The shows that ushered in TV's current "Golden Age"?

The Wire

There were also those ambitious early HBO movies like And the Band Played On and Indictment: The McMartin Trial - in that era, HBO dominated this - that changed the landscape and lead to an eventual "Golden Age" across networks. That eventually dovetailed with Mini-Series too and a significant increase in quality acting to the point where this Best Actor/Best Actress category here is significantly changed historically - at times it's even as competitive (or more) than the Oscars.

I think Oz should get some points, if only for the fact the it ushered in the era of hour long HBO Drama brilliance. Also, had it not gone of the boil so badly in it's last two Seasons, it would rate as highly with me as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and others.

Yeah... I was waiting for it.

I'll just refer you to Emily Nussbaum's brilliant piece in The New Yorker. (Emphasis my own.)

When people talk about the rise of great TV, they inevitably credit one show, “The Sopranos.” Even before James Gandolfini’s death, the HBO drama’s mystique was secure: novelistic and cinematic, David Chase’s auteurist masterpiece cracked open the gangster genre like a rib cage, releasing the latent ambition of television, and launching us all into a golden age.

“The Sopranos” deserves the hype. Yet there’s something screwy about the way that the show and its cable-drama blood brothers have come to dominate the conversation, elbowing other forms of greatness out of the frame. It’s a bias that bubbles up early in Brett Martin’s otherwise excellent new book, “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘The Wire’ to ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad,’ ” a deeply reported and dishy account of just how your prestige-cable sausage is made. I tore through the book, yet when I reached Martin’s chronicle of the rise of HBO I felt a jolt. “It might as well have been a tourism campaign for a post-Rudolph Giuliani, de-ethnicized Gotham awash in money,” Martin writes of one of my favorite shows. “Its characters were types as familiar as those in ‘The Golden Girls’: the Slut, the Prude, the Career Woman, the Heroine. But they talked more explicitly, certainly about their bodies, but also about their desires and discontents outside the bedroom, than women on TV ever had before.”

Martin gives “Sex and the City” credit for jump-starting HBO, but the condescension is palpable, and the grudging praise is reserved for only one aspect of the series—the rawness of its subject matter. Martin hardly invented this attitude: he is simply reiterating what has become the reflexive consensus on the show, right down to the hackneyed “Golden Girls” gag. Even as “The Sopranos” has ascended to TV’s Mt. Olympus, the reputation of “Sex and the City” has shrunk and faded, like some tragic dry-clean-only dress tossed into a decade-long hot cycle. By the show’s fifteen-year anniversary, this year, we fans had trained ourselves to downgrade the show to a “guilty pleasure,” to mock its puns, to get into self-flagellating conversations about those blinkered and blinged-out movies. Whenever a new chick-centric series débuts, there are invidious comparisons: don’t worry, it’s no “Sex and the City,” they say. As if that were a good thing.

But “Sex and the City,” too, was once one of HBO’s flagship shows. It was the peer of “The Sopranos,” albeit in a different tone and in a different milieu, deconstructing a different genre. Mob shows, cop shows, cowboy shows—those are formulas with gravitas. “Sex and the City,” in contrast, was pigeonholed as a sitcom. In fact, it was a bold riff on the romantic comedy: the show wrestled with the limits of that pink-tinted genre for almost its entire run. In the end, it gave in. Yet until that last-minute stumble it was sharp, iconoclastic television. High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of character, “Sex and the City” was a brilliant and, in certain ways, radical show. It also originated the unacknowledged first female anti-hero on television: ladies and gentlemen, Carrie Bradshaw.

Please, people, I can hear your objections from here. But first think back. Before “Sex and the City,” the vast majority of iconic “single girl” characters on television, from That Girl to Mary Tyler Moore and Molly Dodd, had been you-go-girl types—which is to say, actual role models. (Ally McBeal was a notable and problematic exception.) They were pioneers who offered many single women the representation they craved, and they were also, crucially, adorable to men: vulnerable and plucky and warm. However varied the layers they displayed over time, they flattered a specific pathology: the cultural requirement that women greet other women with the refrain “Oh, me, too! Me, too!”

In contrast, Carrie and her friends—Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte—were odder birds by far, jagged, aggressive, and sometimes frightening figures, like a makeup mirror lit up in neon. They were simultaneously real and abstract, emotionally complex and philosophically stylized. Women identified with them—“I’m a Carrie!”—but then became furious when they showed flaws. And, with the exception of Charlotte (Kristin Davis), men didn’t find them likable: there were endless cruel jokes about Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Carrie as sluts, man-haters, or gold-diggers. To me, as a single woman, it felt like a definite sign of progress: since the elemental representation of single life at the time was the comic strip “Cathy” (ack! chocolate!), better that one’s life should be viewed as glamorously threatening than as sad and lonely.

Carrie Bradshaw herself began as a mirror for another woman: she was the avatar of the New York Observer columnist Candace Bushnell, a steely “sexual anthropologist” on the prowl for blind items. When the initial showrunner, Darren Star, and his mostly female writing staff adapted Bushnell’s columns, they transformed that icy Carrie, pouring her into the warm body of Sarah Jessica Parker. Out popped a chatterbox with a schnoz, whose advanced fashion sense was not intended to lure men into matrimony. For a half dozen episodes, Carrie was a happy, curious explorer, out companionably smoking with modellizers. If she’d stayed that way, the show might have been another “Mary Tyler Moore”: a playful, empowering comedy about one woman’s adventures in the big city.

Instead, Carrie fell under the thrall of Mr. Big, the sexy, emotionally withholding forty-three-year-old financier played by Chris Noth. From then on, pleasurable as “Sex and the City” remained, it also felt designed to push back at its audience’s wish for identification, triggering as much anxiety as relief. It switched the romantic comedy’s primal scene, from “Me, too!” to “Am I like her?” A man practically woven out of red flags, Big wasn’t there to rescue Carrie; instead, his “great love” was a slow poisoning. She spun out, becoming anxious, obsessive, and, despite her charm, wildly self-centered—in her own words, “the frightening woman whose fear ate her sanity.” Their relationship was viewed with concern by her friends, who were not, as Martin suggests, mere “types” but portrayals of a narrow slice of wealthy white thirty-something Manhattanites: the Waspy gallerina, the liberal-feminist lawyer, the decadent power publicist.

Although the show’s first season is its slightest, it swiftly establishes a bold mixture of moods—fizzy and sour, blunt and arch—and shifts between satirical and sincere modes of storytelling. (It’s not even especially dated: though the show has gained a reputation for over-the-top absurdity, I can tell you that these night clubs and fashion shows do exist—maybe even more so now that Manhattan has become a gated island for the wealthy.) There is already a melancholic undertow, full of foreshadowing. “What if he never calls and three weeks from now I pick up the New York Times and I read that he’s married some perfect little woman who never passes gas under his five-hundred-dollar sheets?” Carrie frets in Episode 11. In a moment of clarity, she tells Miranda that, when she’s around Big, “I’m not like me. I’m, like, Together Carrie. I wear little outfits: Sexy Carrie and Casual Carrie. Sometimes I catch myself actually posing. It’s just—it’s exhausting.”

That was the conundrum Carrie faced for the entire series: true love turned her into a fake. The Season 1 neurotic Carrie didn’t stick, though. She and Big fixed things, then they broke up again, harder. He moved to Paris. She met Aidan (John Corbett), the marrying type. In Season 3, the writers upped the ante, having Carrie do something overtly anti-heroic: she cheated on a decent man with a bad one (Big, of course), now married to that “perfect little woman,” Natasha. They didn’t paper over the repercussions: Natasha’s humiliation, and the way Carrie’s betrayal hardened Aidan, even once he took her back. During six seasons, Carrie changed, as anyone might from thirty-two to thirty-eight, and not always in positive ways. She got more honest and more responsible; she became a saner girlfriend. But she also became scarred, prissier, strikingly gun-shy—and, finally, she panicked at the question of what it would mean to be an older single woman.

Her friends went through changes, too, often upon being confronted with their worst flaws—Charlotte’s superficiality, Miranda’s caustic tongue, Samantha’s refusal to be vulnerable. In a departure from nearly all earlier half-hour comedies, the writers fully embraced the richness of serial storytelling. In a movie we go from glare to kiss in two hours. “Sex and the City” was liberated from closure, turning “once upon a time” into a wry mantra, treating its characters’ struggles with a rare mixture of bluntness and compassion. It was one of the first television comedies to let its characters change in serious ways, several years before other half-hour comedies, like “The Office,” went and stole all the credit.

So why is the show so often portrayed as a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarrassment to womankind? It’s a classic misunderstanding, I think, stemming from an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicit about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior. Certainly, the show’s formula was strict: usually four plots—two deep, two shallow—linked by Carrie’s voice-over. The B plots generally involved one of the non-Carrie women getting laid; these slapstick sequences were crucial to the show’s rude rhythms, interjecting energy and rupturing anything sentimental. (It’s one reason those bowdlerized reruns on E! are such a crime: with the literal and figurative fucks edited out, the show is a rom-com.)

Most unusually, the characters themselves were symbolic. As I’ve written elsewhere—and argued, often drunkenly, at cocktail parties—the four friends operated as near-allegorical figures, pegged to contemporary debates about women’s lives, mapped along three overlapping continuums. The first was emotional: Carrie and Charlotte were romantics; Miranda and Samantha were cynics. The second was ideological: Miranda and Carrie were second-wave feminists, who believed in egalitarianism; Charlotte and Samantha were third-wave feminists, focussed on exploiting the power of femininity, from opposing angles. The third concerned sex itself. At first, Miranda and Charlotte were prudes, while Samantha and Carrie were libertines. Unsettlingly, as the show progressed, Carrie began to glide toward caution, away from freedom, out of fear.

Every conversation the friends had, at brunch or out shopping, amounted to a “Crossfire”-like debate. When Carrie sleeps with a dreamy French architect and he leaves a thousand dollars by her bed, she consults her friends. “Money is power. Sex is power,” Samantha argues. “Therefore, getting money for sex is simply an exchange of power.” “Don’t listen to the dime-store Camille Paglia,” Miranda shoots back. The most famous such conversation took place four episodes in, after Charlotte’s boyfriend asked her to have anal sex. The friends pile into a cab for a raucous debate about whether her choice is about power-exchange (Miranda) or about finding a fun new hole (Samantha). “I’m not a hole!” Charlotte protests, and they hit a pothole. “What was that?” Charlotte asks. “A preview,” Miranda and Samantha say in unison, and burst out laughing.

The show’s basic value system aligns with Carrie: romantic, second-wave, libertine. But “Sex and the City” ’s real strength was its willingness not to stack the deck: it let every side make a case, so that complexity carried the day. When Carrie and Aidan break up, they are both right. When Miranda and Carrie argue about her move to Paris, they are both right. The show’s style could be brittle, but its substance was flexible, in a way that made the series feel peculiarly broad-ranging, covering so much ground, so fleetly, that it became easy to take it for granted.

Endings count in television, maybe too much. “The Sopranos” concluded with a black screen: it rejected easy satisfaction and pissed off its most devoted fans. (David Chase fled to the South of France.)

Three years earlier, in 2004, “Sex and the City” had other pressures to contend with: while a mob film ends in murder, we all know where a romantic comedy ends. I’ll defend until my dying day the sixth-season plot in which Carrie seeks respite with a celebrity like her, the Russian artist Aleksandr (Mikhail Baryshnikov), a chilly genius she doesn’t love but who offers her a dreamlike fairy tale, the one she has always longed for: Paris, safety, money, pleasure. It felt ugly, and sad, in a realistic way. In one of the season’s, and the show’s, best episodes, she saw other older women settling (Candice Bergen) or falling out of windows (the hilarious Kristen Johnston, who delivered one of “Sex and the City” ’s best monologues: “When did everybody stop smoking? When did everybody pair off? . . . I’m so bored I could die”). The show always had a realpolitik directness about such social pressures; as another HBO series put it recently, winter was coming.

And then, in the final round, “Sex and the City” pulled its punches, and let Big rescue Carrie. It honored the wishes of its heroine, and at least half of the audience, and it gave us a very memorable dress, too. But it also showed a failure of nerve, an inability of the writers to imagine, or to trust themselves to portray, any other kind of ending—happy or not. And I can’t help but wonder: What would the show look like without that finale? What if it were the story of a woman who lost herself in her thirties, who was changed by a poisonous, powerful love affair, and who emerged, finally, surrounded by her friends? Who would Carrie be then? It’s an interesting question, one that shouldn’t erase the show’s powerful legacy. We’ll just have to wait for another show to answer it.

I know a lot of people here don't want to hear it, but Breaking Bad was probably the catalyst that pushed TV into where it is now.

Even though I'd agree it's one of the all-time greats, I think it helped to codify the Golden Age rather than ushering it in. Breaking Bad benefited from shows that came before it because shows like The Sopranos and Deadwood wrote the formula on having villainous protagonists, and Gilligan himself learned from working on The X-Files how to hone his craft and knowing that mythology-reliant series needed a proper course to adhere to. It's still a vitally essential show worthy of all of its acclaim, but it built its empire on the backs of those that came before it.

With that said, I'd also like to nominate The Shield. The first time (as far as I can recall) where we saw the true gritty brutality of law enforcement and the corruption it engenders on a personal level, rather than the sweeping Dickensian lens we saw in The Wire.

Of course you gotta bring it back to Denzel. 

The Shield and Training Day both found their roots in the Rampart scandal, and there's no way that Shawn Ryan saw Training Day, conceived a show and got it into production that quickly. FX may have been influenced by Training Day in terms of marketing and realizing that the success of Washington's film might've been transferable to television, but beyond that, to say that The Shield wasn't innovative because a movie came along half a year earlier and capitalized on the same real-life storyline in a different medium is a bit of a glib oversimplification. With that logic, you might as well say The Sopranos couldn't be a game-changer because The Godfather/Goodfellas exist.

Television had never followed crooked cops before, and Training Day at least had Ethan Hawke's character as our POV into the depravity of it all, but he was still a moral character. The Shield's moral centers (Dutch and Claudette) are still incredibly flawed, and even so, they act as antagonists in the show because we are following Vic and the Strike Team. Even Training Day kept Alonzo at arm's length because we weren't meant to empathize with him or like him, and it's only due to Washington's charisma that we did. It's the same thing with DDL in Gangs of New York: he's a horribly racist, xenophobic thug, but he's compelling because of the actor's charisma, not his actions (and a rather weak co-lead). But The Shield went one step further. The corruption was the focus, and because we were invested in Vic's life, his family, and the way he treated his job, you started out rooting for him to elude justice while meting it out. The question is, when did viewers (if they ever did) turn on Vic himself?

More than likely Shawn Ryan saw Training Day was going into production, and managed to get a greenlight for his own Rampart based TV show because a big movie studio greenlit a film with an A-list movie star. Nobody ever accused Hollywood of being original, but Training Day was a hot spec script for years. Would a TV network had taken a chance on The Shield if they didn't know a studio backed, A-list starring movie of essentially the same material was coming. Got my doubts. But Ryan had way more than 7 months to do his TV version.

The Sopranos was a game changer because it focused on the neurosis of an Italian-American mobster. What made The Sopranos stand out from being some TV rip-off of Goodfellas, was the integral interaction between Tony and Dr Melfi. It was a complete subversion of the genre. This tough guy mob boss having panic attacks and needing a shrink.

I never gave The Shield that much deep thought to be honest. i thought it was a well acted, well made compelling thriller series that I gave up after a few seasons, but there just wasn't enough of a hook for me to consider it particularly original. But if you rate it that high, then I'm happy for you.

You can't be serious.

The Shield has nothing in common with Training Day outside of it being about a dirty cop in LA. To write off a seven season, 80-something episode series as a Training Day ripoff is just ludicrous.

The Shield is unquestionably one of the most innovative shows of the last 20 years. It was FX's first original drama series (and they're now arguably the most acclaimed network out there) and the first "prestige drama" on basic cable. Vic Mackey shooting another cop in the face IN THE FIRST EPISODE OF THE SERIES was undoubtedly a game changer.

Go watch the rest of it and then we'll see what you have to say.

Maybe it's the marketing for The Shield that prejudiced me. I remember it around the time it came out, and it seemed heavily marketed on the premise of "if you liked Training Day, you'll love this show". And TD was constantly mentioned in reviews of The Shield (at least in the early season).

So yeah, I'm possibly not the best judge, especially since I didn't even finish the show. But I'll take people's word for it that it was more original and groundbreaking than I gave it credit for. I may even find time to watch the last couple of seasons.

To me, shows post-BB started having their own style that was different from TV before it and almost cinematic in quality. I'm terrible at putting stuff like this into words, but while stuff like The Sopranos and whatnot came before it-- they were all filmed and staged like TV shows. Obviously better than the likes of Law & Order, Lost, etc where you have high quality-- there's still the element of "we have 44 minutes and X amount of commercials, so we're gonna have a huge beat here and a huge beat there and a 'coming next week' there!". 

Again, I'm terrible at putting thoughts like these into words but I feel like BB changed the game on the mainstream where while it's still television, you can still have your own distinct style to what your doing which I think a lot more shows now are doing than they were before. 

That's not to downplay the importance of other shows (Larry Sanders changed the game entirely even before the golden age, NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Streets basically paved the way for all the good cop shows, The Sopranos probably perfected caring about characters that were downright horrible people, etc. etc. etc.). I just think BB turned all that good TV into something more than even that. 

(also, for the record, The Shield is probably my number two show... and the comparisons to Training Day make me want to vomit)