- Movies are important, but there's something about TV that has ingratiated itself into our lives — we let these shows into our homes, our families, and our day-to-day.
- As a result, these shows can have a profound effect.
- "I Love Lucy" was the first TV show to feature a pregnant woman.
- When President Gerald Ford appeared on "Saturday Night Live," it was a milestone for politics.
- Visit INSIDER's homepage for more stories.
Television has been part of our lives for decades at this point, and while its content has gone through popularity ups and downs, it has always been important to pop culture.
These 16 shows had tangible impacts on laws, politics, diversity, and our cultural lexicon. Shows like "Pose" and "Ellen" open up viewers' minds to LGBTQ people, while "I Love Lucy" showed the first pregnant woman on TV.
Keep scrolling to learn more about these iconic shows and how they changed the world.
"Game of Thrones" found mainstream success and made fantasy "cool."
Since the days of "Star Trek" in the '60s, fantasy and sci-fi were relegated to the fringes of pop culture, and weren't exactly associated with popularity, especially when it came to TV. While movies like "Star Wars,""Harry Potter," and "Lord of the Rings" were blockbuster smashes, cracking the code for fantasy on TV took some more time.
"Game of Thrones" became a worldwide phenomenon, and one of the last moments of so-called "monoculture," according to The Ringer. The entire world watched for eight seasons as dragons, knights, and magic played out on our screens, making it cool to be a "nerd."
And now, other fantasy stories are moving to the medium — just take a look at HBO's upcoming "His Dark Materials" series or Amazon's "Lord of the Rings" series.
"Ellen" was one of the first majorly popular sitcoms to feature an openly gay main character.
There had been gay characters on TV before the '90s sitcom "Ellen," but this was the first time that a beloved pop culture mainstay came out, both on screen and in real life. Just a few weeks before "The Puppy Episode" aired in which Ellen DeGeneres' character came out, the real DeGeneres announced "Yep, I'm gay" in TIME magazine.
The episode was watched by an estimated 42 million people, and according to a 2015 Variety poll, DeGeneres has influenced gay rights in America more than any other celebrity. Plus, her show opened doors for the many gay characters on TV since then, including those in "Will & Grace,""The L Word," and "Queer as Folk," according to History.com.
"America's Most Wanted" helped capture 1,100 criminals during its 24 years on TV.
As many as 1,100 dangerous criminals were taken off the streets after "America's Most Wanted" premiered in 1988. Though law enforcement officials were skeptical at first, they eventually came to embrace the show, and even called in tips, according to The New York Times.
"America's Most Wanted" tapped into America's fascination with true crime and its obsession with participating — now you could be a detective, too. The show was instrumental in getting Elizabeth Smart rescued, along with over 30 other missing children, wrote The New York Times.
"Most Wanted" was hosted by John Walsh for all 24 seasons. Walsh became an advocate for missing children after his 6-year-old son, Adam, was tragically abducted and murdered in 1981. In 2006, 25 years later, the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act was signed into law, reported Fox. Yes, the show has even helped get laws passed.
"General Electric Theater" turned Ronald Reagan into a Republican, and the rest is American history.
No, Donald Trump isn't the first TV star to get elected president. That honor belongs to the 40th president, Ronald Reagan, who was a TV star in the '50s and '60s.
Before his time on the show, Reagan was a Democrat. He was twice elected the president of the Screen Actors Guild, a labor union.
But once he was tapped to host "General Electric Theater," he was also contractually obligated to tour the country and visit General Electric plants across the country, which fundamentally changed his political views. As Slate wrote, "Ronald Reagan began working for GE in 1954 as a liberal anticommunist and finished in 1962 so far to the right that the company felt it had to drop him as a spokesman."
In 1962, the show ended, and Reagan formally switched from Democrat to Republican, reported TIME — and now he's lauded as one of the most important figures in Republican history.
"Beverly Hills, 90210" introduced us all to the power of a teen soap.
All teen soap roads lead back to"Beverly Hills, 90210," according to The Guardian. Without it, we might not have "Gossip Girl,""Dawson's Creek,""One Tree Hill" ... The list goes on. The show ran for 10 seasons, made huge celebrities out of its "teen stars," and even spawned a 2000s spin-off, "90210." It was also one of the first bona-fide hits for Fox, which was still a young network at the time.
Anyone who was a kid or teen in the '90s grew up alongside the kids of West Bev, and it remains a cultural touchstone for them.
We owe "90210" a lot, including fashion trends, the proliferation of teen love triangles (team Brenda all the way), and the show was one of the first to deal with real issues facing teens, including sex, pregnancy, alcohol, and just growing up, according to Slate.
"Keeping Up with the Kardashians" has created an actual billionaire.
The Kardashians and Jenners make up one of the most famous families on the planet, full stop. They rake in hundreds of millions of dollars, or in Kylie's case, $1 billion. They have their hands in everything from make-up to clothes to cupcake mix to credit cards to apps to prison reform, as The Hollywood Reporter wrote.
And all that came from "Keeping Up with the Kardashians," which was originally just pitched as another reality show documenting a large and extremely loud family in Calabasas. It's been on since 2007, inspired a few spin-offs, and introduced us to what's become the first family of reality TV, as Cosmo called them. Don't be shocked when they take over the world.
Before "I Love Lucy," television networks balked at the idea of showing a pregnant woman on TV.
Back when they weren't allowed to say pregnant on TV, as the AV Club reported — characters had to use euphemisms like "expecting"— it was a huge deal for Lucille Ball's character, Lucy, to be pregnant. The main characters didn't even sleep in the same bed.
While it's tame for this day and age, the implication that Lucy and her husband Ricky had sex was a big deal. Her on-screen (and off-screen) pregnancy cracked the door for a more realistic depiction of marriage on TV.
"Pose" is the first TV show to have hired a trans woman of color as a writer, Janet Mock, and has more trans actors than any show before it.
Vice called it "the most important show on TV right now" and LA Weekly said it was "the most groundbreaking LGBT show ever." Why? Because "Pose" is giving the LGBTQ community, and people of color, a chance to see the stories of those who fought through bigotry and the AIDS epidemic and paved the way for any acceptance and freedoms the community has today.
What makes "Pose" especially authentic is that it stars trans actors and is written and directed by trans people, unlike some other shows about the community.
Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" helped Americans see food and culture as something that brings the world together.
The chef fearlessly trekked into war torn countries like Lebanon, all in the pursuit of good food. While doing so, he showed a country of viewers that people all around the world are living their lives, just like Americans do.
Bourdain used what The New Food Economy called gastrodiplomacy, or "a form of cultural diplomacy that uses food's potential to bring people together, helping us to understand and sympathize with one another's circumstances." He is missed.
We may have "The Sopranos" and James Gandolfini to thank for the rise of the anti-hero, a trend that still continues in TV to this day.
Now, it seems like almost every TV show has some form of anti-hero, but for many years, TV was cut into black and white, heroes and villains. That all changed when Tony Soprano, head of a New Jersey mob family, came charging onto our screens in 1999.
You can draw a clear line from Gregory House, Walter White, Dexter Morgan, and Jax Teller through to Tony Soprano, who alternately made viewers root for and against him, according to Rotten Tomatoes. Our TV landscape today was irrevocably changed by "The Sopranos."
The original "Star Trek" featured the first interracial kiss on TV in the '60s — but was also a win for diversity and feminism.
This 1968 interracial kiss was groundbreaking at the time.
Though the kiss itself isn't romantic — in typical "Star Trek" fashion, the Enterprise's crew is taken hostage by aliens and the two were forced to kiss — it still represents a huge shift in the TV landscape, wrote The Hollywood Reporter, and the episode, "Plato's Stepchildren," will be remembered forever.
Besides the kiss, the show's future Earth (though, not necessarily its other worlds) represented a future utopia where both women and people of different races could be treated as equals. It aired in a time they decisively were not.
"Star Trek" also influenced plenty of modern tech, from the cell phone to automatic doors, according to Global News.
There has never been anything quite like "Saturday Night Live," from its political commentary to its being a star-making machine.
"Saturday Night Live" has been dependably on our screens for 44 seasons and counting. It has created dozens of movie stars, from Eddie Murphy to Will Ferrell to Tina Fey, and the list goes on. According to The Denver Post, America's sense of humor, and our comedians, would be fundamentally different if "SNL" didn't exist.
As The Denver Post wrote, the "Weekend Update" sketches "set the stage for the more intellectual cable lineup of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, John Oliver, and Larry Wilmore."
And lastly, the show changed politics forever, according to TIME. In 1976, President Gerald Ford uttered the famous "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!," and his press secretary hosted. Now, it's common for politicians to appear on the show and use it as a way to appeal to viewers, but this trend can be traced back to Ford.
Desperate Housewives led to an entire franchise of "Real Housewives" and their many, many spin-offs.
It may seem like there are an infinite number of "Real Housewives" shows across the country, from New York to Dallas to Beverly Hills, but its real first season came out in 2004, when the soap "Desperate Housewives" premiered. The show, based on the comings and goings of a group of friends on Wisteria Lane, was an instant phenomenon.
It was so popular, in fact, that the powers that be at Bravo decided it was time for a show depicting "actual" housewives. Now we have icons like Bethenny Frankel and Lisa Vanderpump in our lives — thanks, "Desperate Housewives."
The all-consuming nature of "Who shot JR?" on "Dallas" ensured that cliffhangers would become the most popular way to end a season of TV.
"Dallas"was the first of its kind: a primetime soap opera, wrote Rolling Stone. Up until the '80s, soaps exclusively aired during the day like "Guiding Light,""General Hospital," and "One Life to Live.""Dallas" aired at night, bringing soap opera dramatics to an entirely new demographic and giving the genre some legitimacy. Now, there are primetime soaps on almost every night on every channel.
We also have "Dallas" to thank for making the cliffhanger something that almost every TV show now employs during the season finale to ensure people keep talking about it over the summer and tune in to the season premiere.
The show's most famous cliffhanger and possibly the most famous cliffhanger of all time was "Who shot JR?," the dastardly oil tycoon and one of the main characters, JR Ewing. The gamble paid off — 350 million people tuned in in November 1980 to see just who had shot him, according to History.com.
"RuPaul's Drag Race" has succeeded in making drag culture mainstream.
For the decades prior to "Drag Race,"drag culture was shoved to the side, according to Them, a community platform specifically focused on LGBTQ culture.
"Drag has represented a loud f--- you to mainstream cisgender heteronormativity, reveling in its queerness and outsider status, mocking the tenets of a culture which regularly marginalized LGBTQ+ people," wrote Them.
But now? After "Drag Race?" Drag has decidedly become part of mainstream culture, with former contestants starring in "Rent Live,"appearing in "A Star Is Born,"popping up on Ariana Grande songs, and mounting sold-out nationwide tours. The show's been nominated for multiple Emmys and is showing no signs of slowing down.
The strangeness of "Twin Peaks" can be felt in almost every other mysterious TV show to come after, from "Riverdale" to "Lost" to "Atlanta."
In fact, according to Rolling Stone, at least 20 other TV shows have been influenced by this David Lynch fever dream. Truly, anything that takes place in the Pacific Northwest automatically gets a "Twin Peaks" name check, as does anything with a murder mystery, a hint of supernatural, coffee, a diner — basically everything on TV.
It pushed the limits of what TV can be and just how much you can confuse your viewers without driving them away. Peak TV is named fittingly — all these shows owe a great debt to "Twin Peaks."
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