Joe's TV List Doesn't Suck

#49: Beavis and Butt-head
(MTV, 1993-1997)

Mock if you will, but if you never actually watched Mike Judge’s first major gift to pop culture and only heard about the damage it supposedly inflicted on our nation’s youth, then you don’t realize that Judge wrote (or, in the case of the video interludes, improvised) some caustically intelligent, incisive commentary on the middle-American MTV crowd — right to their faces — but did so with a gentle fondness for his characters, a quality that he would later bring to the more mainstream but also-excellent King of the Hill. But mostly, Beavis and Butt-head was funny as heck, and surreally wise to boot. When the pair sell each other a bunch of candy-drive chocolate bars for the same $2, well, it makes no less economic sense than Hillary’s whole platform, right? Heh-heh-heh. I said ‘hole.’