Talk about NBC in upheaval this year! At first, shuttling Scrubs off might have seemed like a horrible move, but it allowed ABC to give it a beautiful send-off and it allowed NBC to go ahead with two of the all-time greats. I'm still largely thinking about this in a network mindset because that was my exposure at the age of eleven, but we're also seeing a boom elsewhere. Two years after The Sopranos ended and one year left until Lost ends, we're seeing the ripple effects of that as "peak TV" really began in earnest around this time (and following the writer's strike). The prestige groundwork had been laid; they just started excelling from here on.
Honorable friends: Breaking Bad, Psych, Party Down, Man v. Food, Between Two Ferns, Better Off Ted, HIMYM, Lost, Dating in the Dark, Baseball Tonight, Desperate Housewives