TV’s Moments of Joy: The Quest for Peace

TV’s Greatest Surprises: A Paley Center for Media Special – Usually, these specials disappoint by trotting out the same clips over and over. But this one, listing TV’s greatest surprises was, appropriately, surprising. Sure, a couple of the choices were head scratchers – how exactly was Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live a surprise? They told us she was going to do it, and then she did it. And the grape-stomping scene in I Love Lucy probably doesn’t count as surprising. It’s not like people thought it wasn’t going to go wrong. Still, there were a couple of cool scenes that we’d forgotten, like Sam Malone revealing his toupee. But what really impressed us was that the murder of Omar Little in Season Five of The Wire made the list, all the way up at number 11. That’s a pretty impressive showing for a series that didn’t really penetrate the mainstream. Frankly, just seeing that iconic shot of Omar walking down the street with a sawed-off shotgun in hand on network television was pretty freaking cool.