of the very best seasons of The Simpsons and SNL, it's not that surprising that he became a comedy legend who now hosts the Oscars. But in 1993, he was just this lanky 30-year-old who still looked like a college kid and had barely any onscreen experience, and he was basically thrown to the wolves as the inheritor of David Letterman's timeslot. But as a longtime Letterman fan, I was happy to give the new guy a chance, and it became a young insomniac's favorite reason to stay up late on a school night in those early years when the show was constantly under threat of cancellation. 

Casting is everything in television, and so many of the shows on this list simply wouldn't work, or would have had to work in some completely different way, if they'd starred anyone else. And that's never more true than in the case of The X-Files, the chemistry between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson made it more than a sci-fi show, and proved that most great cult shows have an extremely horny cult. 

There are a lot of Fox shows on this list (tied with NBC for the most with 13 shows each), because in the era of three broadcast networks, the brash new fourth network was genuinely putting things on the air that simply would not have otherwise been on television. A couple years before Homicide's debut, Roc was the first time I got to see Baltimore depicted on television, and Charles S. Dutton really blurred the lines between a sitcom filmed before a studio audience and an old-fashioned stage play in a really interesting way. 

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