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‘All in the Family’ wins our Best TV Show bracket

What’s the best show of the last 50 years? We asked readers to decide.

Readers voted over two weeks for the best TV show of the last 50 years.Ally Rseza

That’s that. All 486,000 votes have been cast over six rounds in the last two weeks and we finally have a champion of television: Norman Lear’s “All in the Family.”

The 1970s comedy defeated “Seinfeld” with 53.1 percent of the vote in the finals. It defeated “The Sopranos” in the semifinals, and “Breaking Bad” in the round before that. It’s touted as the series that brought reality to prime-time TV.

“This groundbreaker, from Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, radically changed scripted TV as it took on all the issues that previous series had been dodging, from the Vietnam War, racism, homophobia, and religion to menopause and impotence,” television critic Matthew Gilbert wrote of the show at the beginning of the bracket.

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Read how Gilbert feels about the winner of the bracket, and check out the bracket graphic below to see what happened in each round.


Click through to read about each show here:

The Competitors:

Channel 1

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Channel 2

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Channel 3

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Channel 4

Read more from our Best TV Show project:


Matthew Gilbert can be reached at matthew.gilbert@globe.com. Follow him @MatthewGilbert. Brittany Bowker can be reached at brittany.bowker@globe.com. Follow her @brittbowker and also on Instagram @brittbowker.