Doctor Who 

For as long as I can remember, I've heard about the good Doctor, references, inside jokes and the like. Such as "Real Daleks don't climb stairs, they flatten the building".

The quandary was this: Where do I begin, with thousands of episodes aired? I was afraid of getting myself into something deep, dense, voluminous and possibly repetitive, impossible to get back out of.

The very simple yet belated answer was, of course, by accident.

On one of those sleepless nights, flipping channels, I saw astronauts in a Victorian library, and was immediately intrigued by the weird homage to Kubrick. Before the commercial break, I was treated to electronic ghosts and invisible floating piranhas.

Then this absolute beauty comes up, I paraphrase - "You've been living in a computer simulation, your physical body is elsewhere" - "But I've been dieting"

Bleak, subtle and sophisticated humor? Check, and count me in.

As it turned out, I had stumbled into the middle of a Sy-Fy Channel short marathon of Doctor Who. I resisted going to sleep until the damn thing ended five or six episodes later, at ten in the morning.

What wildly imaginative premises, what a high-quality level of writing, what a gem this is! There is serious brain-power at work here, courtesy of the BBC yet again, on a continuing heroic mission to sacrifice short-term profit for long-term legacy. As evidence, I present "Monty Python's Flying Circus", "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", "The Singing Detective", "Brideshead Revisited".

From what little I've seen in half of a short marathon, Doctor Who deserves a ten out of ten.