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:
Read more from our Best TV Show project:
- Finals: ‘All in the Family,’ a sitcom that has stood the test of time, is our readers’ choice for TV’s best
- Semifinals: In our Best TV bracket, a deserving final four — and a couple of agonizing choices ahead
- Round 4: Our Best TV bracket is down to eight, and older series are getting some love
- Round 3: 7 surprises from Round 2 of our Best TV Show bracket
- Round 2: In Round 2 of our Best TV bracket, this was the toughest call of all
- Round 1: In Round 1 of our Best TV bracket, the results that surprised our critic
- Methodology: What’s the best TV show of the last 50 years? You decide.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at matthew.gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert. Brittany Bowker can be reached at brittany.bowker@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @brittbowker and on Instagram @brittbowker.