1) Doctor Who - Going back over 40 years. The 4th Doctor (Tom Wood) has been my favorite. And Peri my favorite Companion as she is built like a brick ****house (taught you some colloquial English there). However, the new series is fantastic, all three years. Rose as companion in series 1 and 2 was fantastic. And the companion in series 3 grew on me. And I expect the 4th to be great also, as the new companion is going to be good. She played in Christmas Special between year 2 and 3. Nothing beat Doctor Who, or even comes close in my book. An American Movie was made in the 90's, but it is only so-so, I don't consider it real Doctor Who.
2) For Comedy, Red Dwarf.
3) I think that the last Star Trek Series "Star Trek Enterprise" was real good, and not appreciated. Very good acting, characters, and it was fresh.
I tend not to like much of the current stuff, other than Who. They seem to all want to put some ideology into them, push dippy doo media entertainment cultural values on you, rather than just be entertaining. The last Star Trek series did a little of that, it was annoying. But only a couple times. Red Dwarf is just funny and quite creative.
Doctor Who has had a few series where it clearly has been making a point of how TV is sucking out the brains of people in society. Well an Alien got into the TV sets and did that physically. Clearly this was a metaphor. Kind of hypocritical for sure, but I respect that. Killed my TV long ago to protect my brain, only watch selective items on tape or DVD.
If you aren't exclusively tied into space based sci-fi, the last three series of Doctor Who are most certainly worth getting on DVD.
Why just the last 3? I think they are great. But so are earlier ones. Doctors 1-3 are pretty old time, but still interesting. 4 is great. 5 and 6 pretty good. 7 went down hill I feel a bit (last series before break). The movie does not count in my book.
Even though they did not have the budgets in series back then, they made up for it with scripts, and characters.
This is why I consider much of current crap on tv banal. Just effects, other than that pretty shallow, predictable. Sometimes a movie will come out, and get a lot of attention. I won't watch it for awhile, then check it out. And 10 minutes later turn it off, just effects, boring, predictable.
In some old series they did not have the money, so they had no choice but to really do things in a special way with scripts and nuances, character studies. But you have to be someone who appreciates that kind of stuff.
edit: if you are interested in looking at these on youtube, well, I accept is is not right, stealing in a way, but what the heck, you can do a search on "Runaway Bride" to see an example, the Christmas Special after Rose left. Actually the entire 3 years are on youtube, but the guy codes them to avoid detection. Accunts with Who have pretty much been eliminated by youtube, you used to be able to find most everything.
Here is a nice tribute to Rose, done to music.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pnhvLNwZ65MPlayed by Billie Piper, former pop star, better actor. I am a pretty tough guy I think, but I cried seeing this.