Here's the start of the big ones. These are shows I will list without hesitation as my favourite shows.

First up is the highest placed cartoon and the best show done by that guy who created "The Simpsons".

5: Futurama (1999 - ? )

Futurama follows the adventures of a pizza delivery boy named Fry who falls into a cryogenic chamber and is frozen until the year 3,000. Upon exiting the tube he finds that he's escaped his dead end life and is now living in the future.

Fry is very much the everyman of the show, he's the one who experiences new events the same time as the viewer. But Fry is also dumb, he's possibly the dumbest character on television. He's certainly dumber than Homer and possibly dumber than Peter Griffin. The other characters in the show are a one-eyed woman named Leela, a foul-mouthed, kleptomaniac, beer chugging robot called Bender, a senile amoral crackpot professor (who is distantly related to Fry), a lobster like doctor, a rastafarian accountant, an wealthy intern from mars and a janitor.

Futurama is the best kind of sci-fi, it doesn't take itself too seriously but it does use very complicated science as the basis for a lot of its stories and jokes. It's a show that can be alternately hilarious and then touching. A few of the episodes are well known for actually making viewers cry. It's a show that parodies modern life by providing a vision of how mundane life in the future could be. There's a lot of fantastic stuff there, but people just take it for granted.

Futurama spans four seasons plus a movie and only really has one episode that I consider to be a bit duff ("That's Lobstertainment"). It has some of the most memorable side characters in any cartoon, especially Mom, Morbo, Zapp Braniggan and Richard Nixon. And it also follows solid continuity, so solid infact that certain events that occur in the third & fourth season are foreshadowed in the first episode and there are other points where later stories are foreshadowed. It's refreshing to see a show that's willing to set up long story arcs with hints and resolve them in a leisurely fashion.

Futurama is the best cartoon on the planet. For me there is no cartoon I'd consider higher.
imdb: 9.3
tv.com: 9.2