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Empire Magazine (which I haven't bought since it gave Attack Of The Clones a 5 Star review, but anyway...) recently asked its readers (magazine and online) to vote for their all-time favourite TV shows. The Top 50 has now been compiled and can be read in its entirety here. As I'm sure you'll all be pleased to know, the geeks have inherited the earth.

It's a list dominated by American shows - unsurprising really, given the quality of recent US TV output - with only eleven UK shows making the list, and only one of those (a welcome surprise) scraping the top ten. As usual with these things, the list is heavily skewed towards recent shows because our memories don't go back beyond last week most of the time - I think the oldest show here is the original Star Trek, and even the geek vote only gets that into the top fifty. I'm pleased to see many of my own votes do well, but equally disappointed to see others miss out completely. The full Empire top ten looks like this...

10. Spaced Like I say, the geeks have it - wonder how much the proposed US remake / desecration might sour our memory of this show?

9. The X-Files It's become very trendy to bash The X-Files for the things it got wrong - particularly in later seasons. For me, this was the show I'd been waiting for ever since Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World went off air.

8. The Wire I will get around to watching this soon. Louise is loving it.

7. Friends I know, but as much as we all may have grown to hate its smugness... it was still a pretty funny show. Joey always made me laugh... though not so much in his spin-off.

6. 24 May have jumped the shark in its last season - hell, it jumped the killer whale, but this is still one of the most nail-bitingly ludicrous ways to spend 24 hours of your life.

5. Lost No, I won't have a word said against Lost. It just gets better and better. And it does so through great writing and well-crafted characters. Yeah, Jack's an annoying gimp - but Locke, Hurley, Sawyer and Ben more than make up for that.

4. The West Wing I often forget just how much I loved this show, particularly in the Aaron Sorkin days. Tribute to the cast that they kept things almost as riveting in his absence, though the real life death of John Spencer was almost too much to take towards the end.

3. The Sopranos Everyone loved it. I watched the first episode and couldn't get into it. I know I should give it another go.

2. Buffy, The Vampire Slayer As with The West Wing and Lost, it was the writing that made this show. Sarah Michelle Gellar was always a little vacuous, but they wrote around that and made her character work. The supporting cast have been woefully underused since - poor old James Marsters, slumming it in Torchwood for god's sake!

1. No alarms and no surprises... The Simpsons When I was younger, I didn't used to get this show. Bart has always annoyed me, and the Lisa and Marge episodes can tend to drag. But there is one thing that makes The Simpsons truly great... Mr. Burns. D'oh! Sorry. I mean, Homer. Of course. The perfect multi-layered comic creation. Forced to choose, I'd pick for South Park, only because if it came down to Homer vs. Cartman in a fight, I'd have to respect Eric's authoritah.

My own top ten?

Oh, go on then...

10. The Twilight Zone
9. Deadwood
8. Lost
7. Cheers
6. Buffy
5. Moonlighting
4. Twin Peaks
3. The West Wing
2. The X-Files
1. NYPD Blue

Numbers 10, 8, 6 and 1 don't even make the Empire 50. Poor old Andy Sipowicz - you get my vote anyway, old pal.