To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

A couple weeks ago, alethialia asked people to comment with their five favorite TV series ever. I find that topic fascinating, so I thought I'd try it here. Plus, it offers another opportunity for fannish navel-gazing! (I swear, I'll stop with this soon.)

Name your five favorite series--not the ones you think are "best" (for whatever that definition encompasses for you), not the five most critically-acclaimed, most popular, whatever, but favorite.

My five were:

Northern Exposure
Babylon 5
Slings & Arrows
Battlestar Galactica
Wonderfalls

What seems immediately apparent is that I'm drawn more strongly to ensemble shows rather than, say, buddy-cop shows, or Doctor Who, where it's often the Doctor and the companion du jour against the world. I'm interested in the world built by these shows, or our world as defined by these shows, and to get a fuller perspective on that world, one needs more viewpoints. To that end, two of them have absolutely mammoth regular casts and a slew of reoccurring guest characters; two have larger-than-average regular casts (nine for NX, 11ish for S&A) and also use several reoccurring characters; WF, at eight main characters (minus the wax lion, etc.), isn't as huge, but is still on the big side. Two of them (S&A, Wonderfalls) do have a central protagonist, but they never forget to give the supporting characters full and interesting storylines which often have little to do with that central protagonist. The other three, while technically having someone who comes first in the credits, really don't give that person more time in the spotlight than most or all of the other characters.

(I wonder if part of the reason I like ensemble shows it that it ups the chances of getting interesting female characters. These all have some fantastic ones.)

The other big thing they all have in common is that, on some level, they all deal with creating a community and/or discovering, taking, and defining one's place in either the created community or one that exists before the show starts. One is about finding your place in a family, one about finding it in a small town, another in a professional community and as an artist; one creates a society out of a ragtag fleet, and one out of civilizations on a galactic scale. (B5 includes a hefty dose of "taking/defining one's place" from pretty much all the characters, not to mention the cultures they come from. And beyond that I shall remain silent because to do otherwise would be very spoily!)

The final conceptual glue holding this list--and all of my runners up, about which more in a moment--is QUIRK. Apparently I am an even bigger fan of magical realism than I thought. For example, every single one of these shows includes at least one character who hears voices in their heads and/or sees and speaks people who don't exist (anymore). Granted, B5 tends to have sci-fi explanations for this--telepathy, generally--but Sheridan's dream in S2, say, still falls into the general pattern; not to mention there are all the prophecies and such going on. Things get even more quirky/magically realistic if we include my runners up, which are due South (ghost!Bob), Farscape (though Harvey does get a sci-fi explanation), Pushing Daisies (no ghosts, but it passes the fantasy test because, well, Ned brings dead people back to life), and Moonlighting (again, no ghosts or visions, but...yeah, I think you could say it's pretty damn quirky. Fourth wall? What's that?).

...All of this says yet again that I really ought to LOVE Buffy. And yet, somehow, no. I was going to suggest that this means I now have a really good metric for picking out media to glom onto, but that reminds me that there are always exceptions, apparently.

Anyway. Your five favorites, go.