The SNL episode where (I think) Rosanne Rosannadanna spouts this little ditty, along the same lines as the infamous “beans, beans” poem:
Jeans, jeans,
The magical pants.
The tighter they are,
The greater the chance
That someone for sure
Will be there to watch
And see how you scratch
The itch in your crotch.
I saw that as a rerun, and only one time, but it has stuck in my mind ever since. It’s quite funny in a lowbrow way, but it makes me a bit sad anyway … R.I.P. Gilda.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer S5, episode 22–The Gift. When they all gather around her body and Spike falls to the ground, crying completely torn up, bleeding. All I could think of was that he told her when she gives in to her death wish, he’d be there–it would be one. good. day. I mean, the Slayer of Slayers sobbing at the death of one, I know he loved her, but still, for me that was pretty powerful.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer S7 ep 22–Chosen.
“I love you.”
“No you don’t, but thanks for saying it.”
sniff I’m getting all choked up just thinking about it.
I remember Reagan being shot, because they pre-empted Scooby Doo. I’ve been a Democrat ever since.
I remember being at my grandmother’s, watch Geraldo trying to breach Al Capone’s vaults, and being bitterly, bitterly angry when we had to leave about fifteen minutes before he finally got the doors open. Not that I missed much, of course.
I saw the Dwyer video, but not when it was broadcast. One of my jackass friends surprised me with the video clip on the internet. “Dude, come over to the computer! You gotta check this out!” Christ, I wish I’d never seen that.
I remember being very young, but still old enough to know who the Beatles were and what Seargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was, and I remember seeing the movie of the same name (the one starring the Bee Gees) and being terribly, terribly confused.
There used to be a bug, or a secret code, or some damn thing, in the old cable boxes, where you could hit a combo of buttons and get free Showtime. I’m not making this up. IIRC, you’d go to the channel right before showtime, and press up and down at the same time. When I was thirteen, I used this exclusively on Saturday nights to watch, and tape, cheesy soft core porn. I still have one of them kicking around here somewhere. The Next Lady Chatterly, I believe.
I remember spending the bulk of my highschool graduation party watching a particular white bronco cruise liesurely through the freeways of Los Angeles.
I remember the scene with the jet engine at the end of the first episode of Firefly (the first one they aired, anyway). It remains the coolest single thing I’ve ever seen in scripted television.
Oh, I forgot a couple news related one…
August 1991, I was up alone watching TV around midnight on a Sunday night/Monday morning. I flipped through to CNN and paused for a few minutes for no particular reason, and the announcer said, something to the effect of, “This is just in from Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev has resigned.” or whatever the original cover story for the hardliner coup was. No doubt the backroom at CNN was going nuts, but for about the next fifteen minutes or a half hour, the anchor just continued keeping to the script before the coverage really began. That turned into a long and memorable night of watching history unfold on TV…
From the same era…I also remember coming home from 5pm Saturday night church with the family, turning on the local news where the anchor had just starting to announce that Pres. Bush had taken ill while in Japan (the barfing incident). While it turned out to be a little funny in the end, it seemed to be more than just food poisoning at first and I remember my mother especially being very concerned…I think she was afraid of the thought of Pres. Quayle! 
My family had a satellite dish at the time of the post Rodney King verdict riots in LA…we spent that evening cruising the raw feeds coming in…and I mean raw.
We were staying with my Aunt Ida in Connecticut, and I remember we had the TV on the whole time, as background noise. We’d wander from time to time into the living room to see how the war was going. We were so happy when Israel won: “At last! Peace in the Mideast!”
Oy.
Yeah, as I recall it was pretty unreal. There was so much blood that it looked like a scene from a bad ‘B’ horror movie.
In our area it was the Playboy Channel. Channel 22. You pushed the buttons for 21 and 23 at the same time, and it mostly descrambled the softcore pornathon that ran from from 9PM to 6AM. (Ahh, Electric Blue.) Problem was the buttons on those first generation boxes (that went all the way up to channel 24, MTV) were so bloody loud that your parents could tell what you were up to from five rooms away.
[sub]Or so I’ve been told.[/sub]
Oh, and I remember watching a certain white Ford Bronco quite well, too.
9-11 leaves an impression of course.
As for something from a TV show, well one thing that sticks with me is when Ralphie beat the stripper to death on The Sopranos. It is one of the saddest, most disturbing things I’ve seen on any TV show or movie.
I missed seeing a lot of these events live, although in the cases of 9-11 and others I stayed glued to the set for the follow-ups.
My roommates and I watched most of the first Gulf War on TV. I remember the guy giving his report from Jerusalem while wearing a gas mask seemed pretty surreal.
KAL flight 007 being shot down.
The continual updates on hijacked planes being flown from city to city around the mid-east.
The Tienamen Square demonstrations and crackdown.
Joe Thiesman’s leg getting snapped like a twig.
One recent one I remember was about a grisly murder here back in 1997. A 10-year-old’s severed head had been placed at the entrance of an elementary school in Kobe, and for months the entire nation was waiting for the police to find who the killer was. I was sitting in a little noodle shop when the news came on that an arrest had been made. The entire restaurant froze when they announced that it was a 13-year-old boy.
Excellent question… my responses come in several categories:
Actual news events:
My primary images of 9/11 are not really the TV images, because I first heard about it on the car radio while driving to work, at which time both the towers had already fallen. So I went into work, and we just hung around watching TV for several hours and then left, but my strongest memory is the sense of shock and national community, not any particular TV image. I didn’t have a TV at the time of Challenger, was never very interested in OJ, and associate the first gulf war more with car radio than TV, and the second more with constantly checking cnn.com.
Actually, the news event that I most strongly associate in my mind with just sitting watching things develop on TV was the death of Princess Di.
Sports:
Far and away the most exciting sports moment that I’ve seen live on TV was the gold medal game in women’s soccer in the 2000 olympics. The US, favored to beat Sweden, went up 1-0 with apparent ease, then gave up two cheap goals, trailed 2-1 going into penalty time, and then, 2+minutes into penalty time, when all hope had failed, SCORED A GOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAL!!! (The US went on to lose in overtime, but oh my lord was that goal exciting).
TV Shows:
Many moments from My So Called Life struck strong chords with me, in particular, the ends of Other People’s Mothers, The Life of Brian, and In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, plus the whole scene in the church from So-called Angels.
My favorite TV show, The Simpsons, has provided many memorable moments, perhaps the single most defining being the first time I saw the monorail song from Marge Vs. The Monorail.
Late Night with Conan O’Brien had a sketch a few years ago in which Arafat and Sharon are arguing about the middle east, and GWB and Ozzie Osbourne come in to mediate. It includes Arafat complaining that while trapped in his office, all he had to eat was Bugles and Fluffernutter. I’ve searched hard to find that skit online somewhere, but with no success…
My single most memorable Saturday Night Live moment was on the Andrew Dice Clay show, the brief “Skit Glorifying Hitler”, with Dana Carvey doing an odd by hysterical mishmash of a Hitler impression along with all of his SNL catchphrases.
And finally, the single most stunning thing I’ve ever seen on TV was Cassius’s self-righting mechanism on season 2 (I think… maybe season 3) of the British RobotWars. (The reason this was so stunning was that it introduced an entirely new and unexpected capability to these robots, which we had watched compete for so long… it was more or less equivalent to a human athlete suddenly learning to fly in the middle of a game…)
The ending of Blackadder IV. The most moving moment in all of the rich history of British sitcoms.
Second Blackadder IV.
As far as sports go, even though I am not a Man Utd fan, injury time in the 1999 Champions League final is pretty hard to beat.
Actually, Michael Thomas’ goal for Arsenal against Liverpool in the last game of the season in 1989 might just beat it.
Non-sporting real world events? I didn’t see September 11th live, so probably either the knocking down of the Berlin Wall or the fella with the bags in Tiananmen Square.
For some reason, what sticks out to me, besides all these ‘normal’ responses of earth-shaking events, comes from somewhere in the early '70’s. I was eating a bowl of some sort of sugary cereal, in my childhood innocence, when my mom put the Mike Douglas show on. The whole show was about a semi-skanky looking teenage girl who talked about how she was an alcoholic. It was like the first ray of darkness falling on my innocence. I was entranced by the story, both because of the fact that this wasn’t a Leave it to Beaver kind of thing on TV, but also because I was strangely attracted to her. I was only maybe 5 years old, buy I remember being aroused by this girl, and not understanding it. She was crying and her eyeliner was running down her face. Nothing has been black and white since I saw that show.
I second third and fourth a lot of these but a couple I will never forget.
I think it was on a Saturday. Don’t remember the date without looking it up. But I very clearly remember watching the first crack form in the iron curtain. It was the day that Solidarity took over Poland. I remember turning to my sister and saying, “This is first man on the moon type stuff.” Looking back it was really the beginning of the end for the USSR.
Another was watching Dan Rather devolve as the night went on and the votes were counted in 2000. I have never seen a major news anchor “lose it” quite so badly while covering a story.
9/11 of course. And six months later, when CBS ran the tape of the first plane hitting the WTC, with the full sound effect of everyone saying “HOLY SHIT.” Kinda summed up the whole day.
And on the short-lived TV series “Something Wilder,” where Gene Wilder played the father of twin two year old boys. He goes over to the neighbors to complain about the late parties and loud music at their house. The neighbor is Alice Cooper, who then complains about the music coming from Gene’s house, and Alice sings 'I love you, you love me…" Hearing Alice do the Barney song will stay in my head forever.
Another one for 9/11. After I got home from work that day I was glued to the TV for several hours watching the news coverage.
Going back to my childhood, the first time something on TV really affected me was when I was about 9 or 10 years old, watching the daily coverage of the hostage crisis in Iran. I wanted to know why these people in some faraway country would detain our people for so long, and who was this “Ayatollah” (sp?) guy anyway?
I don’t think anyone has mentioned Oklahoma City yet. I was at work when this happened. I went into the break room and the TV was on. The bombing had just happened as TV cameras were showing the large cavity that had been blasted out of the federal building in OKC. My sense of security at home (here in the U.S.) was compromised after this.
I also remember OJ’s not-so-high-speed chase down the freeway with the white Bronco. I kept watching, hoping he’d step on it.
I remember all the hype that surrounded the Geraldo Rivera episode where KKK/white supremacist members were on the show and a fight broke out onstage with chairs being thrown, one of them breaking Mr. Rivera’s nose. I had never watched the show other than this one episode.
I also recall Johnny Carson’s final show. I also remember the show in which Mr. Carson gave a tribute to his departed son who was killed in a car crash in 1991. The tribute featured a montage of photographs his son had taken with the band playing music. The show, appropriately, ended with a quiet fade instead of the usual cheering audience and credits rolling.
I was watching a Wallace and Gromit mini-marathon a few years back, and by the time Gromit was in the plane (during A Close Shave, I was literally cheering at the TV. First time that’s happened in years.
Some other moments that stick with me:
Watching the Enterprise shuttle drop tests. I was in front of the TV, sitting as still as I could, because my dad was balancing the Super-8 camera on my head. (The film turned out pretty good, considering.)
Sitting in a very odd hotel in Copenhagen (everything folded into the walls – bed, table, chairs, etc.) watching a version of Return of the Jedi that had been dubbed into German, with Danish subtitles.
Sitting in a very nice hotel in Tokyo, turning on the TV, seeing a baseball game broadcast, with local election results in a crawl at the bottom of the screen, all in kanji, and realizing, “Holy fcking sht, I’m in Japan”
Coming home from a welcome party on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, turning on the TV, and going from drunk to sober in milliseconds. I spent the rest of that night/morning watching the ABC feed and making many calls back to the States.
Watching news coverage of a previous day’s festival, noticing an incredibly huge guy standing amidst all the Japanese people, realizing it was me. (I hate that…)
Those are classics of Aussie TV.
What about Ron Casey and Normie Rowe throwing fists at one another? Or Ian Chappell’s indiscrete use of the work “fuck” on Wide World of Sport?
One that really sticks out is staying up all night to watch the last race of the 1983 America’s Cup, and Prime Minister Bob Hawke on TV that morning saying that any boss who sacked a worker for not coming to work that day was a “mug.”
Once, when i was a kid (about 9 or 10 y.o.), i was home from school with a cold and was watching daytime TV with my mum. They were about to play an afternoon movie, and it was introduced by some woman who spoke for five minutes about the movie, the actors, etc., etc. When she finished her spiel, she said something like:
“And now, here’s the movie. I hope you like it…”
The screen faded out, but they must have accidentally left her microphone on, because the next thing we heard was her voice saying:
“…you’d better, or i’ll gnaw your tits off.”
My mother and i stared at each other, dumbfounded, not quite sure whether we’d both heard the same thing. But we had.
Odo finally kissing Kira on Star Trek: DS9
Yeah, I am a big softie. . .
Cher’s first appearance on Letterman. Apparently they’d been trying to get her on the show for quite some time. When Dave asked her why she’d waited so long, she said it was because she thought he was an asshole. For the rest of the show, Dave would refer back to it - he would be talking about whatever, then stop and say somthing like “But what do I know, I’m an asshole!”
Robin Williams on the Tonight Show, doing a dead-on impression of Jack Nicholson accepting the Oscar (I guess he’d been nominated that year): “Wow. I’m so happy to get this, I could just drop a log.” Johnny couldn’t speak for a few minutes, he was laughing so hard.
Stupid pet tricks on Letterman - the parrot that took a dump on command. Dave’s comment: “That’s it ladies and gentlemen, no more Stupid Pet Tricks - we have our winner!”
The US hockey team winning the gold in the 1980 Winter Olympics. USA! USA!
The hostage situation with the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Jim McKay (?) announcing “They’re gone.”
I could go on and on.