As Seen on TV...

The good folks at Flavorwire have compiled a list of the 25 most memorable moments on television, with clips showing the scenes or events in question and a little bit of the history thereof.

You may or may not agree with the list and its rankings, but a couple of things make it a particularly strong entry in this sort of thing. One, it looks at a wide range of TV history, stretching back into the medium's early days of the 1950s. A lot of times, the people who compile these things seem to have no memory of anything before Saved by the Bell. But the Flavorwire list includes Lucy and Ethel's job in the chocolate factory, the final episode of The Fugitive, and a couple of well-known 1980s TV moments in the final episode of M*A*S*H* and the infamous "Who Shot J.R.?" cliffhanger.

It also, as it moves higher up the list, looks more at actual events captured by news crews and cameras instead of scripted shows. In other words, real things outweigh made-up things. All a TV show is, after all, is another episode in what show creators hope to be a long string of them. Even a finale is a manufactured event -- the characters may come to an end but the real people playing them go on to live their lives.

Real-world, stuff, on the other hand, has lasting impact even after people have begun to forget it. The incredible importance given to a political candidate's image, for example, stems directly from the sweaty, shifty look of Richard Nixon in his 1960 debate with John F. Kennedy. Radio listeners gave the edge to Nixon, TV viewers who could see the polished Kennedy and the worn-out Nixon broke for the former. In subsequent elections, image took on more and more weight opposed to substance and actual political thinking -- whether we are still on the road to the candidate who is all manufactured image and absolutely zero content or we have already arrived may be debated itself. But that's the direction we're going.

The top event (spoiler!) is the moon landing in 1969. The very first time in history that human beings stood on the surface of a world on which we did not evolve, the first time humanity would have someone to write an epitaph if our whole world blinked out of existence. Maybe discovering how to create fire on our own tops this, or learning how to tend crops instead of gather wild-growing plants. Perhaps it's the invention of writing and the ability to transmit ideas and record them for future generations, or the discovery of the way numbers could be manipulated to express complex physical relationships and descriptions.

But none of those were on TV.