Buffy The Vampire Slayer

5. "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" (1973-1974)

Chris Carter’s avowed inspiration for "The X-Files," the short-lived series "Kolchak" followed the adventures of an eccentric, sharp-tongued reporter (Darren McGavin) with a knack for finding monsters in the modern world. Spawned from a pair of darkly witty TV Movies of the Week ("The Night Stalker" and "The Night Strangler") scripted by the superb American fantasist Richard Matheson, it made for a unique genre mix: tongue-in-cheek humor, gothic chills and a fast-talking hero in a rumpled rummage-store suit time-warped from a 1950s newspaper comedy into a monster mash throwback. The series, which ran a single season, never quite recaptured the glory of the original films, but McGavin’s sardonic, seedy newshound is so much fun you may not care, and the memorable monsters made this show the next best thing to late-night creature-feature reruns.

<> 4. "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" (1997-2003)

It’s got a tongue-in-cheek title and a premise that reads like a comic book, but Joss Whedon’s inspired mix of horror movie revisionism, pop culture vamping and human tragedy is funny, clever, thrilling and — surprisingly — emotionally resonant. The snappy fantasy about a high-school cutie (Sarah Michelle Gellar) born to dispatch vampires, demons and other hell spawn, uses the fantastic to explore the hard choices and journeys made by humans. It makes for both an inspired metaphor for mortal life and a whip-smart mythology for youth in the modern media age. It depicted the collision of hormonal turmoil, supernatural soap opera, apocalyptic adventure and tongue-in-cheek humor, and the most human exploration of death, grief, sacrifice and self-actualization. Spin-off series "Angel" went a different way — a shadowy, noir-esque detective show with a vampire private eye saving the human world from inhuman evil — but it works with the same social currency.

’’The X-Files’’ 3. "The X-Files" (1993-2002)

"The truth is out there," promised the great pop-culture sci-fi conspiracy series. It turns out that a lot of people wanted to believe, and they turned Chris Carter’s oddball cult series into an unlikely prime-time hit. Carter wrapped alien-chasing hero FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and his cool-headed, scientifically minded partner Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) in a web of Area 51 UFOlogy and shadow-government paranoia, along with numerous detours into tales of monsters, mutants and supernatural phenomena. The show ran out of steam and righteous indignation long before it ended, but even the latter seasons offered some deliciously mind-slurping episodes of the paranormal, and Carter balanced the shadowy style and creepy sense of unease with a lilting sense of humor. For an even darker, more gruesome jolt of conspiratorial weirdness and sinister supernatural, check out Carter’s "Millennium."

’’Twin Peaks’’ 2. "Twin Peaks" (1990-1991)

David Lynch’s surreal TV noir strips back the layers of a small town nestled in the backwoods beauty of rural Washington state and discovers the capital city of TV weird under the sleepy surface of Smalltown, U.S.A. It might sound like a rehash of his nightmarish movie "Blue Velvet," but this murder mystery is both a twisted soap opera and a demented dip into the indescribable depths of evil that only Lynch can deliver. Kyle MacLachlan’s unconventional FBI agent incorporates psychic premonitions and dream-time clues into his investigation of a brutal serial-killer, which makes him relatively normal in this town of strange secrets and surreal mysteries. Perhaps a little too weird for its time, it was cancelled after its second season. Lynch’s revenge was the most maddeningly perverse unresolved cliffhanger on TV.

’’The Twilight Zone’’ 1. "The Twilight Zone" (1959-1964)

Submitted for your approval: the gold standard of television of the fantastic. Rod Serling’s landmark anthology series straddles the dimension between science fiction and fantasy, "the middle ground between science and superstition," if you will. It was the Emmy-winning dramatist’s ingenious solution to creative freedom: slip in the social politics and barbed human dramas that were so dear to his heart behind the façade of fantasy. The result was a TV series so iconic and influential that its very title has become a cultural catch-phrase. Some of the shows are unforgettable: "The Eye of the Beholder" (with classic sleight-of-hand camerawork); "The Invaders" (a terrified, mute Agnes Moorehead battles alien invaders); "It’s a Good Life" (from Jerome Bixby’s harrowing short story, with Bill Mumy as a 6-year-old monster with God-like powers); and "To Serve Man" (a monumental episode with some of the best punch lines of all time). The O. Henry plot twists are grabbers and the dramatic sentences of poetic justice extremely satisfying, but for all the fantasies and fears put on display week after week, it’s Serling’s compassion, social conscience and insight into the mysteries of the human soul that makes this show timeless.