<li>Let it ramble —“It was television, pure and simple, without dispute, and though some may dispute <em>that</em>, I maintain that it stands still as the platonic ideal, a metonym for all shows that come after, the Ur-show that took a genre, a medium, a generation away from tenuous explorations and shoved it without remorse into the world we inhabit today, and one might wonder, should such a thing not have happened, how unfortunate and insipid our lives-in-entertainment might be today.”</li>
<li>Now replace that sentence without “It is” to be more evocative —“Television, pure and simple, without dispute. There’s no way that we can take what we had from that show and say anything but. I maintain that it <em>still</em> stands as the platonic ideal, a metonym for all shows that came after. It was the Ur-show that took a genre, a medium, a generation away from the tenuous explorations and shoved, without remorse into the world we inhabit today. And one might wonder, should such a thing not have happened, how unfortunate and insipid our lives-in-entertainment might be today.”</li>
<p>It sets up a mystery that leaves the reader (and even the writer) questioning what it actually is that we’re talking about. I like the circumlocution aspect of it, talking about an unknown (unknowable?) thing.</p>