The Best Television Scenes of the Decade

I’ve stated a number of times the ’00s were the Golden Age of television, when HBO and a number of network shows officially blew the film industry out of the water. When we look back on the great stories of this decade, we’ll remember books like Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead”, Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything Is Illuminated”, and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road. We’ll remember films like “Up” and “There Will Be Blood”. By and large, though, we’ll remember this as the decade of brilliant, epic small screen.

Since I’m a little late to the Best Television Shows of the Decade listmaking, and since I’m only going to end up rehashing the lists over at The AV Club and Paste¹, I’m taking a different approach.

Next to flawless, sweeping storytelling, my favorite part of television this decade involved those moments after a particularly great sequence or scene, those moments I would pause the action for a moment and sit in awe at what I’d just seen, or turn wide-eyed to my wife.  Can you believe what we just saw?

(Editor’s Note: Some of these scenes – an alarming amount of them, actually – contain brutal violence and profanity.  Viewer beware.)

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Honorable Mention: There’s a scene in Friday Night Lights‘ third season where Tammy Taylor has a discussion with her daughter Julie about sex.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the clip.  Tammy’s reaction, a mixture of shock, heartbreak, and anger at Julie’s apparently flippant attitude toward sexuality, is one of the most realistic and touching acting pieces I’ve ever seen.  It would’ve been somewhere in the middle of this list if I’d been able to find it.

10. Freaks and Geeks – Lady

I’ll admit I don’t really get the furor over Freaks and Geeks. It’s a good show, but I’ve never considered it on par with the decade’s other offerings.  Granted, the bar rose exponentially as the decade rolled on, and Freaks and Geeks aired early on.  I generally view the show the same way I view Judd Apatow’s comedy film machine: good, but not as great as the press they receive.

Still, Apatow followed John Hughes’ steps as a voice of a new generation, reveling in the conflict inherent in growing up and the awkward pain of being young.  Few scenes capture the horror and hilarity of being a lovestruck high schooler like this one, when Jason Siegel’s Nick confesses his feelings for Linda Cardelini’s Lindsay through the music of Styx.  It’s the sort of grand romantic gesture I’d lie awake at night picturing in my head.  Fortunately, the reason of daylight usually won out.  Usually.  One time it didn’t, and the results were about as terrifying as you’ll see here.

9. Curb Your Enthusiasm – Starbucks and the New Larry

After inadvertently injuring Shaquille O’Neal on national TV, Larry David draws the ire of an entire city.  While he’s initially apologetic, he quickly realizes his dreams have come true: no one wants anything to do with him.  No one asks him for favors, doctor’s give him their medical opinion for free, and, for a time, Larry relishes his role as social pariah rather than schmuck.  The new, happy Larry may disgust Cheryl, but it allows for one of the funniest scenes in David’s legendary comic history.

8. Always Sunny in Philadelphia – Night Man

Always Sunny isn’t for everyone.  The FX comedy takes Seinfeld‘s selfish singles to more shocking lows and more gratuitous depravity, with Charlie Kelly’s squalid low-rent studio standing in for Jerry’s apartment, and the back alley Paddy’s Pub in place of the coffee shop.  Still, it makes for spectacular comedy.  The “Night Man” scene, when Charlie, Mac and Danny Devito’s Frank try and form a band from disparate musical styles and an absence of talent, is reliable in eliciting a chuckle even from Sunny haters.

7. Arrested Development – Her?

This was a difficult choice.  I texted Don Miller on the subject, and he wisely suggested The Chicken Dance.  The problem in coming up with one scene, however, is AD‘s brilliance builds over time, and the best scenes recall earlier jokes.  The Michael/George Michael/Anne Veal mayonegg scene may be my favorite single bit simply due to Michael Cera’s delivery, but I couldn’t find that clip, either.  Instead, here’s a montage of “Her?”s, which I think captures exactly what made Arrested Development television’s greatest comedy of all-time.

Arrested Development “Her?” clips from Jeremy Toeman on Vimeo.

6. Big Love – Happiest Girl in the Whole USA

Paste and The AV Club each left HBO’s polygamist drama off their lists, to which I’ll respectively disagree.   Critics’ main complain seems to be the show’s penchant for king-sized, soap opera-ish drama, but creators Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer have worked the medium to new heights.  Big Love‘s third season reached astonishing levels of drama, where each episode seemed to pack in a season finale’s worth of twists and turns.  This scene, the end of Episode 22 in Season 2, was one of those HBO-trademark montage finishes, where the song choice plays against the series’ themes of the compromises and struggles Big Love’s female characters face on a daily basis.  Daveigh Chase’s pristine rendition of the Donna Fargo song helps, too.

5. The Sopranos – Phil Leotardo’s Demise

With The Sopranos‘ final scene a minor disappointment, the assassination of Tony’s rival Phil Leotardo goes down as the most memorable moment of the show’s last episode. This was a difficult pick, too, since The Sopranos featured dozens of incredible moments over its illustrious span. In particular, the moment when Dr. Melfi rejects the temptation to tell Tony about her rape (and take revenge on her assailant) in “Employee of the Month” came to mind, along with Tony’s numerous abstract dream sequences.

Phil’s death, though, captures The Sopranos’ pitch black humor. The scene’s brilliance is not so much about seeing Leotardo’s creative end², but more the single shot of his grandchild in a carseat, rising and falling over a gentle bump.

4. Mad Men – The Carousel

The decade’s late claim to television supremacy, Mad Men wields a deft hand, patiently and slowly spinning out the story of a nation thrust into cataclysmic change. Each episode is laced with moments, from Betty shooting pigeons with a BB gun in her front yard with a cigarette dangling from her lips to Pete dancing in his office to the lawnmower scene, which I would’ve put here, but didn’t want to give it away for latecomers. The Carousel giftwraps the show’s ethos through Don Draper’s wistful ad pitch, and it’s one of those scenes where Don realizes what he’s losing, but seems powerless to win back.  Considering it takes place in 1961, another message is clear: even in a time perceived as America’s highest point, people yearned for the good ol’ days.

Embedding is disabled, so you’ll have to click here.

3. Deadwood – Fight between Dan and “The Captain”

David Milch’s Dickensian take on the Western was wrought with ornate prose, grimy brutality, and unexpected community in a frontier mining town.  While the first season pitted the righteous rage of Seth Bullock (television’s greatest Enneagram Type 1 protagonist) against the ruthless cunning of Al Swearengen, one of those great villains you can’t help but love, the second and third seasons introduced increasingly sinister forces.

By the end, Deadwood was an almost libertarian cautionary tale, as the town’s good (Bullock) and bad (Swearengen) fought together against a two-headed beast of ineffectual government and the insatiable greed and power of George Hearst.

The series’ indelible scene is that war, between true community and corporate might, played out as an old-style Western showdown between Swearengen’s loyal barkeep Dan Dority and Hearst’s hulking henchman, Captain Joe Turner.  Without guns.  The scene features over four minutes of grappling and punching over the filthy thoroughfare splitting the town, and ends in eye-popping horror.  Unfortunately, the prevailing sense as the series ended was of a battle won and a war soon lost.  After all, men like Hearst have the money to hire a hundred Captain Joe Turners.

2. The Office (British) – Tim Confesses His Love to Dawn

The Office creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant welded Christopher Guest’s mockumentary style with Larry David’s obsession with discomfort into the decade’s most enduring comedy.  Anymore, comparing the British and American forms of the hit sitcom is an exercise in futility.  Where the British version benefited from a short run with a set story arc, the American version has used its longer run to develop the supporting cast and paint Dunder Mifflin as a quirky take on the workplace as de facto family.   In the British version, there was always a sense that Tim and Dawn were better than the rest, the sole bits of light in a depressing and meaningless rat race.

The American writers should be credited for not drawing the tension out too long, ala Sam and Diane, and bringing their handsome protagonists together early, allowing for new stories and conflicts to develop.  For Jim and Pam, getting together was just the beginning, and there wasn’t ever a question that it would happen.

The Tim and Dawn story, on the other, was far less clear-cut.  Tim was always more convincing as a “good buddy” than the tall, movie-star handsome Jim, and while Dawn’s fiancee Lee was no catch, there was a more realistic sense that she’d stick with his security.

All of which made this scene, in which Tim finally declares his love for Dawn, one of the most harrowing, heartbreaking and innovative moments in television history.

With Dawn on the verge of leaving for the United States with Lee, Tim discusses all the reasons it won’t work. His first, watered-down attempt at asking Dawn out has failed, and he seems to accept that circumstances cannot be changed. Then, in a masterful display of showing, not telling, Tim takes what may be the first courageous action of his life. Everything from Dawn’s split-ends to the cut microphone to the voyeuristic look through the blinds to the brevity of Dawn’s reaction to the mic’s reconnection underline how much is at stake. You don’t need to have gone through something like that to be utterly crushed.

Even worse, for all British viewers knew, that was it, the final episode in the series’ run. The two-hour long Christmas Special didn’t air until over a year later. Even then, it was down to the final minutes, as Tim and Dawn awkwardly say goodbye and Dawn leaves one last time with Lee to the strains of Take That’s “Back for Good”.

Her return is appropriately understated due to what could’ve been a documentarian’s throwaway shot, as it even takes a few seconds for the filmmaker to catch her in the background. The moment doesn’t pause for sentimentality, though it’s difficult to imagine viewers not cheering as she meekly taps Tim on the shoulder.

For all the American series’ incredible accomplishments (in my opinion, it’s superior to the British version), it never mustered single scenes like these two.

1. The Wire – Dukie’s Fan

True to its status as the best television series of the decade (eh, let’s just go with all of history), The Wire had hundreds of memorable scenes, ranging from hilarious to horrifying to unbearably sad. The show’s epic sweep began as a cops-and-dealers crime story, then pulled back in each subsequent season to reveal another layer of an American city in decline.

While the show’s final season turned a critical eye to the media and tried valiantly to tie up to the loose ends of what seemed like a million story plots, it was The Wire‘s 4th season, which focused on the Baltimore school system and four boys caught in poverty’s crossfire, that shined as its most urgent.

My guess is, every fan of The Wire can recall a few scenes seared into their memory.  Maybe it’s MacNulty’s car crash while wasted, or Marlo Stanfield reestablishing his dominance on a random corner, or Omar buying his last pack of cigarettes.  For me, it was a scene at the end of an episode in Season 4 which takes place in Mr. Pryzbylewski’s classroom.

As a bullied girl suddenly attacks her tormenters, the scene spins away into horrific violence.  The camera flits across a calm and curious Michael, a frozen, traumatized Randy and a stunned Namond, and finally rests on Dukie, the social outcast, who kneels down next to the bullied girl and cools her with a handheld fan.

The dizzying transition from what may have been the series’ most gut-wrenching violence into a moment of stunning tenderness from The Wire‘s most tragic character was absolutely devastating. I was watching that episode on my laptop, with headphones, next to my wife on a couch, when I burst into sobbing. What’s wrong? she kept asking.

It took me a minute or so to let her know it was just one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen in any story ever.  Beauty is one thing, but I think sometimes it’s easy to forget beauty is nothing when it’s not juxtaposed with the world’s profanity.