Twenty years ago, the HBO series let the American viewing public we weren't in Kansas anymore.

"Big Bang's" 200th episode, titled "The Celebration Experimentation," will feature a cameo by original "Batman" star Adam West, along with the returns of Wil Wheaton, Sara Gilbert, John Ross Bowie and Christine Baranski.

Eight years after the finale, in an adaptation of his book on NBC’s ratings triumph, the network’s former prime-time president Warren Littlefield unspools an oral history of the show’s stunning success.

In 2007, an L.A. family's unvarnished docuseries launched on E!, and reality television, female body image, social media and, above all, the economy of celebrity were forever changed. Now the stars and producers of the megafranchise (nine TV spinoffs, hundreds of millions of dollars earned) reveal the secrets of its improbable explosion into the zeitgeist.

Fifteen years, 30 seasons, 460 castaways. One show lit the torch for the reality-TV revolution. On May 31, 2000, CBS premiered "Survivor," an unscripted experiment (based on a Swedish series) that stranded 16 Americans on the remote island of Pulau Tiga near Borneo in the South China Sea.

Before she was a media deity, Oprah Winfrey was afledgling local talk show host with a shot at national stardom.An oral history of her pivotal first syndicated season.

The cast and creators look back at the original series' biggest moments.

Marin County, Calif., 1992. The Internet has yet to take hold, Jay Leno is the fresh new face of "The Tonight Show," Bill Clinton has just shown off his saxophone bona fides on "Arsenio Hall," and Comedy Central is four years away from the premiere of "The Daily Show" starring Craig Kilborn.

This Sunday, "The X-Files" returns to Fox for a limited-engagement series of six episodes. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson will reprise their roles as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, parts that made them household names in the 1990s. At one point, it seemed like "The X-Files" was everywhere.

How did Michael Jackson come to appear in "The Simpsons?" Why did he not appear under his own name? Find out here.

The influential Fox Kids cartoon only hit the air after a studio exec bet her career on it, with the show going on to prove the Marvel Universe "had commercial value far beyond what anybody estimated."

How a rag-tag group of writers, voice actors, and animators cobbled together MTV's first 'girl hit' and the longest-running animated series in the network's history.

Here's a fact that'll burst your giant, red ball: "Alias'" series finale aired 10 years ago this month. That means it's been a decade since we last watched Sydney Bristow go about the business of being a graduate student by day, spy extraordinaire by night... and also sometimes by day.

300 episodes? Seriously? Seriously. In age dominated by TV series favoring seasons of 13 episodes or less, finite conclusions and ambiguous off-broadcast ratings, it's a rare network show indeed that hits the once-vaunted 300-episode milestone. On Thursday Nov.

"Top Boy," a show created and written by Northern Irish novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennett, premiered on Channel 4 in 2011. Set on the fictional Summerhouse housing estate in Hackney, the series follows Dushane (Ashley Walters) and Sully (Kano), who -- along with a small crew – run a drug ring in the estate.

A decade after it premiered, the creators of 'The Guild' look back on the groundbreaking web comedy.

Stars and creators of the series share their juiciest memories and reflect on the show's legacy.

“She’s going to always be known as the girl who didn’t go to Paris.” To this day, it remains one of the most cutthroat lines ever delivered on reality television. The recipient, of course, was Lauren Conrad, then a wide-eyed twentysomething who had recently fled the Laguna Beach, Calif., bubble where she was raised for Los Angeles to pursue a career in fashion.

"The internet before the internet."

TV Guide named it as the fortieth best television episode of all time. On lists of favorite sitcoms, or favorite holiday episodes, it invariably ranks even higher. "WKRP in Cincinnati's" seventh episode, "Turkeys Away" begins as a wholesome, almost bland, Thanksgiving show.

Fun fact: MTV didn't even plan for the show to be a thing -- it was just supposed to be a schedule filler.

Created by Sam Mettler in 2005, the series gave some heft to a then-lightweight genre by introducing a public-service element: Every episode depicts a week in the life of an addict who has hit rock-bottom and offers each a chance to get sober via a surprise intervention.

‘In casting we saw 200 or 300 people. At one point we thought, argh, maybe it should be animated.’