But those classic shows are not lackluster. It’s all a matter of taste. I don’t want to have to keep track of a dozen story lines from week to week, and I find all the ambiguity and multiple shifting characters and timelines in today’s television offerings pretentious and annoying for the most part. There’s not a single dramatic TV show that I follow today.
The old shows were much more to my taste then, and they still are. Today’s shows seem to want to be more about style than substance. They need weeks to make a point when it used to take 30 minutes to an hour. Storylines that spelled things out so even people in the cheap seats could understand? Yeah, it’s called clarity. Today’s shows need more of it. If I want to play a freakin’ guessing game about characters’ motives, I’ll write my own damn scripts.
When I was a kid I thought Red Skelton was the funniest man ever.
A few years ago I pulled up a couple of episodes at the Museum of Broadcast Communication and, well, my tastes have changed.
On the other hand, I’ve rewatched most of The Waltons twice in recent decades, first about 15 years ago and again in the last year. At least the first four seasons hold up remarkably well, with some really good writing and acting.
I don’t like most Seinfeld reruns. They were creative with the episodes, but once you know what’s happening a lot of them fall flat. Same thing with MASH and Friends. It is just a matter of personal taste though. I’ll watch almost any Cheers episode, though there’s no reason to say any particular one was better than the episodes of the shows I don’t like to see again.
Sorry to say, but I watched the last few episodes of Arrested Development again and I don’t think it’s a show that will age particularly well. A lot of the topical humor is probably not going to ring bells with kids these days. I thought it was still funny, but thinking about the Generation Weenie or whatever they call themselves, they won’t be liking it, I think.
Seinfeld. I enjoyed it as much as anyone did when it was in first run, but for some reason, it now just seems unbearably arch and mannered.
Happy Days. I still enjoy watching the Cunningham family, but the Fonz is just an annoying absurdity. Laverne and Shirley is completely unwatchable to me.
Indeed, a good one, as evidenced now that she’s acting without them.
I should have guessed that many posts here would be about programs one liked as a child. I sort of take it for granted that I have no interest in most of the shows I liked as kid, but then there are examples like Star Trek TOS, which I still enjoy from time to time, dated or not, and Warner Bros cartoons.
Then there is Friends, which I liked a lot as it aired, but now find almost every character insufferable.
If we’re restricting ourselves to shows that we liked as adults, I’ll mention “Law & Order”. It used to be that I could watch endless reruns of it, but I must have hit the saturation point because now I haven’t the slightest desire to watch one.
Liked as kids vs. liked as adults: My problem is that there are huge gaps in my TV viewing history. As a kid, up until I was 10 years old, I can remember watching things like The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons, Happy Days, etc. Then the family TV broke in 1976 and my parents elected to not replace or repair it. For all intents and purposes I really didn’t watch TV regularly again until 1991, when I bought one for my new apartment. I watched a lot of TV for the next 5 years, until, for various reasons, my life fell apart and I moved into a homeless shelter where I lived for the next 8 years, and rarely watched TV there (I discovered the Internet while I lived there). That was followed by 7 years sharing a house with a couple other guys, and though I had a TV I never watched it, aside from the occasional major sporting event. Now that I have my own place again, I no longer even own a television (gave it to my roommate when we moved out of that house). The only “current” stuff I watch is the occasional full-season DVD my sister would loan me, or a few things that have caught my interest on Netflix, like the Battlestar Galactica reboot or Glee.
Lost, Seinfeld, Friends. I watched a lot of those as they were first broadcast. Seinfeld can hold my attention for maybe five minutes and the other two, meh. Insufferable.
By contrast, I can still watch In Living Color, still wanna be a Fly Girl when I grow up and still LOL at many of the skits. And most of the musical acts are still relevant/good to watch.
My wife and I both loved The Man from U.N.C.L.E growing up, so we got the first few shows on Netflix. It was awful. Sexist of course but also stupid and illogical.
Do you remember Ed? It ran from 2000-2004. My ex and I Ioved it, though I tired of it sooner than he when they kept dragging out the “will they/won’t they” thing way beyond reason. In a burst of nostalgia, I started watching it again recently. It’s… it’s not doing it for me. My new guy thinks I’m crazy because I insisted it was the greatest show ever back in the day. I’m only three episodes in… Maybe it will hit its stride soon.
When I was in my late twenties I loved a science fiction sitcom called Quark. Not long ago, I bought the DVD set, and I was crushed to find that it doesn’t seem particularly funny to my 65-year-old self. I don’t think my sense of humor is gone, but it has certainly changed.
That’s the one I came in here to mention. I used to love it when I was kid. But then a couple of years ago, I got one of the DVDs from Netflix, and it just didn’t hold up at all. It’s very much geared toward kids, and the gags they threw in for adults revolve mostly around pop culture topics that were popular in the 80s, but that are hard to give a shit about today.
I enjoyed it during its run, but I don’t know that I could sit through an episode today. When I catch a glimpse while channel-surfing, it just seems so forced.
mmm
I can’t think of any. A lot are at least as crappy as I remember while others turn out surprisingly good, within the limitations of the genre. Like Bewitched and, especially, Dick Van Dyke and Combat. But it helps to be able to accept Genre TV as being what it is, with rules and stock characters, situations, and dialogue.
As a kid I thought Combat was pretty hard on the guest stars/replacements, who were Red Shirts in black and white, but I later learned that war is hard on replacements and that each squad has its core of vets who survive while it’s sink or swim for replacements, and a lot sink first.
A show I still think qualifies as a quality program, but I cannot watch anymore is Buffy the Vampire Slaver. That was the first ( and probably last ) time I ever became actively involved, however peripherally, in fandom both on line and off. In part my very slow-growing estrangement from that whole scene kinda soured me on everything associated with it, in part I was unenthusiastic about the final two seasons and in part I got tired of Whedon’s Whedonisms.
It’s not like I think he is a hack or anything and I’ll still happily watch Firefly or some of his other projects ( I enjoyed The Avengers recently ). But BtVS was ground zero for so much of that stuff I now find that particular show a little too familiarly Whedony for me. Heck I’d much rather watch Dollhouse re-runs than Buffy.
But I’d still defend the show as quality TV if it came up in conversation.
For me it would have to be Northern Exposure. I used to love that show when i was in college. Now the stories just seem silly (throwing tomatoes at people on Thanksgiving? The feast of San Giuseppe that we had never heard about till the new doctor showed up? And how come we never knew Holling went into rutting season at the same time as the moose until the final episode? You’d think it would have come into play sooner in the series) and the characters seem like idiots. If I ever met Dr. Fleischman in real life I would probably think he was an annoying jerk.
The thing I notice now about old series that I used to love, e.g., Combat!, Time Tunnel, Batman, ST: TOS, Mission: Impossible, Columbo, and The Beverly Hillbillies, is how slim their budgets must have been, and how pressed they must have been for time every week. By today’s standards, they were chronically underfunded and/or behind schedule, and it shows in almost every episode.
This is not to say I no longer like these programs; it’s just that I see them more realistically now.
In terms of originality, creativity, quality of writing, acting talent, etc., I don’t see that shows today are any better overall, even though budgets are higher and production schedules less intense. Most of them, I think, suck in comparison with older shows.