The Best Moments in T.V.

So this thread is born from something I saw elsewhere which was focused on a very different subject, but I thought may be fun here. As I am writing, I have a sense of Deja Vu (maybe the Matrix got changed????) that this has been done before.

Anyway, the idea is to post a video of what you would consider the most monumental pieces of T.V. that you have seen. That can be because it blew you away, or made that T.V. series climb to a new height or whatever.

Warning!!!! If you haven't seen any if these and would like to one day... dont watch the clips!!

My first example is one of many moments in Star Trek: TNG but I think is possibly one of the most pivotal moments in the whole series. Still gives me goosebumps even though I know the outcome!



The second I will go with in my initial post is this one:



While there are definitely bigger moments, I think this one solidified Game of Thrones as a series. This was back when "anyone could die" was a good thing and wasn't just for the shock value or to "subvert expectations." It made sense in the context and the world that had been built and gave you a sense that was reinforced with the likes of the "Red Wedding" that it didn't matter who your favourites were. Just like in real life, your favourites don't always get the upper hand.

I have many more, but that is my starting point.

Nice choice of topic. TNG was in my opinion the best of the franchise, and Patrick Stewart could milk a moment like no one else in the cast.

Feel free to post your own ones... maybe bring some people in to some shows that they had never heard of!

Dr Who not allowed. Stay in your own lane!

{{ This had a huge impact on young me, ( I was about 9, 10 years old at time) and to this day I still cant hear the old war tune of 'pack up your troubles in your old kit bag', especially whistled, without getting chills and the creeps.

Couldnt find a  clip but heres the whole story, Assignment 2 of Saphire and Steel, jump to 30.16 for clip I have in mind to 36.32 (if you want you can start at 29.50 for the intro that 'explains' the shows premise, if explains is the right word, Ive seen them all then and since, and I still dont really understand exactly what or who Saphire and Steel are! But brilliant tv.  }}

I watched some if it... I was completely lost! Not sure if that is because I was getting harassed for decisions on some kitchen stuff or if I would get lost anyway!

{{ I should try to give some context to the suggested clip iin that, as best I can! So its a sci-fi/supernatural mishmash. When weird stuff happens that effects space and time, or gets distrupted somehow or weird entites try to do something to reality, embodied Elements are sent in to solve the problem and repair the universe. Some of the Heavy Elements cannot be used in universes that contain life, but two who can are sent to patch up our reality when it goes wrong, Sapphire, who has empathetic powers, and incredible sapphire eyes, and Steel, whose cold and hard as nails, but clever with it but they stand as equals in the team.
In this particular episode they turn up at a long abandoned railway station in England, where they find a ghost hunter who has ben recording ghostly goings on there  over a period of time. Being more intuned to reality Saphire and Steel can sense however something much weirder and dangerous than just a ghost is going on, and Sapphire when ghostly things happen can see and experience them with more ease than Steel. I dont want to say more as that to spoil the story but it was very creepy and weird and blew my tiny 10 year old mind. }}

oooh great idea Lance. I have a few seminal ones for me which have always stuck in my mind.

Quatermas and the Pit, freaked me out as a kid and started my love of Sci-Fi.



Game of Thrones, The Door, really got me in the guts.



I know this is a film, but I saw it first on TV when I was a kid, it always makes me crack up, every single time.

I guess this was the TV show which had the most long lasting effect on my imagination growing up, it is so iconic it was even parodied by the Fast Show as people of a certain all watched it as kids.

Hold the door...

I watched Life of Brian when I was actually quite young and can remember that as wording like Biggus Dickus is even funnier for a child!

I have never watched any Monty Python as an adult except accidentally when channel skipping or something.

I have never heard of the other two. I will have a watch of those clips.

X-Files the Toomes episode, which is too scary to post, but X-Files was one of my faves.



Best ever episode of Buffy 'Once more with feeling' I loved this show but this episode stood out for its genius.

In the 80s this was the 'event TV' of the decade. Bitter sweet story of an ordinary middle class boy in an aristocratic wonderland.

{{{ I've my mum to thank for a lot of my influential TV watching when young, she let me watch stuff that was most certainly not aimed at children, but they all had a couple of things in common, they were experimental, boundary pushing or in some other way distinguishable from the more normal TV of the day (I didnt know this of course being young with no context, I just devoured it). And the other thing they all had in common is how well written they were. And this went for children's TV at the time which treated its audience with respect and never spoke down to them, taking their lead more the best children's novels than from traditional children's TV, which had been very patronising. I'm leaving Who out here as it kind of goes without saying it had a massive influence, mainly for its genre hopping, the way it could shift tone and mood on a penny, and its sheer imagination and scope, and infectious lead performances who were clearly loving it.

So stuff that I saw pretty young, up to about 14 was stuff like Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, which was where I was first introduced to the concept of mixing genres and using fantasy and imagination to explore character and psyche. Everything about it was memorable to me and it was unique, and as a child it had this odd melancholy side to it of seeing for the first time the world from the perspective of an old man looking back to their childhood through their imagination of events.



Alongside Potter I got to see such excellent productions as Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party, possibly the most 70's thing ever made and Ken Loache's Cathy Come Home (which was actually made before my time but my mum encouraged me to watch its repeat with the warning it was hard to watch. She was right) but it was also my first introduction to reality drama, gritty kitchen sink docu-drama style that didn't hide or glamourise the reality of life for the poor. Its a desperate tale about a womens attempts to survive poverty and stop the authorities form taking her child away from her. And its uncomprimising in its depictions.
Sadly I couldnt find clips for either of them!

Alan Bennet was another whose work I devoured whenever it was on TV, his ability to play with language and dialect and then explore character through their word use, and their speech patterns is a marvellous way of shining light onto a character even whilst the topic is often mundane or common place. But they reflected the sort of women who dominated life in the small north of England towns he grew up in. And as a child who went to work with is mother pre-school and often during holidays, and her work mates as they were all cleaners and it was the seventies were women and also her best mates, so I saw a lot of these women too, and my childhood was dominated by women as men were away at work all day, pub at night, or bowls, or dominoes/darts/pool league, masonic meeting. A lot of my early TV watching therefore has a slant towards women. And she never preached anything to me, she just suggested stuff to watch she was watching, pointed me in the direction of something she thought I'd like or find interesting. And 9 times out of 10 I did, 10 being I never got her love of soaps , which she retains to this day.



Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was another one that I remember vividly, I remember its honesty, its stellar performances, its cruelty, the fact it was about an adopted girl growing up gay in a small strictly religious community was and is almost incidental in a way to what I remember from it, which was really the unfairness and cruelty of people when they really believe they are right. It made me wary of every thinking I was right about something, to always try to leave room for 'I could be wrong about that'. And to be wary of people who claim absolute certainty and absolute right.
Shockingly this is the only clip I could find of it.



Robin of Sherwood I loved, from it I got you could mix the supernatural and the historic and the fantastical all in a 'real' setting and get away with it. And it was tons of fun and well written characters and stories. And the real sets and location shooting made it feel gritty in a way Robin Hood normally isn't. Plus as Elthir will tell you, Clannad on the soundtrack what more could you want! Oh and also aded the Saracen as a Merry Man character, everyone wanted to be Nasser.



Other stuff that was ground breaking but I didn't know it at the time, I just watched with my mum were sitcoms like The Liver Birds and Man About the House, and especially Butterflies- which I'd say was closer to a tragic comedy drama than a sitcom. It made a big impression on me and really started my life long love of comedic moments being in pure dramas, life can be funny sometimes and still be real. No reason a drama cannot show that too.
I think as a young male watching Butteflies one of the things that sruck me most was how the husaband was written, the premise is basically that the woman is stuck in a marriage that is just grind and routine and being a mother and wife, and all her dreams of romance and adventure are just dreams. Till she meets an old flame and she and he clearly still have a thing for each other, and its about the tensions between all these things. It would therefore have been easy to paint the husband as horrible, violent uncaring and unloving etc, but he isnt, he's dull yeah, he lacks imagination yeah, but he loves her, works hard, has provided a nice home, treats her well within the norms of his day, tries to understand, that a releationship could fall apart underneath whilst on the surface there is no obvious reason for why it is, that stayed with me.



Another, one of the US imports was Cagney and Lacey which also made an impression, it used every type of drama made strong social commentary purely through characters and situation, and was often funny too. Beautifully played and written.

My mum also had a taste for the creepy, the ghost story, so Tales of the Unexpected from Roald Dahl made it onto my viewing list too (as did his books, my mum is reasonable for my love of books too, being an avid reader herself, still having two to three books on the go at any one time). It had a very memorable intro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gwg7ZVOu5e0

But I shouldn't leave my dad out of all this, he worked damn hard and often long hours as he moved up the ladder in the US Navy, as a result I watched less TV with him, but that in a way gives it its own special nostalgia, but through his association with Americans on a daily basis we watched some good US stuff, this way I got introduced first at a very young age to Laurel and Hardy, then Sergeant Bilko with Phil Silvers
original Star Trek, and the Rockford Files. Rockford was anothe rone that mixed genres well,it was a private detective mystery style thing, but sort of subverted and with a lot of humour thrown in. And another memorable intro.



My Dad was and is a huge fan of documentaries and particularly anything Attenborough and we never missed that sort of thing which was event TV in its day anyway with only 3 channels available most of this time period. I also watched a lot of history documentaries with my dad so that was a factor in my love of history. He also grew up on Goonies, and so Python were his thing and that's how I first got into Python and retrospectively the earlier radio stuff like Round The Horn, and The Goonies.
But he also loved a good sitcom, Porridge being the main one that was another big influence on me, so much comedy and so much pathos and so much drama all at once, in a setting that shouldn't be funny at all, a prison.



And that covers pretty much all the really influential stuff I can think of, though sure Ive missed others, for the period where I was growing up and living at home. After this sort of time I was out of there and making my own choices on what I would watch. But I got a pretty good head start from my parents in what to look for I think. }}}

Talking of watching TV show with your folks, I vividly remember watching this with my dad, he loved it. I think it remains one of the best ever made. Rover always freaked me out, we even went to Portmeirion in Wales to see the film set.

Figgy, you beat me to it with the X-Files and specifically the Toombs episode! I stopped watching it later on but up to about series 4 or 5 were great!!! Toombs was a defining episode I think.

I have mentioned this before, but a cult sci-fi classic called Space: Above and Beyond is one of my all time favourite series but only lasted 1 season. It was Battlestar Galactica 2004 before that gritty sci-fi became popular and so disappeared in to nothingness.

My favourite scene is the series is this one. The dude in the plane is a colonel who was part of an elite unit that got its ass kicked and couldn't fly again so took over the rookie team that is the focus of the series.

The alien fighter is a prototype that has been killing lots of the human forces who have been struggling to make a dent even when they go after it in force. The funeral is for one of his team that got killed going after it which then resulted in the colonel going out against orders, as his previous injury meant he couldn't fly without risk of dying, to fight the enemy himself to get revenge.

Talking of Battlestar Galatians 2004, I think this scene from the pilot mini-series ser the tone for what we were to get.

Anyone that saw the originals knows that it wasn't really a war series, it was sci-fi first, misogyny second and maybe war third.

The 2004 series didn't redefine anything as far as I am concerned, but it did popularise that gritty sci-fi genre and was generally a really good series in itself.

You cab probably tell that I spent a lot of my life watching fantasy or sci-fi stuff, so for something else....

This is really to celebrate a whole series and the beginnings of a global superstar in the lead character.

Who doesn't know this tune! Quality 90s T.V and often with a lot of references to "black culture" that seem to get missed these days where self-pity for circumstances gets shot down in favour of family values, work ethic and honesty... not hiding behind a past that many never experienced themselves.

I like his style of rap. It's a far cry from the painfully monotonous gangster rap style which unfortunately became more popular. His up and down style brings out his comedic nuance.

yep I enjoyed Fresh Prince for the qualities you mention Lance. No self-pity just positive role models and normal family dynamics. Colour was immaterial, it was about character and humour.

The greatest moment in Premier league history.

As a Liverpool fan, I loved watching Fergie's face while that was going on.

And yes, that probably is the most iconic Premier League moment.

When it comes to the Champions League, I am still gutted that I didn't go to this game as I think this could go down as one of the most iconic CL moments.



And I know I am super biased here, but this is my top F.A. Cup moment.

I was blown away by the Westworld series.  It went beyond the original by asking what would happen if the hosts (the androids) didn't realize they weren't human?  What if some of them started to remember bleary visions of their pasts leaking through from the nightly resets?

On top of this the creators set up a series of mind-fucks.  They took their time with it, making sure the viewers were well set in one belief before they turned it on its head.   Each of these were on the level of the final reveal in The Sixth Sense an I won't give them away.  

But on top of this was the extraordinary quality both of writing and cast.  Bagging Anthony Hopkins for a TV series was a major coup, and boy did he deliver.  None of the cast knew the twists that were coming up, but Hopkins as a sort of god-like character felt he had to know the whole story line, and threatened to quit if they didn't fill him in.  He used this exclusive knowledge to produce just the effect needed - you know he knows something, always, but you don't know what it is.

Out of so many great scenes (the series is rampant with great scenes) here's just one that shows the quality of writing and acting.



Here's another great scene where the madame Maeve (another incomparable character) realizes the reality she's in and sets forth to break herself free of the bonds.  I wasn't really aware of Thandy Newton before Westworld, but she's an actor of towering skill.  One who can say volumes just with a shot of her eyes.