Of the limited choices given, I voted for
The X Files. Why ?
- Gillian Anderson & David Duchovny have the best onscreen sexual chemistry since The Thin Man's Myrna Loy & William Powell.
- A wonderful noir ambience to virtually every episode. Chris Carter has done his film homework, and many episodes have brief hommages to some of the great noir cinematographers -- like the half-shadowed Cancer Man's face obscured with smoke ; the dramatic use of chiaroscuro ; and figures backlit with smoke and fog.
- Of course, noir has its roots in German Expressionism, and X Files has many Expressionist elements -- the low, off-center, or high-angle camera shots ; the first-person point-of-view camera shots, and the sense that reality can easily become fused with dream.
Okay,
now I see the ballot for "Other". If you've never seen
Firefly, you missed a really great series that glowed on the small screen with the same longevity of a firefly's glow, exactly 15 weeks. If
Star Trek is discovering distant galaxies with intelligent ships that meet a full crew's every creature comfort,
Firefly is a rough band of homesteaders travelling out to the territories in covered wagons -- science fiction-cum-western. As Captain Mal Reynolds says in the opening narration :
Here's how it is: Earth got used up, so we terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths, some rich and flush with new technologies, some not so much. Central Planets, them was formed the Alliance, waged war to bring everyone under their rule; a few idiots tried to fight it, among them myself. I'm Malcolm Reynolds, captain of the Serenity. Got a good crew: fighters, pilot, mechanic. We even picked up a preacher, and a bona fide companion. There's a doctor, too, his genius sister [River] from some Alliance camp, so they're keeping a low profile. You got a job, we can do it, don't much care what it is.
And there's some great dialogue :
Jayne Cobb (the muscle): Are you saying River (the doctor's sister) is a witch?
Pilot 'Wash' Washburn: Yes, Jayne, she's a witch. She's had congress with the Beast.
Jayne Cobb: She's in Congress?
Wash: How did your brain even learn human speech?
The series is out on DVD now, and definitely worth renting.
FS