Brian Volk-Weiss’ 10 Most Culturally Influential TV Shows of All Time

The highly-rated program and its record-breaking finale certainly caught the attention of Volk-Weiss. “[M*A*S*H was] one of, if not the very first show, that showed what war was really like, but not from bombs and bullets on the battlefield point-of-view. What the people not in combat did to help those who were in it to get through the experience,” he says. “When Hawkeye saw the mom kill her child because it was crying while they were behind enemy lines, it burned into my brain more than almost anything else I’ve ever seen on a screen.”

From Mike Wallace to the ticking of that clock, Volk-Weiss sees this newsmagazine show as an airbag for the United States. He goes further to call it “close to a fourth pillar of the United States government in that they have the time and money to focus, for years if necessary, on important things that need to stop happening, from getting the Emmett Till case reopened to Ed Bradley covering the fact that he couldn’t get a taxi in Manhattan.”

The HBO miniseries was packed with star power like Meryl Streep and Al Pacino, but in Volk-Weiss’ eyes, it’s the impactful premise that forever leaves a lasting mark. “Another show that took what had largely been stereotypes in homosexuality, and AIDS, and gave them a face and a story that almost anyone could relate to.”

To a young Volk-Weiss, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air wasn’t that big of a deal other than the fact that he loved it,  “however, my black friends were blown away that a young black lead (young was a key variable back then because many prior respected black leads were much older, like Benson or the parents in The Jeffersons) had a Malcolm X poster on his wall on network TV. Or that a rich black family that was ‘normal’ and many of the ‘not normal’ people, who led to the comic relief, were white.”

Volk-Weiss remembers the Ellen DeGeneres sitcom like it was yesterday. “I remember asking my mom what a lesbian was because of this show,” he admits, before adding, “Had this show not been made the way it was, there’s a very good chance I would have gotten to college with no idea what lesbians were. But luckily this show brought the topic up, and she could walk me through everything from her point-of-view, which basically was ‘it’s women who love women, and it’s not a big deal.’”

While Star Trek gets a lot of credit for the first interracial kiss (that didn’t actually air originally), Volk-Weiss believes more credit should go to another milestone from space, the final frontier. “That there was a black woman working on the bridge in the same capacity as any other race that could have been in that job (and the pilot was shot in the late 1960s). And an Asian man was driving the entire ship. Even adding a Russian barely five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis almost destroyed civilization was as groundbreaking as it gets. The effects of these casting choices are still being felt today.”

Unlike Sanford and Son,  Volk-Weiss explains this All in the Family spinoff that saw George (Sherman Hemsley) and Weezy (Isabel Sanford) movin’ on up to the East Side was widely seen all over the United States. “I believe it was many white Americans’ very first realistic glimpse of what black people do at home and not a stereotypical and or uneducated description of the topic.  It came out less than five years after Sanford and Sonand already it felt many more years than that.”

For Volk-Weiss, this “is the often-forgotten great, great, grandparent of modern TV.” He argues everything from The Wire to The Sopranoscame out of it to some degree. “In addition to a type of storytelling that is very common now but had never been shown before on network TV. It made it very clear from the pilot onwards that the circumstances of one’s youth play a massive part in why people end up becoming, later in life, what they become,” the avid watcher says.

As Volk-Weiss remembers, he had never seen a show before that took such a unique point of view, detailing, “It’s very clear that most of the criminals came from poverty and most of the cops did not (in fact many of the cops were the children of cops).”

Volk-Weiss feels the landmark Carroll O’Connor starring sitcom took “what we now call the deep blue and deep blue point-of-view and put both on display in a very even-handed way.” He adds: “We saw both sides, listen to each other (every now and then), and slowly change. While Archie was rightfully the butt of most jokes, there were times that he said things to ‘Meathead’ that clearly resonated.”

“My mom loved this show,” Volk-Weiss recalls. “I remember watching this show all the time as a kid growing up in New York, and it seemed like any other TV show. But when I went to college in the Midwest I realized most people had never even heard of it, let alone seen it.” This fact helped him realize, even back in the mid-’90s, that “people with different backgrounds were already watching different things, as though on two different planets.”