Several times when there has been discussion of music, there’s talk about how many young fans like Classic Rock. Or even older jazz and big band. Of course, it’s often filtered down to just the hits that had long survival anyway, rather than all the hits that didn’t stand the test of time.
But does the same hold for television? Shows, of course, being bigger time-investments than movies (though that may be a different thread). There are remakes/reboots, particularly in children’s programming (though we’ve seen them in a much broader set in recent years), but I’m talking about the originals. Do kids and teens actually seek out and watch older sitcoms or dramas? Or have things just changed too much? Not just in the type of shows made or topical humor or changing social mores or things about actually making shows, but also in how we watch them. Binge-watching seems especially unsuited to sitcoms to me and it makes the bad continuity and plotholes in shows with mytharcs more noticeable.
If by “old” you mean things going back to the '50s and '60s, the only show I can imagine my daughter actually seeking out on her own is the original B&W Addams Family. She loves the franchise, and anything about Wednesday in particular.
Of course she knows about shows like Fawlty Towers and Night Court, mostly through me (I have all the DVDs), and a lot of others (like Dick van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore), but I don’t recall her ever sitting down with me and watching them.
Fifteen–twenty years ago she was hooked on Charmed and House, and we always sat down together to watch CSI, NCIS, Family Guy, Married … with Children, and The Simpsons, but that’s fallen by the wayside.
The only thing we watch together now is Jeopardy! a couple of times a month, and an occasional movie on TCM. (I think the last one was Double Indemnity.)
My 11 year old daughter has loved the Brady Bunch for about three years now. So much so, she had a Very Brady Birthday for her 9th birthday. She also really enjoys watching old Barker-era Price is Rights and Bob Ross’ Joy of Painting on PlutoTV.
She and her 13- year- old brother both enjoyed watching old Pee-wee’s Playhouses a couple years ago. Oh and the old 60s Batman series. They got the DVDs for Christmas a couple years ago.
My kids LOVE “The Simpsons”, and have always liked the old Looney Tunes cartoons. They also love “Rugrats” and some old show called “Recess” which I think was a bit young for me.
As far as regular TV shows go, they’re in there watching “Good Eats” right now. They don’t watch a lot of live-action TV though.
Movies are a different story, albeit outside the scope of this thread.
My daughters love Full House. Other than that, they don’t watch older shows. They hardly watch new TV shows either, apart from sports. Most of their viewing is social media/youtube.
I remember my daughter watching Rugrats twenty-odd years ago, and it goes without saying that we both love Looney Tunes cartoons. We watched shows like 'Allo, 'Allo and Mr Bean together too.
After her mother took her to Canada in 2005, she started watching “reality” shows like You Are What You Eat, Style by Jury, and one about debutantes I think was called Sow’s Ear.
After I moved there and she started living under my roof again, we would watch old stuff like Perry Mason and Rocky and Bullwinkle together. But getting her to sit and watch an episode of Cheers! with me was like pulling teeth. (It was the one with Coach’s daughter, too.)
She didn’t want to watch Amos ‘n’ Andy with me either, but she laughed when she did.
Nowadays she lives with her boyfriend, and from what I hear they get all their TV and movies through streaming, so I really don’t know what her viewing habits are anymore.
I was born in 1980 and grew up on a steady diet of Mary Tyler Moor, Dick Van Dyke, Taxi etc. Basically anything on Nick at Nite in the late 80’s/early 90’s.
My daughter was born in 2005 and I think the oldest thing she’s ever watched is Full House and Saved By The Bell.
But now that I’m looking at it closer Saved by the Bell and Full preceded her birth by about the same amount of time as the shows I watched preceded my birth (about 17 years in either case). From that point of view, she is (was) watching older shows, just as old as the shows I watched as a kid.
This is definitely the point of view I’m looking at. Though interest in even older shows is certainly something I welcome, I was thinking of things 15-20 years before said child’s birth. I have to admit colorization was a big thing for me - I may not have loved the older shows as I did those of my generation, but I liked them well enough. But I mostly wasn’t really interested in anything black and white (except the Addams Family), which coded as “boring” for me then. Now, I prefer that those originally in black and white not be colorized - they look a bit funny.
My older show experience was the Nick at Nite thing, and was very much sitcoms - don’t know if that’s just because those are the ones my parents called me to watch. Never cared for Beverly Hillbillies, or Petticoat Junction. I did like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Green Acres (for a while, but not the entire series), and especially Get Smart, for some reason.
One fundamental change is that probanly 75% of what my kid watches is Youtube, not Traditional TV at all. And a lot of it is fantastic: way more educational than anything I had access to.
He likes Futurama and Simpsons. Old movies are a big hit, though: Blues Brothers, Spaceballs, The Princess Bride. The Holy Grail. Pirates of the Caribbean is like 20 years old, does that count?
He also likes old books, mostly. Those seem to usully hold up pretty well.
TV has changed. I tried watching all in the family, which i loved when it came out. It’s slow. There’s this incredibly annoying laugh track. It’s just a different experience from modern shows.
Back then, you couldn’t hit “pause” or “back”, and if you missed something, you missed it. The screens were small, so there was never anything important in the background. Show came out once a week and that was it, no one watched two episodes back to back.
I think TV changed fundamentally when viewers started watching recordings and streaming services, and could skip over stuff and rewind.
I agree–the pacing of shows in the past was different, and laugh tracks have gone through phases of heavy/light touch.
I liked “All in the Family” as a kid, and suspect I might not like it as much now.
As a counterexample, I am absolutely fascinated by “What’s My Line” and find the casual friendly nature of the panelists endearing. I find myself reading up on the history of each mystery guest in Wikipedia and learning quite a bit about people from a bygone era.
I am steeling myself in preparation for watching the November 7th 1965 episode–Dorothy Kilgallen died the next day at 52. Though I never knew of her existence before a few months ago, after watching many episodes, I’m sure I will feel a sense of mourning over a death from almost sixty years ago.
I never know how to feel when I hear someone call something from 20 years ago “old”. Should I laugh or cry ?
I was born in 1955, and I mostly consider things from the '30s and earlier as “old.” Certainly nothing after the Eisenhower administration. I guess it’s because I remember them so well.
The last 20 years have gone by so fast for me, I feel I must have missed something somewhere along the way. I think there’s been a lack of continuity in my life.
I was a teen in the mid 1970’s and regularly watched reruns of Star Trek, I Love Lucy, Dream of Jeannie, Big Valley etc. Most of those shows were almost a decade old.
I’ve seen todays teens watching Seinfeld and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They’re 20 years old now.
My 16-yr-old son binge-watched Fawlty Towers recently. He likes a lot of old shows, some of which he discovers on his own, and some of which he finds his father or me watching.
He’s been watching Doctor Who with his father since he was about 10, and when he was maybe 13 started watching old episodes.
He’s watched Taxi, Bob Newhart, Bewitched, & The Addams Family. He loves The Big Bang Theory, which is an old show to him (!!) He also likes some British mystery mini-series. He likes SNL, and was fascinated to find out it’s been on since I was in junior high. So he looked up a few old episodes. He thought a few things were funny, but I had to explain a lot of the references.
Amazingly, he actually got some of the Reagan jokes. But there was one where Gilda Radner was playing Patty Hearst that he wasn’t even sure about after I explained it. Especially when I tried to tell him one of her kidnappers taught English at MY junior high school right before she joined the Symbionese Liberation Army (TRUE!-- she didn’t teach me, but she taught some of my friends older sibs). He decided I was ranting from early onset dementia, I think.
Define “older”? My girls watched Star Trek:TOS, but that’s it. Everything else retro they watch is from the 90s (other Star Trek, or Friends in the older one’s case.) But nothing else from the 80s or before.
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