I was allowed to watch anything that my grandparents watched. I was only limited in what I chose to watch. My grandfather hated Mork and Mindy but that was ONE show I was allowed to choose to watch during the week (I stayed with them while my mom worked every night). I had to watch Fish, Barney Miller, Benny Hill, Hee Haw, Heart to Heart, and Love Boat but I hated all those shows. Still, it was better than sitting in the dark twiddling my thumbs.
At home I could watch whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.
There is much I don’t understand but am curious about in this paragraph.
Are you saying they conspired with each other to make you feel like you were getting away with something against your mom in cahoots with your dad? This seems strange to me if it’s what you’re saying. What reason would they have for wanting you to feel this way?
Also, weren’t TOS episodes an hour long including commercials?
I was not allowed to watch any show that had any intimation of magic in it whatsoever. Dungeons and Dragons was of course right out. Ghostbusters I had to to sneak-watch. Smurfs also was disallowed. Smurfs were actually demons.
This is the one ban that sticks out it my mind too…although I seem to remember “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” being disallowed also (not that I got the subtleties of that anyway).
Monty Python and all the naughty bits were ok, though
It’s so interesting that by the shows people have mentioned, I can tell right away if we’re the same age (or in the ballpark of same age).
My mom was pretty philosophically committed to a no-censorship policy for TV (and reading, too). I think she felt very restricted by her upbringing, and was determined not to repeat that in her own parenting.
However, she drew the line at Three’s Company. It just seemed too dumb to her. I remember her telling us (my brother and I) that we couldn’t watch it because she was afraid it would suck all the IQ points out of our heads. That was the only OUTRIGHT ban.
MASH* was a show my dad loved to watch, and I was allowed to watch that with him, and I loved having a show we watched together (even though I was so young that the vast majority of the show went right over my head, I’m talking 4 or 5 years old here). My mom did think it was too violent, although she agreed the violence was not at all gratuitous, but the rule on this one was that I had to be watching with my dad so he could monitor the amount of blood and gore on the screen.
My interest in Soap came a little later, and I think my mom had some reservations because so many of the themes were more adult, so she discouraged it a bit rather than completely saying no … I don’t even know why I liked it so much, because I definitely wasn’t understanding any of the social issues.
This is the first thing I thought of because my dad would watch it and didn’t care if we were in the room. My mom would freak out about it. My dad mostly didn’t worry about what we were watching, but my mom was pretty strict.
[UK, 1980s] My parents considered ITV (commercial TV) children’s programming to be too lowbrow, so only the BBC was really allowed.
But I too watched Robocop, Hellraiser, the Freddy films etc. before the age of ten, as my friend a couple of houses away had parents with no qualms about unsuitable viewing, thank goodness.
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In was banned in our house. Not for the politics or the suggestive jokes, but for the “disgusting” dancing girls in bikinis and body paint. Yet somehow, we still saw it. Oddly enough, just recently I was talking with my mom and she was remembering that show fondly. That and a few other things are evidence of her selective memory…
I think we were forbidden to watch Laugh In and The Smothers Brothers for a while. To be fair, they were the raciest things on at the time.
I used to stay up late and watch Monty Python when I discovered it on our local PBS station. I had to skip it when my grandmother was visiting, though, because she didn’t sleep much.
Because my parents raised me to question authority. Seriously. See the username? It’s their fault.
They wanted me to learn to think for myself, to realize when rules were arbitrary and not important, and that included their rules. I was allowed - nay, encouraged - to “lawyer” the rules at every opportunity. If I could present a strong argument, with evidence in my favor, and without whining, rules were always up for change. I was never able to come up with a decent reason why I needed to watch Gilligan’s Island, so that remained on the “no” list. In the case of Star Trek, the rule wasn’t so much that I couldn’t watch Star Trek, it was that Mom didn’t want to be the responsible party for her daughter watching “trash” television. So she literally looked the other way while my dad and I got some awesome bonding time, and she probably enjoyed my conspiratorial giggles and whispers sneaking past the bathroom door back to my bed every bit as much as my dad and I did.
If you’ve never experienced glee when your kids think they’re getting away with something but they aren’t really, I highly suggest it. It’s a win-win all around. (My daughter thinks she’s getting away with reading under the covers after lights out. She doesn’t yet realize that’s exactly why she got a flashlight for her birthday. )
So they were! My bad. She must have enjoyed that hour to herself.
No. We had curfews on how late you could stay up which got later as we aged. My mother once at dinner read a letter to the editor denouncing “Bewitched” and another time once that denounced “Hogan’s Heroes”. But she never prohibited watching it. My father would occasionally exercise his breadwinner rights to watch “Gunsmoke”. Other than that, the main argument was which kid controlled the channel selector that night.
I’m surprised how often Three’s Company comes up in this thread. This, too, was verboten for my sister and I, and for the same reason as many of you have posted - my mom thought it was dumb.
My mother didn’t really have a problem with television per se. She just felt it was a wasteland of stupidity, and didn’t have much to offer. This being the Seventies, she had a point. Those shows that she thought were intelligent and well-written, or clever and funny, were perfectly okay, even if they were a bit violent or racy.
So Gilligan’s Island was out, but MASH** was in; The Mary Tyler Moore Show, WKRP In Cincinnati and Soap passed muster, but Fantasy Island, The Love Boat and The A Team didn’t.
She did have two iron-clad rules about the boob tube: No watching TV during dinner, and if there’s no one in the room with the TV, it gets turned off. She drilled those laws in so well that some forty years later, I still get nervous and uncomfortable at my mother-in-law’s house - she likes to leave the TV on for the voices.
That’s a really sweet story, WhyNot. Clearly your mom understood the attraction of prohibition.
My mom wouldn’t let me watch Three’s Company, though all the innuendo and Jack pretending to be a homosexual all went over my head at the time. I just liked the funny guy who made faces and fell a lot. Things have changed so much since that show was on the air, it seems utterly and completely tame compared to most modern shows. My mom, the same mom who banned the show from the house, even bought my sister all the seasons on DVD a few years back.
Married With Children was also banned for a while, but not for its whole run.
The only other thing I remember specifically being told I couldn’t watch was the TV movie The Day After when it first aired. I hadn’t even heard of it, and my mom sat me down and told me they didn’t want me to watch it because it would be too scary. I was like “okay… I won’t watch this show I never heard of and didn’t plan to watch anyway…” Then the next day at school everyone was talking about it, and we even had to have a special sit down on carpet squares in the front of the classroom so the teacher could discuss it with us.
I finally managed to catch it on cable a few years back (well, probably a decade or more… wow time flies) and found it kinda dumb.
Like others, I wasn’t allowed to watch “Three’s Company.” My father saw that it involved a man living with two women and that was enough to ban it.
We also couldn’t watch “Fantasy Island” and “Love Boat.” I think because of the names.
And couldn’t watch “The Facts of Life” because of the name.
And, for some reason, my father was absolutely convinced that there was a show on TV that was so incredibly smutty, so incredibly offensively vile that we had to flip past it instantly and never speak of it. Yes, I’m talking about “Newhart.”
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