8 Television Shows Scientifically Proven To Make Their Viewers Smarter

There's an episode of the 70's TV sitcom Three Is Company that begins with Janet unable to find her special golden pen. A few seconds later her room mate, Jack, spies through a window the couple's third room mate, Chrissy, taking money out of Janet's purse. Janet had given Chrissy permission to borrow the money but Jack, not knowing that, assumes that Chrissy is responsible for the missing pen and has become a kleptomaniac. A half hour of supposed hilarity ensues.

If that sounds like an incrediblely inane plot it is because Three Is Company was an incredibly inane television show. Go back and watch reruns of most of the shows from that era—Three Is Company, Gilligan's Island, The Dukes Of Hazard among many others—and it is amazing how simple and, well, stupid they seem now. It was shows like these that lead to the common wisdom that watching any TV will turn one's brain to mush and make you dumber.

That common wisdom is now wrong.

While the majority of TV shows may indeed turn your brain to mush a slew of scientific studies have found that some television shows have the effect of marking their viewers smarter. These studies were summarized in the outstanding book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson.

What causes certain television shows to increase their viewers' mental acuity is not simply that they are more creative, Johnson argues. You have to be smarter to write a show like Seinfeld than you do Three Is Company but that doesn't mean watching those shows is any more mentally beneficial.

What Johnson found is that only certain television shows directly lead to an increase in their viewers' mental acuity. The shows that produced the greatest brain benefits tended to have at least some of these elements in common:

• Many overlapping plot strands. The best shows, from a cognitive point of view, will have six or eight or more subplots in a single episode.
• An unclear distinction between the major and minor plot strands. In the best shows some seemingly minor plot point in one episode becomes a major one later, requiring viewers to constantly weigh and reweigh the facets of the show's story line.
• A relatively large number of primary characters. Some characters might disappear for whole shows, even a whole season, and then be reintroduced.
• Moral ambiguity. Instead of clear villains and heroes it is more mentally challenging when some character's allegiance and motives are unclear or keep shifting.
• No narritive hand holding. If, for example, the protagonist's submarine is going to be crushed if it descends more than 500 meters a smart-inducing show will convey that through the action or infer it through the dialog, leaving the viewer to figure out the nature of the underwater peril. A "normal" show will have the executive officer character awkwardly saying just before the critical moment "You know, Captain, we'll be crushed if the depth needle moves beyond 500 meter mark."
• Non-linear action. When a show includes flashbacks, or flash forwards, an important part of your brain gets a workout rearranging the scenes into the correct chronological series of events.

So that's the theory. What specific shows do researchers say will make you smarter watching them? There's no exact scientific way to compare the benefits of watching one show over another but below are eight of the best in rough order.

You may very well have seen some of these shows before. There's another trait smart-creating shows possess: They have new layers for you to discover when you watch them a second and third time.

And with that, to the list . . .

This might be the best example of a series that has all of the qualities of an intelligence-enhancing television. Alias is a spy thriller action show wrapped in a family drama wrapped in a historical mystery. Doing the 'work" of sorting through all the clues and complex relationships presented in the five season long narrative is intellectually stimulating—but you'll be too wrapped up in the plot and characters to notice.

Alias is one of those shows you need to watch starting from the very first episode. It is best watched along with other people so that you can speculate together on the potential future plot happenings.

Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, credits Hill Street Blues as the first mentally challenging television show. It was this personal police drama that first took multiple plot strands and wrapped them together. Though the first episode aired way back in 1981, Hill Street Blues still has a modern and relivant feel.

Perhaps there's never been a dialog driven show as mentally stimulating as The West Wing. The high-minded verbal exchanges between the President and his staff in the halls of the White House move along at a snappy pace; the subtle inferences are easy to miss if you don't keep up. What's more, the dialog about the events enveloping this fictional White House on any particular episode are often discussed by the characters who have knowledge of events the viewers do not. So not only do you have to follow along with the plot of a West Wing show, you have to fill in the missing information gaps. You wouldn't imagine that to be fun. And yet for a show that's, in essence, all about people talking politics around an office the West Wing is completely entertaining and action packed. And it will leave you wishing that these characters, with their flaws and all, were the people who were running the United States in real life.

You might have heard some fan disappointment over this series's perplexing last episode. Well fugheddaboutit. Perhaps no TV show to date has included as many distinct plot threads as the the mafia drama The Sopranos. A single episode could have as many as a dozen subplots going on at once, layered on top of each other, with certain scenes advancing more than one subplot at a time. The Sopranos is also full of moral ambiguity , especially around our chief protagonists who in the span of a minute can go from whacking some one to exploring his vulnerable emotions on a psychologist's couch.

The producers about this medical drama must have faced the constant temptation to introduce narrative hand holding into the script. Imagine that you are a writer in charge of a scene in which a gun shot victim comes into the emergency room. It would be easy to write a line for the surgeon saying something like "The bullet is close to his heart. He'll die if we don't remove it in the next five minutes." and then to have the next scene show either of a recovered patient or his grieving family. E.R. uses a lot more subtly than that. For a few minutes the show will focuse on the personal lives of the staff of a Chicago hospital and then, suddenly, in comes the gun shot victim and all heck breaks loose. The doctors in the show are trying to figure out what is wrong with their patent (using medical-speak that approximates what real life doctors would use) at the same time we in the audience are. The patients in E.R. don't always make it, but watching the drama that surrounds them is healthy for the brain.

There are several shows, including those mentioned above, that weave together more plot strands than the action-packed 24 does. But few have more characters -- there are 21 distinct major characters in this political thriller -- and none do a better job playing with the story's sense of time. That's because each episode of 24 corresponds to 44 real-life minutes (eg. the hour the show takes minus 16 minutes for commercials). During that time terrorists are plotting, law inforcement is pursuing, politicians are scheming in such overlapping ways that sometimes a splitscreen is required. The plot of 24 is cognitively demanding and the action will keep you on the edge of your seat.

What's a silly reality program about a group of castaways who vote each other off the show until only one remains to collect the million dollar prize doing on a list of televion that makes viewers smarter? Well, some of the interactions between the contentants might be silly, and some of the contrived challenges definitely are silly, but the show itself provides a serious stuff for your brain. That's because the whole premise of each Survivor season starts with a "black box," that is a system in which the rules and personalities aren't known to either the viewers or the show's contestants. The intellectual work around watching a show like Survivor comes in trying to unravel that black box and that involves a lot of self question asking: What's the best way for Gillian to avoid being voted out of the next tribal council? How is Richard going to form an alliance when no one seems to like him? Studies show that these sorts of questions raise viewer's curiousity and give their brain's a workout.

^{Nore: If you've never watched Survivor, the mega-popular first season is still the best.}

A plane crashes onto a deserted island. The survivors must learn how to work together to stay alive. But not every one is as they seem.

As with the television series above, Lost is show that requires viewers to think in order to make sense of what's happening. Individual episodes tend to highlight the experience of one particular survivor and sometimes other surivors make an unexpected appearence in that past. So, the more episodes you watch the more you exercise your brain gets mapping social networks and connecting multiple narrative threads.

And talk about time travel. Nearly every episode include flashbacks. Some include flash-forwards. Some whole entire shows take place at a different time from the central action.

On top of that, Lost is an intensely spiritual show, with layers is history and symbolism wrapped in.

Oh, by the way, the plot is rather riveting too.

Final Notes:

The studies Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, examined—the ones linking increased intelligence to watching certain television shows—are a few years old. It is almost certain that shows that have come out since then (Heroes, for example) produce similar benefits. Since they haven't been studied yet the newer shows were left off of the above list. Other intellectually beneficial shows Johnson cites are Six Feet Under, The Apprentice and My So Called Life.

Johnson also explains how playing certain video games can make you smarter. The most intellectually beneficial video game? Grand Theft Auto.

_{Have any thoughts on the television shows reviewed? Or think another one should have been added to this list? Let us know in a comment:} 

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