TV's Top 10!

Well, this show features on the list simply because till it aired, I didn't half imagine how many hidden talents mingle among us common people. Bianca Ryan's charming voice in the first season, Cas Haley's amazing rendition of 'Walking on the moon' in the second, and Brad Byers' 'fishing-hook-through-the-nose' in the fourth season are particularly memorable, although the image of that fishing hook through his nose still makes me shiver...phew!

P.S. Writing is an amazing talent too, although i doubt somebody will pay me a million bucks to watch me write ;)

C.I.D or Crime Investigation Department is regarded as the longest running TV series in India. It first premiered in 1998 on Sony Entertainment Television and remains an extremely popular show to this day.

The series consists of hard-core police procedural stories dealing with investigation, detection and suspense. The protagonists of the serial are an elite group of police officers belonging to the Crime Investigation Department of the police force, led by ACP Pradyuman. While the stories are plausible, there is an emphasis on dramatic plotting and technical complexities faced by the police.

The series has the distinction of having featured the same characters since it premiered and also holds a Guinness Record for canning an entire episode of CID named The Inheritance / C.I.D. 111 in just one single shot of 111 minutes (one hour fifty one minutes) without a single cut. One of my all-time favorite mystery shows, and is No. 9 on my list.

Let's face it. You love them, I love them, everyone loves the Simpsons. The typical American family living in the typical 'Middle American' town of Springfield, the SImpsons strike a chord with everyone.

Homer Simpson, the goofy and careless dad is married to the sensitive, stereotypical American mother, Marge. They have three kids: Bart, the ten-year-old troublemaker; Lisa, a precocious eight-year-old activist; and Maggie, the baby of the family who rarely ever speaks but communicates by sucking on her pacifier.

An array of other quirky and stereotypical characters make this hilarious show feature on my list at No.8.

Now, If you're not an Indian you probably won't recognize this one. Many Indians have spent years of their life watching and enjoying this show that premiered in 1995.

Set in contemporary India, Hum Paanch means 'The five of us' in English, and is the story of a middle class white collar worker, Anand Mathur, who always finds himself in trouble because of his five daughters - Meenakshi, Radhika, Sweety, Kajal, and Chhoti. The three elder daughters are Anand and his first wife's children. The last two girls are Anand and Bina's daughters.

Together, the five daughters planned to do something new in every episode. Anand's first wife, who was dead, spoke to him through her portrait on the living room wall, while his second wife, Bina, generally supported her daughters. The show was very successful for several years before it went off-the-air. The wacky and fun series makes it to my list at No.7.

Now who can forget this one? Darling little Michelle Tanner, her two sisters D.J. and Stephanie are the three daughters of widower Danny Tanner who enlists the help of his best friend Joey Gladstone and his brother-in-law Jesse Katsopolis to help raise them. Jesse later marries Danny's co-host Rebecca and has two kids, Nicky and Alex. One more notable character in the show is the highly irritating neighbor and D.J.'s best friend Kimmy Gibbler.

The show revolves around the life of the various characters of this family as they help each other through life's travails. The show was a staple 8-o-clock watch for much of my childhood, and thoroughly deserves to be on my list at No. 6.

Imagine a rainy monsoon day in July when a little boy aged 4, sits in front of a black-and-white Elcot captivated by characters from the Arabian Nights....

Yes, that little boy was me, and the show is a TV series based on the stories from The Arabian Nights. It was made in two seasons, and aired on DD National in the days when cable TV had not yet taken root even in the major metros of India. Alif Laila featured an old man who narrated stories from the Arabian Nights such as Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves, The King of Greece and The Physician Doubaan etc.

To this day the images of that old man walking across the desert and narrating stories remain in my memory, and Alif Laila gets a place on my list at No. 5.

This one tickles me to no end even after seven seasons. The show is about a hedonistic jingle writer, Charlie; his uptight brother, Alan; and Alan's growing son, Jake. Charlie's free-wheeling life is complicated and altered when his brother gets divorced and moves, along with his son, into Charlie's beach-front house.

Charlie Harper (played by the forever-young Charlie Sheen), is a laidback and carefree bachelor who keeps picking on his younger brother Alan, but loves him a lot. Charlie also gives a lot of age-inappropriate advice to Jake, who is the underachieving son of Alan and Judith. Jake spends most of his free time playing video games, eating, watching television, playing guitar and sleeping.

The show that has won several awards will continue for at least two more seasons (and I hope even more!) and makes it to No. 4 on my list for its assortment of characters and witty dialogues.

The Great Indian Laughter Challenge is one of the very successful reality shows on Indian television. It is a competition of stand up comedians that is presented on STAR One. Produced by Endemol India, the fourth series of the show launched on June 6, 2008.

For me this show is number three just simply because of Navjot SIngh Sidhu's incredibly catchy, quirky laughter and his 'Sidhuisms', and the stand-up comedy trio of Raju Shrivastav, Sunil Pal and Ahsaan Qureshi. Every time one of them came onstage they would have me in fits of laughter, and Raju Shrivastav remains to this day one of the few people who can make my mom laugh like hell :D

God bless these amazing stand-up comedians for using their wit and occasional satire to bring laughter on to the homes of the common man. Thoroughly deserves the No.3 spot on my list.

BAZINGA!!

I love this show and I love the characters. Period. Set in Pasadena, California, the show is about two fictional Caltech geniuses, one an experimental physicist (Leonard Hofstadter) and the other a theoretical physicist (Sheldon Cooper), who live across the hall from an attractive blonde waitress with show-biz aspirations (Penny). Leonard and Sheldon's geekiness and sheer intellect are contrasted for comic effect with Penny's social skills and common sense.

Two equally nerdy friends of theirs, Howard Wolowitz (a Jewish engineer who provides outrageous pick-up lines and fancies himself as a ladies man, but is referred to by Penny as 'creepy') and Rajesh Koothrapalli (a particle astrophysicist from New Delhi who is physically unable to talk to women unless he drinks alcohol) are also main characters.

The show is VERY popular, I simply love the comic timing of the geeky characters (you could even say i relate to them, lol) and it easily makes No.2 on my list.

Need i say much? All right, i will.

Friends was an American sitcom created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, which ran on NBC from September 22, 1994 to May 6, 2004, and is still aired on many channels all over the world today. The series revolves around a group of friends in the area of Manhattan, New York City. The series featured six main cast members throughout its run, with numerous characters recurring throughout the ten seasons. The main cast members were familiar to television viewers before their roles on Friends, but were not considered to be stars. The actors all achieved household name celebrity status by the time the show went into its fourth season.

Rachel Green, Ross Geller, Monica Geller, Phoebe Buffay, Joey Tribbiani and Chandler Bing (BING!) make up the characters of Friends. I'm not going to go into details or we may go into an argument that starts with 'WE WERE ON A BREAK!'

This was my list of top ten TV shows. if you would like to know the names of the shows that ALMOST made it, they would have to be:
1. Mr. Bean
2. Scrubs
3. Seinfeld
4. MTV ROADIES
5. Castle

and other shows like White Collar and Glee, which are too recent for me to list here :)

Hope you enjoyed reading it!