Having re-watched Mad Men and My So-Called Life over break, and just finishing up The Wire last week (
during finals, I am not a smart person), my new top 3 in television listed below:
1) My So-Called Life
2) Mad Men
3) The Wire
I was considering placing The Wire above MM, but the first two shows have something The Wire will not have for me: infinite replayability. I think I've watched the entirety of Mad Men season 4 about 7-8 times (don't want to think about the number for the earlier seasons), and the entirety of MSCL no less than 20 times in the past decade.
But The Wire (as was with other amazing shows like BB and FNL for me) will be a single-watch, for the most part. The latter half of S3 might get a few marathons. The thing about Mad Men and MSCL is that although their episode structures seemingly beg for sequential viewing, once you've watched the whole thing, you can watch pretty much any episode in any season and get a huge amount of satisfaction - episodes like "The Suitcase" (and any episode of the show, really) stand equally as well on their own in isolation upon subsequent viewings as they did as part of the grander narrative.
As exhilarating as BB and Homeland were the first time, and as many times The Wire forced my mouth agape during that virgin viewing marathon, I'm not just going to pop in the DVD to watch episode 5 and then episode 12, etc. So that has to factor in my judgment since all this stuff costs $$$
