March 27, 2026

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An overview of great hour-long TV series

It seems like I'm always coming late to the party. For instance, the always-well-written TV series Law and Order had an interesting premise: In a single hour, each episode takes us through the police investigation of a crime and then the criminal trial of the person or persons charged with committing it.

I knew it existed, but I wasn't much of a TV watcher when it came out. Besides, by that time in my life, I was a sit-com guy. After Cheers and The Cosby Show revived the situation comedy after it had been declared dead in the early 1980s, I realized that even though I wrote stories and novels full of sturm und drang, when it came time for entertainment, I wanted to watch shows that were (a) short, and (b) funny.

But then came the beach. We rented a house on Ocean Isle in September, when the weather was still balmy and the water was warm. We could get away with off-season beachery because our older kids were in a private school, and if we wanted to take a week, we could. (Our kids never fell behind. Good students provide their parents with a bit more freedom.)

We quickly learned what going to the beach meant in North Carolina. In California, "going to the beach" meant driving for an hour or so to Santa Cruz, where we had fun on the boardwalk and then got in the water. With the Alaska Current chilling the water of Monterey Bay to just a hair above freezing, and with the steep slope of California beaches, we would run into the waves, get to where the water was up to our chests, and jump around until we couldn't stand the cold a moment longer. Then we'd run back to shore, screaming.

This was great fun, worth the travel time. After a half dozen plunges into the icewater, somebody would look out in the bay and see dorsal fins, which probably were dolphins, but we would always point and scream "shark!" At which point Mom would hand out towels and we'd rush back to the car, not trying to change out of our swimsuits, and then ride home and shower off the saltwater when we got there.

But in North Carolina, going to the beach takes at least a week. You rent a house or condo near the beach, and you luxuriate in the water. Nobody screams "shark" because apparently southerners in the water are not delicious to Atlantic sharks, not at that latitude. The Gulf Stream keeps the water warm far into the autumn. You spend hours at a time in the water, because the surf isn't as violent and the slope of the beach is so gentle that at high tide, it feels like you can walk half a mile into the water without getting in over your head. You can actually swim.

As young parents, we were paranoid enough to make our kids wear lifejackets on the beach. They were the only children there whose parents loved them enough to take that precaution. And when our embarrassed children protested, I said, "You can take off the lifejacket if you want, and go out into the water without it. Once. But within ten minutes of your doing that, we'll be in the car with all our stuff, driving back to Greensboro. The beach isn't happening for you if we don't know that even if you get caught in a rip tide, your heads will stay above water. Not only will that be the end of this beach trip, but also it will be the end of any thought of ever bringing the family back to the beach again. Ever."

And the kids knew that their dad was mean enough to mean it, and Mom would go along with me. So yes, we were the weird family with geeky-looking kids in lifejackets, if you happened to have been on Ocean Isle in that era.

Anyway, when we were exhausted from sun and sand and sea, we'd come back to the rented house and laze around and the television was on. Incredibly, Law and Order was already so successful that the episodes were already in strip syndication, so that no matter what time of the evening we turned on the TV, Law and Order was on.

Michael Moriarty did a fine job as the main prosecutor, but my wife and I were already fans of Sam Waterston. He had the kind of goofy-but-serious face that had made a star out of Jimmy Stewart, and so when we saw him on the screen, we didn't switch away.

I listened more than watched, but by the end of our beach week, we were hooked on Law and Order, which was an hour long and definitely not a sitcom. That was when I began my long love affair with hour-long television drama.

From Law and Order and its various spinoffs, we graduated to JAG and then NCIS. Or, rather, my wife did -- I was reluctant to get hooked on any more shows, so she watched those mostly alone for years, before I (late to the party, as usual) started watching NCIS regularly. By the time I started watching, Emily Wickersham was already there, playing Eleanor Bishop. I didn't realize until I became immersed in reruns that she was the third in a line of excellent female leads, after Sasha Alexander and Cotê de Pablo.

By the 2010s, I had binged on several great hour-long drama series. I watched every episode of Elementary, The Mentalist, Castle, Person of Interest, Lost, and Smallville. Each one of them captivated me, and I watched them even when the writers began to lose their way.

With Elementary, while Lucy Liu and Jonny Lee Miller were unfailingly brilliant, the writers kept trying to bring in new sidekick characters, who were always annoying.

With Castle, the writers weren't quite sure how to keep the formula going after the two leads married each other. They did a decent job, though, and I kept watching right to the end. At first I thought it was Nathan Fillion and his onscreen family that made it all work, especially Susan Sullivan as Castle's aging actress mother; in later years -- like, now -- I realize how powerful Stana Katic's performance really was. She was always the grownup in the room. She was the reason the series stayed connected with reality.

We all found out, watching Lost, just how awful it can be when a series begins with good writing but no long-term plan. By the end, the series was confusing and infuriating and I don't think ours was the only household that resounded with yelling at the stupidity of the last episode. But the first couple of seasons were so good that I still remember it fondly.

Person of Interest was really outstanding, but the engine driving the series was the artificial intelligence that gave the heroes the Social Security numbers of the people they needed to either save or arrest by the end of the episode. The writers were seduced by this A.I., and by the end, every episode was centered around it, which was boring. A sad withering of such a brilliant premise.

The Mentalist had the amazingly charismatic Simon Baker as Patrick Jane, a former fake mentalist who had renounced his scamming ways and now consulted with the California Bureau of Invesitgation on solving crimes. The CBI team was likeable, especially Robin Tunney as Teresa Lisbon. But right from the start, the weakness of the series was that they had exactly one villain, Red John, who had murdered Patrick Jane's family and kept playing cat-and-mouse games with him. At the series's end, when Red John's identity was finally revealed, it was such a stupidly bad choice of criminal masterminds that it cast a pall over the whole series. But I've watched the whole thing two more times, and the series was so well-written and well-acted that (almost) all is (mostly) forgiven.

Smallville should not have appealed to me. I never cared about Superman, and not just because of the dreadfully wooden acting by everybody in the George Reeves black-and-white TV series when I was a kid. I thought the whole premise of an invulnerable hero was boring, and the nineteen colors of kryptonite didn't really help, because apparently kryptonite was so common, despite krypton being an inert gas (atomic number 35) and therefore incapable of forming chemical bonds, that every episode had a villain who was using kryptonite to disable Superman.

But while Smallville also suffered a bit from kryptoniis, it reflected the one superhero comic that I had enjoyed as a kid. Though my primary comic book choices were Classics Illustrated and Scrooge McDuck, I also enjoyed Superboy comics. While Archie, Veronica, Betty, and Jughead never interested me, the life of young Clark Kent did. Trying to pass for normal while being capable of miraculous feats apparently fed into some unconscious fantasy of mine, and Smallville did a superb job of making that situation work in episode after episode. There were a few missteps -- the whole Lana-as-a-witch thing was a waste of time -- but the casting was excellent, especially Michael Rosenbaum as the perfect Lex Luthor, and John Glover as his father, Lionel.

(By the way, Classics Illustrated did such a superb job with David Copperfield that when I finally, in my sixties, listened to the audiobook -- and loved it -- I didn't hear anything that had not been in the comic book.)

But there's one hour-long drama series that I didn't mention, and there are times when I think it's every bit as good as NCIS in its prime -- which, to me, means Greatest Of All Time. And that is the series Bones.

The star and title character, Emily Deschanel as Dr. Temperance Brennan, had the almost impossible job of making us care about a completely detached, proud, socially inappropriate, unlikable character ... and making us like her. She was able to say absolutely outrageous, offensive things with such innocence and self-assurance that we forgive her as the words come out of her mouth.

But, as with the cast surrounding Mark Harmon as Gibbs in NCIS, the rest of the Bones cast was also unforgettably good. With both series, I can rewatch any episode and be surprised and entertained by moments of excellent writing and acting. Both series also brought in outstanding actors to portray characters for an episode or two ... or five ...

I used to go to the movies -- in theaters. But I hate streaming movies. Mostly because nobody is making movies today that are as good as the most brilliant episodes of those two series. When I can rewatch Charles Durning's performance as an aging Medal of Honor recipient on NCIS, what new movie in the past few years is worth getting out of my recliner? Or fussing with getting to a streaming app and finding the show I'm looking for?

Both NCIS and Bones explored every aspect of family, friendship, love, and loss. Whenever I knew anything about the kind of event depicted, the writers nailed it, leading me to trust the writing of events I have never come close to experiencing. I feel like these two series, though they dealt relentlessly with death, covered almost every aspect of life at a level that makes them worthy to be counted among classics of dramatic literature.

Where the two series intersect most is in the autopsy room. We spend a lot of time looking at cut-open corpses, rotted remains, barebones skeletons, detarched organs, and assorted slimy or crawly creatures. Because the actors deal with these things in a matter-of-fact way, it's easy to get over our squeamishness, and just as easy to look away and listen to the dialogue when we can't get over it.

The two shows have different problems in dealing with dead bodies on screen. I'm sure that union rules forbid the dissection of living actors, and there are many autopsy scenes in NCIS where a real-seeming human body has its abdominal and chest cavities completely open, with organs either present or removed. I can't know what degree of observation of real autopsies went into the design and construction of the dissection dummies, but they're certainly good enough to convince me.

Bones doesn't face the same problem very often -- it's an important plot point that Dr. Brennan doesn't want to work with corpses that still have fleshy bits clinging to them. What she wants are disarticulated bones, and I find myself doubting that in every death, all injuries to the body show themselves on the bones. But the title of the series definitely suggests that anything not revealed on the bones will not be the subject of an episode. So there's a strong bias toward a certain kind of injury. Even so, I find myself thinking, "yeah, right," when the staff finds incredibly fine details about the weapons used to inflict damage. But my skepticism is easily overcome when I care about the story, which I almost always do.

NCIS corpses can often be identified by fingerprint scans in situ. Of course, they also use obscure chemistry and physics to get fingerprints from surfaces where it ought to be impossible.

But the series constantly find corpses in widely divergent condition. NCIS corpses are almost always covered with skin and largely intact. Bones corpses are usually so chewed-up by scavenging animals (not always rats) or battering by the elements or consumed by insects or rotted by bacteria that they are not easily identified as human. And both series have featured corpses so dismembered and jumbled up that the examiners are surprised to discover that they have the remains of more than one person.

But I will admit to being both amused and fascinated by the way NCIS deals with the genitalia of corpses lying naked on the table. I imagine that the open display of naked genitalia is no big deal in real autopsy rooms, and leaving the groin covered or uncovered is at the preference of the examiners. I imagine that routinely covering the genitals is a way of showing respect for the person who used to occupy the body, while routinely leaving them uncovered is a matter of convenience and speed.

NCIS is a television show, with an unsorted general audience. The primetime display of human genitals and women's mammaries would probably not pass muster with the network or the FCC. By the tenth season of NCIS, the producers appear to have decided on hand-towel draping. But early on, the genital area was left completely uncovered, as we could see by the completely bare hips. They wisely decided against the blurring that is used so effectively on Naked and Afraid, disappointing viewers lured by the promising title. And only showing the body from the waist up would make autopsy room shots relentlessly claustrophobic.

No, NCIS completely hid the openly displayed genitals by shining on the crotch a light so dazzlingly bright and tightly focused that nothing can be seen in the hot spot. Now, in the real world, there would be no reason to focus such bright light there, and there only. But it doesn't call attention to that location the way blurring does.

I can't help but wonder it the dazzling light hid the fact that the genitals were in fact covered with a flesh-colored patch or sock, so that the naked parts were not visible to the actors in the scene. If the "corpse" was a living actor who was holding very, very still, it might have been the actor's choice as to whether or not to show their naughty bits. But when the body was visible for an extended period, I suspect it would have been beyond the ability of a living actor to remain in a state of corpselike stillness. It's expensive when you have to keep reshooting a scene because breathing or twitching became visible. They would also have to pay somebody to be on set staring relentlessly at the "body" in order to detect movement so a reshoot could be arranged immediately.

Without any inside information, I can only guess that dummies were always used when the "dead body" was not supposed to wake up during the scene. This leads me to admire the outstanding work of the propmakers, who had to make fullsize human bodies week after week.

The crews of both shows had to make convincing prop body parts, always at full size and capable of close scrutiny. They also had to make up weird fungi, insects, sea creatures, and crawly insects. Sometimes they used the real animals, but sometimes they could not, thus depriving millions of microbes and bugs a chance to do a star turn. Not that the animals ever received direct payment -- it was their owners who profited from their hard, authentic work under the lights.

Maybe I only started thinking about such minutiae after seeing particular episodes three or four times. Or maybe I only notice them because I have directed and produced so many plays, and I know that somebody has to think of such stuff. (I never worked with naked bodies on stage, however.) A good friend of mine, Jerry Argetsinger, has often come up with extravagant stage effects, and I have some idea of the amount of work and planning that go into events that seem completely effortless to a watching audience.

Great television series like these aren't accidental. It takes exceptionally good writing. Looking recently at episodes of an old black-and-white western like Cheyenne, which starred Clint Walker in a Clint-Eastwood-esque performance, I saw that the writers knew how to come up with stories that touched the heart -- but they didn't have the leisure or even the need to develop characters and dialogue that would make the scenes have lasting impact.

"Lasting impact" didn't have much meaning in an era when summer reruns were usually the only way viewers could see an episode for a second time. Home VCRs, DVDs, and streaming reruns changed everything, and gradually the creators of television shows met higher and higher standards, until nowadays it's fair to say that the best shows are created For The Ages.

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Addendum: My list of great recent hour-long dramas was not exhaustive. CSI, its many spinoffs, and the spinoffs of NCIS and Law and Order often met similar high standards. I just didn't watch them because, oddly enough, I do have other things to do with my days besides watching television shows. For instance, there are computer games to play.

I found that Criminal Minds met all the high standards of NCIS, Bones, and the other best-ever series. But after one season (beginning, for me, after Mandy Patinkin was replaced by Joe Mantegna), I stopped watching it despite my high regard for the cast and writers, because, quite properly, the episodes centered around such monstrous torturers and killers that I found it too sad and disturbing to watch.

When I have to keep switching away or fast-forwarding to get past the horror, it stops being worth tuning in. Even now, I occasionally catch episodes, and the actors' performances draw me in. But soon enough, I find myself switching away, and I realize that for me, at least, Criminal Minds was just too strong a medicine. I feel too much compassion for the victims, which makes watching for entertainment feel wrong.

Just as a sidenote, a similarity between NCIS and Criminal Minds is their use of an eccentric-looking woman as an expert resource for the rest of the team, with hints of romance between the Clever Woman and one of the team members. Pauley Perrette as Abby Sciuto was so strong a character (and so brilliant a performer) that the writers could build some of the best episodes around her character. I think, particularly, of the tear-jerking episode in which we learn why Abby treasures the felt heart of a long-gone stuffed bear.

I haven't watched Criminal Minds enough to know whether she ever had her own episode, but Kirsten Vangsness, as FBI analyst Penelope Garcia, did a wonderful job in a part that did not exploit her heaviness and eccentricity for comic relief, the way The Drew Carey Show constantly did with Kathy Kinney as Mimi Bobeck. Penelope's playful flirtation with agent Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore) was never played for ridicule or romance. We might suppose that Penelope actually had deeper feelings than Derek, but as far as I saw, it was never carried to the point of causing her pain. Deftly done.

Gubler, played in Criminal Minds by Matthew Gray, may be the most adorable geek in all of television history, though Sean Murray's Timothy McGee in NCIS gives him a run for the money. Then again, Gubler was never persecuted the way McGee was, because NCIS had one of the characters I most hated in all of television. Michael Weatherly as Tony DiNozzo was an excellent actor, quite charismatic and believable. But he was written to be a relentless bully, constantly ragging on McGee to the point of being nauseating. I loathed him for that the way I loathe real-life bullies.

It wasn't until the episode where Tony and Tim rescue Ziva David (Cote de Pablo) from captivity in a Somali terrorist camp that the character of Tony finally turned the corner into being admirable. I think of this as a misstep on the part of the writers. Perhaps they thought that by having other people talk about DiNozzo as the "best agent" it would make us overlook his over-the-top bullying, but not until that episode did I see his character ever do anything to justify his reputation as a good agent, let alone the best.

Meanwhile, we could see Timothy McGee's development as a good agent, partially symbolized by the actor's toning up of his body to look more athletically able. McGee was supposedly the author of bestselling books, turning a hobby into a serious income source. As with the character of Castle in Castle, the writers had a ridiculously inflated view of writer-fame, putting it at the level of actor-fame or athlete-fame.

And they made McGee so egregiously stupid as to base his characters on members of the NCIS team, with only thinly altered names. If the names had been clearly different, it might have been (barely) believable. But from what I know of novice writers -- which is a lot -- none of them would name their characters as stupidly as McGee does. But I swallowed hard and came to love and admire the character -- and I never wavered in my admiration of Sean Murray's performance.

It wasn't Michael Weatherly that I hated, however. I thought he was great as Bull -- though in a way he seemed to be treading in the same territory as Tim Roth in Lie to Me. It is no insult to Weatherly to name Roth as the better actor, and the premise of the series was stronger. Lie to Me is one of the series whose early cancellation I still regret, surpassed in my regret only by Firefly and Extinct.

And one final note about great one-hour dramas. So far I have only seen the first five episodes of NCIS: Origins, but those were excellent, and I have all the other episodes on DVR. The only reason I've delayed watching them is the number of hours in a day, and nothing to do with quality of acting and writing.

Television today is a writers' medium. Movie stars do not make a TV series any better; because television is almost as dialogue-forward as stage plays, it usually takes a different kind of actor to be superb on television. Dialogue gives highly-verbal actors a chance to shine, and moving them to movies often deprives them of their best skills, as dialogue is far less important in most movies. There are brilliant dialogue actors in movies -- one thinks of Anna Kendrick -- but by and large, the talkers do as well as or better in television. Thus television writers have the luxury of being able to count on their actors to carry off complex, resonant, and witty dialogue. (Plus, television writers can make way more money when they reach show-runner status.)