‘Mama’s Family’!!! I nearly forgot about that incredibly horrible and annoying piece of crap portraying white trash southerners with constant arguments and awful Southern Accents.
The Parkers: two fat broads who apparently they think they are sexy. (ugh)!
HEY!! I liked the early years of Laverne and Shirley!! I had the hots for Shirl!! The show, which had been doing well in, what? New York, started a nose dive when they moved to California. It got worse after Shirley abruptly left and flopped.
Alf just absolutely sucked.
INFORMATION: There are cities and counties here with no Black people in them. One was discovered somewhere in North USA, minding it’s own business, when a reported stumbled on it and printed a small report. Then the NAACP investigated, was promptly outraged, and started a big fuss about it, started forming a big Black rally to be held there, rooted around for legal action and had the place smeared in the news and I don’t know what happened after that.
There was also a town found in one of the central states where there are Black people but segregation is alive and well there. The town has separate schools, Blacks cannot eat in White owned restaurants, have to go to Black owned clubs, have to use separate rest rooms and drinking fountains and live in Black communities.
I don’t know whatever happened there, but I figure the NAACP nearly had a stroke stepping in to change things.
If you are going to weigh in, at least get your information correct.
“Mama’s Family” was set in Raytown, MO, a suburb of Kansas City. The “bad southern accents” is explained by the fact that the show was set in the Mid-West. It was truly terrible, but was hardly a popular show.
Laverne and Shirley was set in Milwaukee, WI.
Let’s set this “all-white” thing to rest, as it’s a side issue. So there are all-white cities and counties in the South. Fine. Somehow I doubt that the producers chose to exclude blacks from the cast as an ode to realism. These are the same people who think an entire county is a single small town and that a couple of bootlegging thieves should be considered heroes. But none of this addresses the main issue, which is that The Dukes of Hazard was about as competently made as Battlefield Earth and a hell of a lot less entertaining.
I can’t quite put my finger on it but IMHO, I agree, it was pretty amusing in the first year. But after several dancing babies and scenes of Ally mooning over Billy, it just got irritating for me. Much of that irritation stems from any scene with Vonda Shepard in it.
Why won’t I just change channels? Well, my girlfriend follows it with all her heart. I sit through Ally with her, she lets me ogle Lara Flynn Boyle in The Practice.
Well, Sagasumono, I was debating whether or not to say this, but now I can’t let you sit there alone.
I didn’t hate Small Wonder.
Not saying I liked it…but when it was on, I was a “companion” to a nine-year-old (too old for a “babysitter”) girl, and she liked it. So it was on while we were playing board games or she was doing her homework. She laughed at some of it. This particular show didn’t make much impression on me, but I found syndicated shows in general to be interesting. Because they weren’t courting the big-name advertisers and prime demographics, they were free to be quirky. Plus, coming from a household where my parents did things like tear wastebaskets apart, I was not inclined to sneer at a show where the family members never clashed with each other. IIRC, the conflict in the show was always between the family and outsiders, never between the spouses, or the parents and the kid(s). Or if it was, it was resolved without anything being thrown.
I liked Cybill for the first two seasons (I live in LA, after all). Then the tone changed, and the main character started acting utterly unprofessional, so I drifted away.
Re: AFHV: Another crucial element of the show was someone’s pants falling down. Or a woman’s top falling off, or her slip falling down. Although again, at first, that wasn’t such a bad idea. You take something that would formerly have been one of the low moments of someone’s life, made even worse by documentation, and give them a chance to make money from it and get on TV. I agree, though, that the kid-doing-something-cute factor was enough to make me chew glass.
Respectfully disagree with the poster who felt “Land of The Lost” so bad as to be evil. It was a Saturday morning, kid’s show, yet for it’s time it was amazingly complex with scripts by the likes of David Gerrold, Larry Niven and Norman Spinrad. Name me one other show of it’s kind that even tried to deal with a solipsistic, closed-universe.
Viewed through the eyes of adulthood it is cheesy (the Sleestaks, etc.), but hardly “bad” in the definition put forth by the OP.
Ah, to hell with it. Just to show what a wonderful memory (read: how lifeless I am), here goes:
“Marshall, Will and Holly
On a routine expedition
Met the greatest earthquake ever known.
High on the rapids
It shook their tiny raft
(AAAAAHHHHHHH)
And plunged them down a thousand feet below,
To the Land of the Lost.
Lost… lost… lost”
We now return you to “The Dukes of Hazzard,” already in progress.
Was it? I remember reading in John Updike’s novel Memories of the Ford Adminstration where he mentioned overhearing “the Minneapolis imbroglios of Laverne and Shirley.”
I don’t even watch TV. I just read books. I don’t even know what-all you’re talking about here.
I’m pretty sure it was set in Milwaukee. Ever see the first “Wayne’s World” movie, when they went to Milwaukee and did the spoofe on the opening credits?
So, because it was in a John Updike book, it MUST be true? He probably doesn’t watch any more TV than you, Jomo, and more power to you all. Me, I’m weak … L&S was in Milwaukee, Mary Tyler Moore was in Minneapolis.
At present, I can’t think of any TV stinkers that haven’t already been mentioned. Unless … have you got the one from a few seasons ago with Kirstie Allie?
The Beverly Hillbillies?
I’m guessing you’re kind of young and you look at TBH as just a bunch of annoying simpletons.
You have to understand them in the context of their time. While not every one of the shows was pure gold some of the BH shows were among the funniest and satirically clever shows I’ve seen. If you just looked at the surface it might seem like simple finded farce, but in the context of the time and in the overall storylines there were levels beyond that in the way it was executed. I’m not saying it belongs in the canon of western classical art but as good TV it ranks(ed) pretty well.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the universe of Irwin Allen:
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was okay in its first season (shot in glorious Black & White) but then it turned into the “monster-of-the-week” (always played by a stunt-man in a cheap Hallowe’en costume). It’s amazing how many times that damned sub was shaken back and forth by a monster or an explosion or something and it never once sprung a leak! (But even Voyage was better than SeaQuest. How come Steven Spielberg can’t produce a good TV series?)
Lost in Space. Worse than the recent feature film, if you can believe it. Like Voyage, its first season was also shot in B&W and it was decent in its first few episodes. But then Dr. Smith got VERY popular with the kids and morons (and moronic kids) and it stopped being the story of the Robinson Family and started being the story of Smith, Will and the Robot. It also featured monsters which were stuntmen wearing cheap Hallowe’en costumes. It got so bad that Guy Williams and June Lockhart walked off the show near the end of its run. I’m surprised June agreed to play a cameo in the movie. Was it the money?
Allen was also responsible for Time Tunnel, but it lasted only one season, so it can’t be called popular.
Other than Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and the original The Outer Limits, has there ever been a good science fiction TV series?
I’d also like to dump on the recent crop of syndicated SF-fantasy series like The Lost World, Sheena, Beastmaster, and the rest. They’ve managed something I thought impossible: They make Hercules and Xena look like masterpieces.
Name the worst kid show of all time. I’m talking about stuff you didn’t watch when YOU were a kid, not stuff you won’t watch now. Davey and Goliath, anybody?
You can dislike someone for being a drunk. You can dislike someone for being ignorant. You can dislike someone for being uneducated. But don’t call any white person a “redneck” unless you go around calling black people niggers and Jewish people kikes. They are all insults on the same level.
Are you serious Lizard?
By some people’s definition I am a redneck: I live in rural Alberta and drive a pick-up truck, but but I don’t find the word as offensive as the other two words you used. I suppose “redneck neanderthal” makes it more derogatory, but still…
Oh brother. :rolleyes: Stepfather #1 referred to himself as a redneck. Frequently. Proudly. Is Jeff Foxworthy being racist when he refers to himself and people like him as rednecks?
The redneck reference was intended to show that he was himself a rural southerner, and saw this show as a positive representation of people like him.
The neanderthal part was an insult, though I doubt he would have seen it that way. You have to be able to read and understand a word to be insulted by it.
I went and did some checkin, and I found that I was partly mistaken in what I remembered. I did not leave the 70’s with all my faculties, so my memory isn’t what it used to be.
The correct names for Lenny and Squiggy are, were, Leonard Kosnowski and Andrew Squiggman.
I know consider the matter closed.
[sub]thank you, you will now be returned to your regular programing, in progress[/sub]
