Well, for one thing, especially for the older ones, a lot of their run just doesn’t exist anymore except as stills.
There were occasional soap opera reruns…As The World Turns had an annual tradition of running a classic episode on Christmas and New Years. “Classic” meaning 1980s episodes, usually.
Please forgive me if I misunderstand you, but The Sopranos is classic in any TV age. It eould be classic without the cursing and nudity because the acting and writing is brilliant. I would disagree with an above post that a random episode from its run couldnt be enjoyed out of order. Watch for the late great Gandolfini and Falco.
As I mentioned earlier, I’d conciser “classic” TV to be the 1970s at the latest, and I’d be much more comfortable calling, for instance, I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners classic TV than I would The Brady Bunch or My Three Sons. But I admit that for me “classic” means “something from before I was born or from my very early childhood”, and that’s going to be a different range for different people.
Obviously some things hold up better than others. The X-Files, NewsRadio, Northern Exposure, these were high-quality shows at the time and are still compelling today. Others, not so much.
Personally, I’ve found the 80s action-oriented shows like Miami Vice, Knight Rider, and The A-Team to be awful. It’s painful. I was alive when they were new, I watched them as a kid, and I remember them fondly but that’s really where they should have stayed. (Granted, save for Miami Vice these shows were not particularly well-regarded in their own time, either.)
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Some others (that I’ve been seeing in reruns recently) are The Rockford Files and Columbo. Older shows like that can have a slower pace that you just don’t find that often anymore.
Uh, One Day at a Time was most definitely not a soap opera. :smack:
I’ve gone out of my way to watch/own these:
[ul]
[li]Twin Peaks[/li][li]I, Claudius[/li][li]Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy[/li][li]Smiley’s People[/li][li]The Sandbaggers[/li][/ul]
All highly recommended.
I binge-watched Miami Vice when COZI TV began running it. I consider it a classic, even though it aired on the 80s and I was in my late 20s. It was influenced by. MTV and in its turn, it influenced men’s fashions, and other TV shows began to imitate its styles. And the scripts for the most part were good, although I always raised an eyebrow at Sonny Crockett marrying Sheena Easton, for one thing. It seemed like a case of stuntcasting just to boost ratings. I enjoyed the end of the series when both Crockett and Tubbs, frustrated with the courts kicking their suspects back out on the streets, resigned in disgust.
Well if they’d use valid police procedures, gather evidence, and generally provide the DA with a winnable case, (plus not have gotten conked on the head and actually worked (successfully!) as the head of an international drug cartel, which kinda destroys your credibility) then maybe they wouldn’t have so many thrown out. Just sayin’.
PS get a haircut and some socks! geeze.
Whoops! Well, the name reminded me to think of soap operas, due to its similarity to One Life to Live, I guess?
As a humorous aside, one of the lamest of the lame contestants on the current, dumbed-down iteration of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? was faced with the question “More than 4,000 episodes of which classic TV series are stored in a vault in Kansas?” The choices were, IIRC, The Honeymooners, Gilligan’s Island, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and one more (Miami Vice, maybe).
Apparently, the word “classic” meant more to her than the number “4,000,” which would indicate a run of around 30 years (like, you know, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson). After much deliberation, she picked The Honeymooners (of which there are 39 surviving “classic” episodes). DUH! :smack:
She was out with 5,000 grossly undeserved dollars after using up all her lifelines in the first five questions. Where the hell do they dig up these people, and why do they bother putting them on the air?*
*A purely rhetorical question, of course: They’re “average” Americans, are able to fill air time by spouting pointless drivel, and stand absolutely no chance of ever winning really large sums of money. ***Millionaire ***is definitely another classic series that has fallen on absurdly hard times. Just once, I’d like to see Chris Harrison stare at a contestant and say “What the fuck is wrong with you?!?” after a they give a stupid answer.
Or Days of Our Lives.
Used to watch that occasionally, and remember seeing someone lose on the first question. The “joke” one worth $100.
My favorite happened a couple of years ago: I forget the exact “Where would you be if…?” question (and it was the first one), but the obvious answer was “Ikea” and the idiot chose “Rome, Italy” because it mentioned eating meatballs. :smack: :smack: :smack:
I think that this is the one that I remembered.
(Glitch in posting–double post deleted.)
Oh, I agree, I was just commenting on Little Nemo’s frustration with people not answering the OP specifically. The title, on first read, makes it sound like he’s asking about old TV shows like I Love Lucy and Honeymooners, which are the first things I think of when I hear “Classic TV”, but he’s really asking about Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. I was just trying to explain the disconnect between his expectations and some of the answers he has received.
It’s sobering that of the approximately 326,227,632 Americans now alive, at least 163,113,816 aren’t even that intelligent. 
“Classic TV” has a specific meaning. Like “Classic rock”, it doesn’t mean stuff that is merely great (i.e., a “classic”), but refers to a specific time frame.
I don’t consider a show still on the air, or one that ended in the last ten years, to be classic TV, so I figured (incorrectly) that the OP was one of those people that thinks anything older than last year is old.
In answer to the question he intended to ask, this 55 year old isn’t going to start watching BB or the Sopranos or any other modern serialized TV show that I’m not already watching (such as The Americans).
I remember that one. He realized it pretty much right away, though. I really can’t fault him for it. It wasn’t so much stupidity as being distracted by the last joke answer and a momentary brain fart that ended with “final answer.” I can totally see myself doing something like this on a high pressure stage like a game show.