I caught an epi of Miami Vice the other day. I remember how ultra cool this show was back in the early '80s. Disco music, Don Johnson’s girly-man wardrobe and hair, etc. place it firmly in its time period. I have no idea if the plots are still germane or not. I couldn’t get past the saturation of '80s kitsch.
I don’t think Aaron Spelling had any show that was well thought of during it’s run or after.
I feel like Babylon5 has held up pretty well, but part of the problem with rewatching it is that the first season wasn’t as good as the latter seasons even back in the day. Some of the costuming, effects, and sets just weren’t all the way there, but that’s not a product of it aging badly. The CGI is obviously not up to today’s standards, but I don’t think it has glaringly bad moments, and was pretty much just used for space ships so for me it’s easy to distance from it. ST:TNG and DS9 OTOH does worse in my eyes, like someone else said the sets look very much of their time. B5 has a futuristic look that doesn’t seem as tightly tied to a 90s aesthetic, to me at least.
I tried watching it again a few years back. I couldn’t get past the self-conscious wooden acting. :smack:
What put me off was the lame jokes, incessant moralizing, and smothering political correctness. Not to mention the stupid attempts to “update” the concept (children on board, saucer separation, overuse of the Holodeck, Ten-Forward as a “happening place,” and so on).
Every now and then, I try watching an episode. Usually I turn it off after the first ten minutes.
I don’t find it bad I just find it boring for the most part.
I agree with your point about technology in general, but in the communicator’s defense it really is still much more advanced than anything we have today. If you’re going to compare it to a cellular phone then it wouldn’t be fair to exclude the dense network of towers needed to support it. If you’re going to compare it to a satellite phone then it wouldn’t be fair to exclude the satellites and infrastructure required. The communicator is pretty small even by today’s standards when you consider it needs to have a respectable battery life and communicate with a ship in orbit, with no local infrastructure at all.
You are basically saying that modern shows are ageist; Portraying a world where the elderly do not exist. Is this really better?
I saw a rerun of “Charmed” recently. I didn’t really watch when it was new, but remember people referring to it as being really feminist because all of the main characters are female. But all they seem to do is talk about the various men in their lives. Since the popularization of things like the Bechdel test, things like that stand out like a sore thumb in a way they didn’t in the 90s.
Yeah, but the X-Files doesn’t purport to be anything other than a 1990s show. That doesn’t really bother me any more than watching “Leave it to Beaver” re-runs and noticing that everything is set in the 1950s/1960s.
I think the biggest impediment to watching older shows is that the pacing has changed, probably due to there being a lot more commercial time per hour now than there were in shows from the 80s and before.
So now we’re used to shows being tighter and faster, and older shows have a more… leisurely(?) pace that’s hard to get used to. For example, I watched an episode of “Golden Girls” the other day (was bored and it was late at night), and it was both funnier than I remember the show being, and also amazingly slower in terms of the pacing of the scenes, and the plot of the episode, when compared to latter day sitcoms.
I’ve sometimes watched classic shows from the 50s. Most don’t hold up well. Ozzie and Harriet, Bachelor Father, The Cisco Kid …
It’d be easier to name the few that do hold up, like Burns and Allen.
I tried to watch West Wing because so many people on this board love the show. I couldn’t even make it through the first show.
The use of pagers I found to be distracting. Especially when they play it off as “I’m an important person, that’s why I have this pager. How cool am I?”
Also, at the beginning of one scene:
“I gotta go. I have a meeting with the POTUS”
“POTUS? What’s POTUS?”
“President of The United States!” [cue dramatic music]
It was just too silly for me to take seriously. It was probably good for its time though.
I wish my mother had loved me that much 
Aaron Spelling aimed at the lowest of the lowest common denominators. He was matched only by Gary Marshall.
Boring isn’t bad? :dubious: 
For a while we were watching re-runs of the Andy Griffith Show. It’s enjoyable in a quaint way, but the plots are incredibly lame, and I can see the jokes getting set up a mile away.
I wonder - did people think the same thing when the show was new?
Boring is bad. At the time they were first on I liked them well enough but was never totally thrilled. They made it too antiseptic. Too many spatial anomalies as the bad guy. There were some very good shows in there too.
That depends. How many years have you been watching/exposed to TV sitcoms? 10 years? 30 years? Maybe you’ve seen so many shows that those jokes, which were fresh in 1960, have been reused so much over the years that you’ve “heard them before”
For example, I can’t be bothered with modern day horror films. They bore me. I’ve seen so many horror/suspense films in my 50+ years that I can’t be scared by the stuff being passed as horror these days.
Sometimes the problems aren’t in the shows or movies, it’s not that they’re “lame”, it’s that we’ve seen just too damn much!
Sorry for the tangent, but this always bothered me. Star Trek communicators are not just communicators. Our cell phones don’t have the ability to sent signals into orbit. And their range is apparently planet wide, since I’m pretty sure they work even when there’s no ship in orbit. Not called out in the show, but they have to be high power encryption device as well. Just my head cannon here, but making it a single-use device might be due to security reason.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer doesn’t hold up in reruns. Dated music and I know the story arc of each character. Willow has puppy dog eyes for Oz. Then they are together for awhile. Then she’s gay. Then she’s evil.
Knowing the fate of the characters makes it pointless to rewatch. It’s actually painful to see Buffy’s mom knowing her fate.
MASH doesn’t hold up because it ran several seasons too long. I was getting tired of the thinner and thinner storylines. No way would I rewatch all 251 episodes.