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Tina Fey turned her years running the Saturday Night Live writers' room into a live-action cartoon about a sketch show nobody at the network cared about. Liz Lemon, Jack Donaghy, Tracy Jordan and Kenneth the page won three straight Outstanding Comedy Series Emmys while the ratings never caught up — and NBC kept it on anyway.
Michael Crichton's high-velocity emergency-room drama gave network television permission to be dense, technical, and chaotic. Gurneys crashing, doctors walking and talking through hallways, trauma in real time — it changed what television drama could do.
A radio psychiatrist, his even fussier brother, their blue-collar dad in a duct-taped recliner, and a dog with a staring problem. Frasier turned sherry, opera, and wounded pride into eleven seasons of the most decorated comedy on television — then Kelsey Grammer sang you out over tossed salads and scrambled eggs.
Paul and Jamie Buchman, a documentary filmmaker and a PR specialist in a Greenwich Village apartment, bickered about nothing for seven seasons while NBC moved them around the week. Helen Hunt won four straight Emmys for it, and the dog, Murray, was twice voted TV's most popular.