I think there’s another fundamental change- when I was a kid, if I wanted to watch TV during the day on a school vacation or when I was home sick , it was all old reruns, usually of sitcoms or game/talk shows. That was it - we didn’t have cable. My kids had loads of choices and now there is streaming added - if my children or grandchildren ever end up watching an old TV show it will be by choice, not because at 10am they had a choice of two twenty-year old sitcoms , three game shows and a talk show.
As far as old TV shows - my son watched “Seinfeld” in syndication but it wasn’t that old at the time. He started watching maybe 5 years after it went off the air.
I guess this is considered TV - my son started watching Laurel & Hardy when he was around 2 years old. He loved those shows his entire life and would watch them whenever they were on.
My 23 year old has seen a lot of older stuff but that was via late night basic cable when reruns of old sitcoms was the best thing on. In this era of streaming on demand, I assume fewer teenagers are landing on Night Court.
Although, when he was maybe 15, he did steal and consume my box set of The Red Green Show on his own volition.
I agree that TV shows have changed a lot. But I don’t feel that necessarily means old shows aren’t being watched. I look at myself. I would consider series like The Andy Griffith Show or Gunsmoke or The Twilight Zone to be old shows. But I can watch episodes of these shows and enjoy them, even while recognizing that they don’t make shows like these anymore (WandaVision excepted).
I’ve never seen that, but based on reading about two sentences of the premise, maybe try Would I Lie To You. The general form of the show is that a panelist reads a card that contains either something true or something false about themselves (and they don’t know what they’re about to read) and the other members have to ask them questions and decide if it’s true or not.
Some people, like Rhod Gilbert, are exceptionally good at staying on their toes while making up a lie and equally good and pretending to stay on their toes when telling the truth.
Yes, my kids watch older television shows, older being stuff that was made before they were born, or arguably, before they tuned into pop culture, or stuff from pre-2005 or so (for the former qualifier).
actually when i was a kid the “superstation” concept had just started and it was all the 50s and 60s a lot of it I didn’t like or didn’t appreciate at the time … but MEtv antenna tv decades etc was the old WTBS in Atlanta and WGN in Chicago and others
Heck a lot of it was reruns of shows that were still on the air like mash barney miller … alice …
Then came nick at nite and then I watched shows id never seen originally even some rare ones …
I think it’s pretty obvious that people and tv aren’t measured on the same scale. In 1990 Bewitched was about that age, and absolutely everyone I knew regarded it as an old show. And since so damn many people believe old age starts north of 70, we’d have a very small pool of shows if we used people-based-oldness.
My 9 year old does NOT watch old TV. She occasionally encounters older shows, for example the other day she was watching a Treehouse of Horrors clip compilation on YouTube, and I said she could watch the full episodes on Disney, but she didn’t want to. Similar things have happened with South Park.
She likes Star Trek Discovery and Lower Decks, but won’t watch any of the older shows.
A big part of that is rejection of any culture that parents recommend, but even with access to lots of old shows on various streaming services she hasn’t gotten into any old shows on her own. I’m sure if one of the YouTube channels she watches recommended some old show like ER she’d be all over it.
Right. A 25-year-old person wouldn’t be considered old, but a 25-year-old car certainly would be, and a 25-year-old dog would be ancient. “Old” is relative to what kind of thing you’re talking about.
My 23-year old loved The Waltons, and she was really amused when her 12-year old cousin confided that she loved Malcolm in the Middle, which my 23-year old watches religiously, and they bonded over that. My kid never saw that show during its initial run.
She also had a lot of questions for me about The Simpsons when I came upon her watching reruns one day. I had to explain how groundbreaking and novel it was when it first came out, and how we’d make sure she and her sibs were in bed by 8PM Sunday night (for as long as we could get away with it) so we could watch.
I used to love What’s My Line, back in the days when the Game Show Network would show it regularly on Sunday evenings. It had a rather odd mixture of that “casual friendly nature” that you mentioned, and an old-fashioned stuffy formality. All the male panelists would wear dark suits and ties, and John Daly called everybody “Mister” or “Miss,” and would rather ponderously ask the female contestants “Is it Miss or Mrs.?” There was a lot of what we would today call “dead space,” where the contestants would shake hands with the panel, or Bennet Cerf would tell some long meandering story that ended in an awful pun. You could probably do a revival today, but the pacing and the general tone would have to be very different.
I’d agree, but it’s also not a linear scale. Somewhere around the mid- to late-90s, things slowed down somehow. At least, for sitcoms. Early 80s sitcoms seem very old now, 90s shows like Friends seem dated, but not old.
Whereas yes, in 1985, a 1960 show would seem old as balls, I agree.
I don’t know if it was the rise of video, cable and syndication that “froze” shows, kept them current for longer, and streaming subsequently accelerated that, or what it is. But shows stay current for longer, it seems to me.