2012 Best TV Show Madness Bracket Tournament – First Round Voting Begins with Top Seeds Burn Notice, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, Community, New Girl, Survivor, Dexter, Big Bang Theory and More!

Features, Shows, Top Story

It’s that time again! It’s the month of March and that could only mean one thing…time for another Inside Pulse TV Tournament, while you drink green beer! The biggest and most talked about tournament during “March Madness” season is still the NCAA Basketball championship tournament, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any room for other tournaments out there. More importantly, there will always be room and time in your life to fill out more of those brackets that everyone loves. What else will you be doing today? Working at your duty station filling out those TPS Reports? HA! I didn’t think so either.

Everyone loves brackets and television. We proved that the last two years when we got hundreds of thousands of votes each weeks in our “Best Show on Television Tournament” in 2010 and “Best Television Character Tournament” in 2011. Back in 2010, Chuck was the surprise ultimate winner over another surprise show, Burn Notice. Neither show was a #1 seed or a #2 seed, but they took down a few of those top seeds along the way. By contrast, last year the final four characters were mostly all #1 seeds with two #1 seeds facing off in the finals. In that final matchup, Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory barely defeated Barson Stinson from How I Met Your Mother. But enough about the last two years, lets take a look at this year’s tournament.

Last year, I said that Inside Pulse decided NOT do another “Best Show on Television” tournament, because we didn’t think the landscape of television had changed that much from the year before. Well if you look back at the 2010 Best TV Show Bracket, you will see that about 1/3 of the shows from that tournament are NO LONGER on the air! Almost half of the top 8 seeded shows like Lost, 24, Friday Night Lights have since gone off the air. You add that to the fact that a lot of quality shows have premiered in the last couple of years, and you can clearly see that the landscape of television has changed. That’s why we are going to once again crown the “Best Show on TV Today”!

Now lets get into the details of the tournament. Two years ago, we picked 96 shows. But just like the real NCAA Basketball tournament appears to be expanding, so is our tournament this year. I tried at first to fit in 96 shows into this tournament, but quickly found out it was impossible. So I decided to expand the tournament to 128 shows. That means there will be no byes this year for top seeds. But 128 shows was a must for this year’s tournament to get all of the “Big 5” shows and emerging cable and premium channel shows that deserved to be in there.

It should be noted how shows could qualify for this tournament. First, it had to have an aired a new episode since June 2011. The only exception to that is Mad Men, which doesn’t come back with a new season until next month, but it still qualified because it has been a consistent Emmy Award winning drama for the past few years. But besides that all of these shows have had new episodes since June 2011. So that automatically disqualifies a few shows from HBO and SHOWTIME and a few cable shows who won’t be back with new seasons until later this year.

But even if you have had new episodes since the Summer of 2011, it doesn’t mean you will automatically get in. There were some shows like Friday Night Lights, Rescue Me, and Entourage that all had their series finale in the summer of 2011. They are NOT in this tournament, because they won’t be coming back this year. In the same category, are shows that debuted this past Fall 2011 or maybe even the year before, that have been cancelled or likely be cancelled by May of this year. I decided to NOT include those shows either, since they won’t be coming back for the Fall of 2012. So this disqualifies shows like Pan Am, The Playboy Club, The Firm, Body of Proof, and Harry’s Law among others. So basically to qualify for this tournament, a show must have aired a new episode since June 2011 and is either airing right now or will air new episodes later this year.

Now here is how the qualifying shows were selected. First, I asked various Inside Pulse staff members what their Top 10 Shows from this past year were and used those rankings as a starting point for seeding and ranking these shows. After all the individual top 10 lists were compiled and calculated, there were 32 shows that rose above the rest. Each of these shows were ranked high on multiple lists. The rest of the shows were just a ranked on a few lists or not at all. So unlike most tournaments, including the 2010 tournament, those 32 shows were the ONLY ones to actually be seeded. They each get one of the top 8 seeds in the 4 different regions based on the “Top 10″ lists I got. The other shows were basically placed in the bracket in random order. Some shows had more “weight” than others, but depending on how you look at it, there might be few upsets in this tournament. The only time you could truly call it an upset is if one of the top 32 seeds loses in the early rounds of the tournament.

A few more things before you get to the bracket. Just like the real NCAA Tournament, there were some automatic qualifying shows. They might have been in lesser conferences i.e. networks, but they each won their network tournament to earn a spot in the championship tournament. So you will see a few shows from each of the “lesser” cable networks with a few more from the “upper” cable and premium networks. But the majority of shows come from ABC, FOX, NBC, CBS, and THE CW. Even with 128 shows, I’m sure there are still some of your favorites that didn’t make it into the field. But among the opinions of 20 various staffers with a variety of tastes, the majority of your favorites should be there. Take a look at the bracket yourself by going here:

2012 Inside Pulse Best Television Show Tournament Bracket

Remember, when you do place your votes in this tournament, you should always vote on what is the best show RIGHT NOW. Some of these shows have been around for years, but if they are not at the top of their game in their current season, and a newer show is, then you should vote for the newer show. Past performance might come into play, but you should judge these showss on their merits today.

As you can see there are four different regions with 8 top seeds each, and 24 other shows. There are no byes this year, so that means there are 64 matchups in the first round that need YOUR votes! So the time is now. Tell all your friends. It’s up to YOU to VOTE for which show you think is the best on TV. Make sure to vote for all the matchups as every vote counts.


ABC Region – First Round Matchups

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FOX Region – First Round Matchups

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CBS Region – First Round Matchups

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NBC Region – First Round Matchups

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Each of these polls will stay open for one week. Next week the next round begins and we will continue until the final show is crowed as the best some time around the middle of April. Remember to tell all of your friends to vote as well!

I'm not embarrassed to say that my favorite television show of all-time is The O.C. I live by the motto "you can't fight fate!" More importantly, I watch WAY too much television, but I do so for the benefit of everyone reading this now. So to my mom and my wife, I say thanks for reading! To everyone else that might stumble across this, remember TiVo should be your best friend!