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Curated playlist

Peabody Award–winning television programs

  • Moon Shot3 minThe year 1994 brought a book titled Moon Shot to shelves. Alan Shepard, one of the Mercury Seven astronauts, served as the primary author. He worked alongside Jay Barbree, an NBC News correspondent. Howard Benedict, an Associated Press…
  • The Simpsons10 minThe Simpsons premiered on the 17th of December 1989, and within months it had done something no animated show had managed since the 1970s: it cracked American prime-time and stayed there. Time magazine would eventually name it the greatest…
  • Sesame Street11 minSesame Street premiered on the 10th of November 1969, and within a decade, nine million American children under the age of six were watching it every single day. That number speaks to something more than popularity. It points to a question…
  • Twin Peaks13 minTwin Peaks premiered on ABC on the 8th of April 1990, and within hours the television landscape had shifted in a way critics were struggling to describe. A naked body, wrapped in plastic, washed up on the bank of a river near a small…
  • Doctor Who12 minDoctor Who first reached British television screens at 17:16:20 GMT on the 23rd of November 1963 - eighty seconds later than scheduled, because BBC announcements about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the previous day ran…
  • Frasier8 minFrasier Crane, a pompous Seattle radio psychiatrist with a taste for Coco Chanel sofas and Eames Lounge Chairs, became one of American television's most decorated characters. On the 16th of September 1993, NBC premiered Frasier, a spin-off…
  • Saturday Night Live11 minSaturday Night Live premiered on NBC on the 11th of October 1975, hosted by comedian George Carlin, and it has not stopped since. For more than five decades, the show has broadcast live from Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York…
  • The Civil War (miniseries)7 minThe Civil War documentary miniseries arrived on PBS on the 23rd of September 1990, and for five consecutive nights, it stopped America in its tracks. More than 39 million viewers tuned in to at least one episode. Night after night, an…
  • Breaking Bad14 minBreaking Bad is an American crime drama television series that asked a question most storytellers never dare to pose: what if we watched a good man choose, step by step, to become a monster? When it premiered on AMC on the 20th of January…
  • Jeopardy!10 minJeopardy! debuted on NBC on the 30th of March 1964, and it was born on an airplane. Merv Griffin was mulling over game show ideas during a flight back to New York City from Duluth when his wife Julann asked a simple question: why not give…
  • Game of Thrones13 minGame of Thrones premiered on HBO on the 17th of April 2011, and when it ended on the 19th of May 2019, it had run for 73 episodes across eight seasons. David Benioff and D. B. Weiss built it as the first adaptation of George R. R. Martin's…
  • South Park13 minSouth Park debuted on Comedy Central on the 13th of August 1997, and within three months, the ratings for a single cable show had tripled. By the time the second season aired, eight of the ten highest-rated programs on all of basic cable…
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender12 minAvatar: The Last Airbender premiered on Nickelodeon on the 21st of February 2005, and what greeted viewers that evening was unlike anything American television had offered children before. A twelve-year-old boy named Aang had been frozen…
  • The Ed Sullivan Show11 minThe Ed Sullivan Show debuted on CBS on the 20th of June, 1948, with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis performing alongside Broadway composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II previewing the score to South Pacific. That night set the…

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