TV's Number One New Idea for Programming

When I used to work at Premiere, we would often joke about all the lists and packages that magazine would put together--"The 100 Best Performances", "The 50 Biggest Hollywood Diasters", and of course, "The Power List" where we ranked the most influential people working in Hollywood. I thought for sure a day would come when we'd do a list of our best lists. But the reason we used the format so often is because people went bananas for it. The issues sold well and our office would be inundated with emails and letters about everything that we had done wrong. Some enthusiastic fans would even go as far as rewriting our entire lists for us. So I guess it's no surprise that lists have become the number one idea when it comes to TV programming, according to CNN.com (btw, excellent headline writing, guys):

You'll know television's mania for lists has gotten completely out of hand when C-SPAN counts down the 100 greatest Senate filibusters.

Maybe that moment is closer than we think. Lists have become such a popular television format that even The Weather Channel offered the "100 Biggest Weather Moments" this spring. Can "50 Toughest Conference Committee Leaders" really be far behind?

List programs are the potato chips of programming: snack food for the mind that tastes good, has virtually no nutritional value and is impossible to resist.

No one can watch, or produce, just one.

"People just have an insatiable appetite for putting things into categories and ranking them," said Bernie Kaminski, supervising producer at VH1. "People will debate about the greatest anything, from who was the greatest basketball player to who makes the greatest cheeseburger."