Joss Whedon

You can’t deny the smarts, business savvy and uncanny feel for the public’s taste inherent in legendary producers such as Dick Wolf, Jerry Bruckheimer and Aaron Spelling — the king of glossy soaps and ’70s jiggle TV. They have a knack for branding TV shows and creating franchises out of their own distinctive take on TV’s most venerable genres. Just see how "Law & Order" and "CSI" have not only proliferated but influenced the shape and style of prime-time TV drama: slick, snappy, sharp.

It takes a different kind of producer to push the envelope of TV conventions. It’s a rocky road littered with failed vehicles, but the producers who survive the obstacle course of conservative networks, audiences who gravitate toward familiarity and advertisers who prefer to avoid controversy are the ones who capture the public’s imagination and redefine the pop-culture lexicon.

These 10 producers have a respect for audience intelligence, a flair for creating distinctive characters, a sense of narrative adventure and a compulsion for tweaking genres and conventions and playing with the expectations of TV viewers. And it’s no coincidence that each of these producers was also a creator and a writer in his own right.

10. Jay Tarses

Breakthrough Series: "The Bob Newhart Show"

Defining Show: "Buffalo Bill"

Other Career Highlights: "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd," "The Slap Maxwell Story"

Signature Style: The wry dramedy of adult life

Jay Tarses never had a hit after turning button-down comedian Bob Newhart into TV’s most famous therapist in "The Bob Newhart Show." Yet the wit and grown-up sensibilities of shows such as "Buffalo Bill" and "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd" captured the zeitgeist of their times better than most other hit shows around them and earned the kind of devoted followings that would have turned them into unqualified smashes on cable. The regrettably short-lived "Buffalo Bill" in particular is a masterpiece of caustic wit and cutting satire, with Dabney Coleman as an arrogant local TV talk-show host with a network-sized ego and an insufferable manner who is not unaware of his conceit and verbal cruelty — he just doesn’t care. Self-obsession has never been funnier.

9. Glenn Gordon Caron

Breakthrough Series: "Remington Steele"

Defining Show: "Moonlighting"

Other Career Highlights: "Now and Again," "Medium"

Signature Style: Romance, from playful romantic tension to grown-up relationships in the family way

The sophistication, sexy simmer and sly humor of "Remington Steele" was a dry run for "Moonlighting," the champagne of TV mystery. The sassy modern take on classic Hollywood screwball romance is bubbly, witty, sexy and charged by Caron’s imaginative brainstorms: A tribute to film noir in black and white, an episode in rhyme, a take-off of Shakespeare’s "Taming of the Shrew" in Elizabethan dress, all with a silky smooth touch. Subsequent shows have been cast in a more serious vein, but both the short-lived sci-fi spy drama "Now and Again" and the current hit "Medium," a crime thriller with a supernatural tinge, are grounded in loving (not always smooth) relationships and the beating heart of complicated family lives and down-to-earth problems.

8. Joss Whedon

Joss Whedon transformed a snappy youth fantasy about vampires and demons — and a high school cutie born to dispatch them between homework assignments — into TV’s most unlikely pop-culture phenomenon since "The X-Files." The series had a canny balance of supernatural soap opera, apocalyptic adventure, tongue-in-cheek humor and mortal consequences. "Buffy" became a mythology for the modern media age, and Whedon followed it up with the noir-tinged spin-off, "Angel," a supernatural detective show in a different kind of Los Angeles underworld, and the scuffed and rugged Western in space, "Firefly," a frontier sci-fi adventure with a mercenary cast and an electrified tension. Whedon has since turned to the big screen, but the three shows he created and shepherded turned imaginative metaphors into very human stories, and that’s the best kind of genre TV.

7. Aaron Sorkin

Breakthrough Series: "Sports Night"

Defining Show: "The West Wing"

Other Career Highlights: "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip"

Signature Style: Smart characters, snappy banter and a social conscience he wears on his sleeve

Playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin made his first mark on TV with one of the sharpest, smartest sitcoms of the 1990s. The characters of "Sports Night," a behind-the-scenes comedy about a 24-hour sports network, pride themselves on both their intellect and professionalism, hallmarks that defined his hit "The West Wing," the quick-witted political drama that made us want to believe in the president and the American political process once again, if only for an hour a week. Sorkin is as hands-on as producers get, scripting a large percentage of the shows himself, so his new "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" is, to date, only his third series, but you can expect another cast of smart, sharp characters and some of the wittiest banter on TV.

6. David Milch

Breakthrough Series: "NYPD Blue"

Defining Show: "Deadwood"

Other Career Highlights: "Murder One," "Brooklyn South," writer on "Hill Street Blues"

Signature Style: Tough-minded and streetwise

David Milch served his TV apprenticeship writing for "Hill Street Blues" under Steven Bochco before they co-created "NYPD Blue" together. Milch’s gift for tough, sometimes gruff professionals (from Dennis Franz’s damaged cop Sipowicz in "Blue" to Daniel Benzali’s icy lawyer in the first season of "Murder One") and gritty milieus ("Brooklyn South") found its most creative outlet in "Deadwood," the violent, unpredictable, utterly original take on the frontier drama he created for HBO. Shot in shades of mud and blood and whiskey, it’s an unglamorous portrait of the real old West, a savage world hewn out of the wilderness by some of the most mercenary characters on TV. But it’s the vibrant cast of one-of-a-kind characters, conversing and cursing in the most poetically profane and melodious dialogue on the screen that breathes life into the grubby outpost of the American Dream.

5. J.J. Abrams

Breakthrough Series: "Felicity"

Defining Show: "Lost"

Other Career Highlights: "Alias"

Signature Style: Keep the audience guessing with murky conspiracies and unfathomable mysteries

J.J. Abrams delivered the fledgling WB network its defining series with the youth-skewing "Felicity," about a small-town girl in a big-city college, but he found his true calling with the high-concept conspiracy spy thriller "Alias." As sexy as it is silly, the adrenaline-powered show mixes high-tech espionage and ancient prophecy with adrenaline-boosted plots laced with double dealing and triple agents, a recipe he perfected with the addictive "Lost," the high-concept survival adventure with supernatural echoes, conspiratorial hints and more mysteries than the complete works of Agatha Christie. Whether Abrams and his collaborators have the show intricately and exactingly mapped out, or they’re just improvising their way through the seasons, it’s the most tantalizing and enigmatic puzzle on TV.

4. David E. Kelley

Breakthrough Series: "Picket Fences"

Defining Show: "Ally McBeal"

Other Career Highlights: "L.A. Law," "Doogie Howser, M.D.," "Chicago Hope," "The Practice," "Boston Public," "Boston Legal"

Signature Style: Eccentric story twists and colorful characters with quirks aplenty

The Boston lawyer-turned-screenwriter cut his TV chops on Steven Bochco’s "L.A. Law" and "Doogie Howser, M.D.," but it was with "Picket Fences" that David E. Kelley found his own cracked voice. The small-town drama where no crime is too bizarre has an oddball sense of humor and whimsy that defines the Kelley touch, from "Chicago Hope" to his current "Boston Legal," with "Ally McBeal" standing as its definitive expression. The prolific Kelley has a history of spreading himself too thin and his shows have a history of wobbling out of control when he shifts attention to a new series, but when he’s on his game there are few shows as entertaining as his creations.

3. Steven Bochco

Breakthrough Series: "Hill Street Blues"

Defining Show: "NYPD Blue"

Other Career Highlights: "Paris," "Delvecchio," "L.A. Law," "Hooperman," "Cop Rock," "Murder One," "Over There"

Signature Style: Weaving multiple story lines through multi-episode arcs

Steven Bochco began his career scripting venerable shows such as "Columbo" and "Ironside," and his work as a producer was in the same vein until "Hill Street Blues." The ensemble serial set in an unidentified inner-city precinct practically revolutionized the cop drama. The handheld camerawork gave it a documentary look and feel unlike anything on TV at time, and its bustling ensemble cast, dynamic street culture and long-running dramatic arcs are almost as fresh 25 years later. In addition to subsequent hits such as "L.A. Law" and "Doogie Howser, M.D.," Bochco gets points for creativity for the offbeat crime dramedy "Hooperman" and the one-of-a-kind "Cop Rock," TV’s first and only crime show in song.

2. Norman Lear

Breakthrough Series: "All in the Family"

Defining Show: "All in the Family"

Other Career Highlights: "Sanford and Son," "Maude," "The Jeffersons," "Good Times," "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," "Palmerstown, U.S.A."

Signature Style: Morality, social justice and politics served up with a punch line

Norman Lear brought controversy into the sitcom with "All in the Family," a comedy where bigoted blue-collar father doesn’t know best, mother is a daffy but good-hearted dingbat and their little girl is a liberated liberal married to a college intellectual constantly bickering with dear old dad over politics, racism, chauvinism, hypocrisy and other favorites from the American Dream. Television was never the same again, especially when Lear had his way with spin-offs such as "Maude," "The Jeffersons" and "Good Times," which dared address an America of crime, unemployment and poverty. Lear helped turn the ’70s into the golden age of the American sitcom, but what is less heralded and perhaps more revolutionary, he put black actors and stories on TV more than any other producer in the ’70s ... or since.

1. David Simon

Breakthrough Series: "Homicide: Life on the Street"

Defining Show: "The Wire"

Other Career Highlights: "The Corner"

Signature Style: Like the title says: life on the streets

This former Baltimore Sun crime reporter got his first taste of TV when his book "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" was transformed into the acclaimed series by Paul Attanasio. Set amidst the bickering camaraderie of a Baltimore homicide squad, "Homicide" was a new slant on the old cop show, confronting issues of job stress and internal politics while solving cases on the mean streets. Simon’s HBO miniseries "The Corner," a lucid and painfully human portrait of a drug-dominated corner in the Baltimore slums, focused on the other side the street, and his brilliant, criminally underwatched "The Wire" straddles both sides of the badge as it maps out the power structures and the mundane realities of both sides of the law with the richness, depth and complexity of a Dickens epic. You won’t find anything more intelligent, fearless or daring on television.

Honorable Mentions

As with any list, there are runners-up that would have placed but for limited space and the vagaries of personal taste: Steven J. Cannell, whose career runs the gamut from "The A-Team" to TV treasures such as "The Rockford Files" and "Wiseguy"; Chris Carter, who transformed the quirky conspiracy sci-fantasy "The X-Files" into a pop-culture phenomenon; and the producing teams of Joshua Brand and John Falsey ("St. Elsewhere," "Northern Exposure," "I’ll Fly Away") and Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz ("Family," "thirtysomething," "My So-Called Life"). And given a little seasoning and a few more shows under their belt, such up-and-comers Denis Leary and Peter Tolan ("Rescue Me") and Shawn Ryan ("The Shield") could earn their spot on the list.

And finally, let us acknowledge the creative force of Rod Serling. This class act of television writing created some of the greatest telefilms and imaginative programs in the history of the format, but he produced only one series in his career — the original, still unmatched anthology show "The Twilight Zone" — and the title was largely honorific, much to Serling’s frustration. TV might have been a better place — at least a more creative one — had the networks entrusted Serling to produce the shows that bore his name, rather than simply write and host.