vulture lists

10 Goofy Pairings in the EW ‘New Classics’ Lists


Look, we’re not going to get on Entertainment Weekly for spending an entire issue on lists of the “New Classics” — “the 1000 best movies, TV shows, albums, books, and more of the past 25 years” — because we love lists. We love making them, we love reading them, and we especially love attempts to list new canons, because they allow for endless argument and nitpicking. Also, they sell magazines, we’re told.

Similarly, it’s not worth the trouble to go into some huge rant about how the only thing stupider than putting Madden Football way down at No. 50 is putting The Things They Carried way down at No. 31. Nonetheless, enormous lists like these, made by a magazine determined to mix highbrow and lowbrow, yield some really hilarious pairings — list entries that we call head-slappers, because No. 14, say, is so obviously a million times better than No. 13 that it makes you slap your head. After the jump, the ten biggest head-slappers in EW’s 1,000th issue.

In ascending order of egregiousness:

58. The Tonight Show With Jay Leno
over
59. Battlestar Galactica

90. Napoleon Dynamite
over
91. Back to the Future

9. Friends
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10. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

20. The Lion King
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21. Schindler’s List

74. Play
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75. Born in the U.S.A.

1. The Road
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2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

5. Jersey Boys
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6. Fences

54. Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814
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55. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

52. Waiting to Exhale
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53. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

And, most ridiculous of all:

25. Shrek
over
26. Hoop Dreams

The EW 1000 [EW]

10 Goofy Pairings in the EW ‘New Classics’ Lists