But if asked to cite twenty top shows, you can't escape raunch. Tom Shales of the Washington Post, perhaps the country's most influential critic, has more than once noted ruefully that the former family hour is turning into a garbage dump. It's well and good that elements of Big Media may be coming around. TV's nonstop, enticing barrage of sexual themes can drown out what parents, teachers, preachers, priests, and rabbis proclaim. Granted, this year the critics didn't take cheap shots at such fare, as they too frequently have.
Television networks listen to critics to a certain extent.
And maybe the critics will also start judging TV shows based on society's definition of quality as opposed to their own.