The Bicentennial Was Better!

The New York Times asked more than 500 TV insiders and experts to select their 10 favorite shows that premiered in the 21st century. That survey of the 100 best TV shows published this week. There’s lots of golden age and prestige TV on it — “Mad Men,” “Game of Thrones,” “Succession,” “Severance” — but also some outliers that illustrate a medium in flux. In the last 25 years, we’ve started talking about TV more seriously, treating it like an art form. But what kind of art form is it now? On today’s episode, Wesley is joined by Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan, the hosts of The Ringer podcast, “The Watch,” to talk about how they voted and what this list tells us about where TV has been, and where it might be going.

This week’s episode will be about the New York Times list of the 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century (full list here). See you tomorrow!

Singer-songwriter Ella Langley’s country tune “Choosin’ Texas” entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart last November, and it hasn’t left. It’s just tied the record for the most nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1: 22 . (Sorry, Mariah Carey.) Wesley Morris is a student of the chart and he’s noticed that in recent years certain songs seem to hang around for a long, long time. These chart toppers are starting to feel more like chart cloggers. Why is this happening? His curiosity cannot be contained for another week. So he’s going to Chris Molanphy, a pop music critic and the host of Slate’s “Hit Parade” podcast, for answers. Together, they recall chart trends, think about Billboard’s tracking metrics, and consider what kind of choice “Choosin’ Texas” is.

It has been 25 years since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and Wesley has been reflecting on what has changed since then — particularly when it comes to comedy. The first film he saw in theaters after the attacks was “Zoolander,” which opened to mediocre box office numbers and mixed reviews. The movie became a flashpoint as the world wrestled with questions about what was funny and when it would be OK to be funny again. And that uncertainty about what American comedy is, whom it’s aimed at and whether it can be therapeutic may never have gone away. This week, The Times’s comedy critic, Jason Zinoman, sits down with Wesley to remember the debates about comedy in the aftermath of the attacks, and to think through how that period changed the art form in ways that we’re still experiencing today.

This year’s summer movie season proved that the “Toy Story” franchise still has some juice, that “The Odyssey” can spark endless debates, and that “The Invite” might be the sleeper film of the year. But according to Wesley Morris, we’re still in a summer movie drought. He can’t help himself! His nostalgia for the movies of summers past is as strong as it was last year. So, once again, Wesley invites Sam Anderson, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, to go back in time. This week, they travel to 1986, where the multiplex marquee reads: “Ruthless People” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”