I still want to emphasize the difference between “these shows are available, if you know where to look” (current day) and “these shows were the only thing on” (back in the day), there is a broad chasm between those two conditions.
Regardless, my question remains, do we know if younger viewers watch The Honeymooners, Little Rascals, Three Stooges, or even know about them?
Define “younger”
One word: Hotties. 
My kids know about The Three Stooges, since I have enjoyed them all my life, and shared with them when they were younger. We still have an occasional Stooge-fest. As for most of the other shows, I would suspect unless young people today had some sort of influence (like me) to let them know about it, they probably would not recognize them.
It’s interesting about the Stooges (and others, I am sure): they started out as filler before a feature show until that ended, then spent years on syndicated TV until that ended, then on video cassette until that ended, and now are available, and known, on the internet. That they have been able to transcend the various media all these years is testament to their genius!
Well, given that there are hundreds of cable channels and multiple streaming services available, there is not and will never will again (excepting a societal collapse) be “the only thing on” shows again, so nothing will meet the criteria you are asking for. You said “It seems to me (correct me if I’m wrong) these shows are no longer shown constantly on TV.” These shows are still shown constantly on TV. You are wrong. We are correcting you.
I know lots of younger people (20s & 30s) who are familiar with everything from The Our Gang comedies to Dick Van Dyke, but they mostly saw them on DVDs their parents or grandparents owned, or found them on YouTube. I think there will always be an audience for something food-- people still read The Canterbury Tales– but video and then DVD, plus YouTube and streaming services have mostly killed reruns of a lot of things. Frankly, I’m surprised that Friends gets so much TV playtime considering you can find it for free several places, and the DVDs have been out forever. I’m actually less surprised to see shows that are in lower demand for streaming on TV-- Charlie’s Angels, for example-- although I am amused that there is a religious channel running it, because it’s apparently now considered very tame.
Nobody yet has mentioned a huge problem with older shows: the pacing.
Sitcoms up to the mid-80s are dreadfully slow by modern viewing habits. Watching them as reruns in the '90s is okay because you’d probably seen them before, but watching them today is unbearable for an adult audience.
About the only thing that’s comparable is terrible reality tv shows (you know, the house-flipping kind) where they recap everything when they come back from commercial break.
You think so? I think that’s really a YMMV thing.
the first version of an coast to coast rerun channel was WTBS in the 80s in fact until he sold every thing to time warner he had a rule that none of his channels showed anything that was under 10 years old with about 3 exceptions :
1 Atlanta sports 2 the original nat geo explorer and the pro wrestling leagues he owned or had rights to oh and beastmaster
Also referring to the cartoons that’s not on in the afternoons anymore time warner has made most of them boomerang exclusive since ted bought AAP (the company that owned all the theatre)animation rightsup to the 70s) and Hannah-barbera studios and there now owned by warners (in fact bill and joe would joke about jack warner and louis b mayer were rolling in their graves since they hated each other … )
Also sony reclaimed the copyrights to their original 3 stooges shorts and are very picky who shows them these days If your in la KTLA has one of its sub channels show the shorts from 12 to 6 am once a week … it was on the main channel for years … they used to show them on the weekends every few hours due to Columbia silently investing in the channel when it began …
these days the little rascals are considered politically incorrect to show… which left kcop 13 with nothing to show on sundays (they were notorious for packaging different blocks with punny names based on movies like "rascals 3: the search for spanky
Yeah, hopefully you can’t paint all Millennial adults with the ADHD brush.
I agree with this - many shows from times past would be inappropriate today. I somehow stumbled onto an episode of “All in the Family” some time ago, and I was thinking “oh, man!”.
How can you not love a series where the stars belong to an organization called “The He-Man Women Haters’ Club”? 
I don’t know if there’s a market for the OLD shows anymore, but I don’t think there’s much worry about the shows of a comparable age being shown these days.
I mean, when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, most of the time-filler shows were from the 1950s through the 1960s. Stuff like Leave it to Beaver, Star Trek, Gunsmoke, Big Valley, Petticoat Junction, Bewitched, etc… Nowadays, you can still see shows of relative vintage, like Friends, Seinfeld, Golden Girls, Star Trek TNG, MASH, Married with Children, etc… They’re not constantly on, but they do rotate through them with regularity.
I think where the bottom has dropped out of the old show market is in kid shows though; the ONLY ones I see on anymore that I recall are Looney Toons, Tom and Jerry and sometimes Scooby Doo, although the latter tends to be the later 1980s-1990s stuff. You have to go over to Cartoon Network to see anything else, and it’s always “retro” stuff aimed at adults. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are still on, but almost exclusively new content, not the original stuff. There’s just a huge amount of first-run content as well as lesser slots for it in the networks, so the old stuff is just edged out for the most part, with PBS, Sprout and Nickelodeon taking up the slack with the new shows.
I’ve noted this too, and with dramas, as well.
When I was growing up in the early 1970s, one of my favorite shows was “Emergency!” (Jack Webb’s paramedic drama, with Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe). A few years ago, they released the first season of the show on DVD. My wife had loved the show, too, and so, we bought the DVD set.
It’s fun to watch from a nostalgia standpoint, but, wow, it’s sloooooooowly paced. If it were re-edited in a modern style, those one-hour episodes would only last about 30 minutes.
I watched those shows too when I was a kid, but remember Seinfeld today is a lot older than Burns & Allen when we were growing up. And there is easily 100 x more inventory to sort through.
I had a book of late’40s early '50s TV shows, and was surprised at the large number that never turned up on our local stations. I lived in NY so I got to watch more independents than just about anyone outside of LA.
So the market for these shows is a lot smaller now, plus those few who care can order DVDs from Netflix in order to see them. I watched all of Have Gun Will Travel that way.
Every single one of these shows still airs regularly. Most of them run daily.
OK, so in the 70s and 80s you watched shows from the 50s and 60s. Those shows, at the time, were 20 or 30 years old.
It is now 2017, and the equivalent shows nowadays are shows from the 80s and 90s. Your kid self watching a show like “I Love Lucy” and “The Honeymooners” in 1975 would be like a kid today watching “Friends” and “Seinfeld”.
In other words, the crusty old crap you watched in the 70s because there was literally nothing else wasn’t actually that old. You’re just a lot older than you think. Kids today who watch crusty old shows are watching shows you don’t think of as “old” because they came out when you were an adult.
And the sheer amount of backlog available today is completely different. In 1975 TV had only been really available as a mass market for 20 years. In the distant future of the present in 2017 we have a gigantic back catalog from 60 years of TV, and the amount of content churned out yearly just gets bigger and bigger so the back catalog gets bigger faster and faster.
And since there are hundreds of channels, along with streaming media, kids today are never going to be forced into a choice of watching “I Love Lucy”, a soap opera, and coverage of the local city council meeting. My kids literally never ever watch broadcast TV. And they never even watch cable TV. They only watch streaming media from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, or Youtube. Yes, they watch a lot of crap, but it’s completely different crap than the kind of stuff we watched as kids.
Oh, I just remembered that they do watch cable TV…when they visit Nana, and Nana has to watch Jeopardy. So that’s a couple times a year.
Is Are You Being Served run on any of the oldies channels?
I watched it for years on PBS after the 10 PM news. I grieved when they stopped.
I’ve thought about buying the DVDs. Watch one episode every weeknight after the news. Just like it used to be.
Ideal show for 10:30 when you’re sleepy and just laid down.
Burn Out is a problem with classic tv.
I’ve seen most of the episodes of Big Valley, Gunsmoke & Bonanza ten times. I’ve seen TOS Star Trek episodes 20 times. I finally reached a point that I stopped watching.
Karen Valentine. Miniskirts. I’ll never forget.
Everything everybody has said is true. But also, they fill up time now by replaying current shows. In the 70s, first run shows would be shown once, and filler was from the 50s. Now I’m seeing filler from last year.