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
over
10. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
20. The Lion King
over
21. Schindler's List
74. Play
over
75. Born in the U.S.A.
1. The Road
over
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
5. Jersey Boys
over
6. Fences
54. Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814
over
55. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
52. Waiting to Exhale
over
53. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
And, most ridiculous of all:
25. Shrek
over
26. Hoop Dreams
The EW 1000 [EW]
