:dubious:
When you have three young teenage girls singing along to “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” and “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” in your backseat while looking up Instagram fan accounts of the Beatles, it’s not that simple.
They might not know about ALL the 1980s TV shows, but they sure watch them. Or, at least, clips on YouTube/Hulu/Netflix. They might never watch an episode of “Law & Order”, but they sure know of its existence and the meaning of the “doink-doink” sound, which is more than you could say of me in 1983 - I surely wasn’t watching “Ironsides” reruns from 1971, that’s for sure!
But today’s kids do. They live in a world where the culture is far more timeless because so much of it is accessible. Frank Sinatra. Celtic music. 40s fashion. Mozart. LOTR. Back to the Future. Friends. All of these, and more, were fads that swept my daughter’s friends over the past 5 years (as well as the usual gaggle of boy bands, Katy Perry, etc).
It was difficult and expensive to have a Sinatra collection in 1982 (when I was my daughter’s age). Nowadays, she has 20 services ready to give her all the Frank she wants to listen to.
And, really, YouTube is the gateway for a lot of this. It’s free, it’s easily broken (from a “get around parental restrictions” standpoint), works on phones, tablets, and there’s videos on almost everything.
But to say the “kids” have no “historical awareness”, especially of pop culture of years and decades and centuries past, doesn’t jibe with my experience.
This is merely a list of those shows whom the most people clicked a link taking them from IMDB to that show’s website and really doesn’t have anything to do with “kids”. Kids aren’t going to look up “Rizzoli & Isles” or more than half these shows.