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

Breakthrough Series: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

Defining Show: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

Other Career Highlights: "Angel," "Firefly," writer on "Roseanne"

Signature Style: Updating and reinvigorating genre TV with pop-culture wit

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.