Nah, TV Land is owned by MTV and is a division of Viacom, which also owns Paramount Pictures, so there’s plenty of money. Their change in direction owes itself to changing the focus of its demographics. Previously, they targeted the Baby Boomers. Now, as the Boomers age, they’re going after the Gen X demographic, the generation which was born to the Boomers.
I remember “I Married Joan”! It was on in the afternoons when I was very, very young and desperately ill, home from school for weeks. My grandmother and I used to watch it together. And I LOVED Adventures In Paradise…oops, wait, hold on a sec…(… leans over to put tennis ball back on leg of walker…)…This morning they were showing Lucy. LUCY! WTF? Why?? That’s ‘new’ on TVLand, and not in a good way. Some form of that show has been on forever, disappeared, and now its back? Please. I’d rather watch The Rifleman.
Wiki says that the inaugural season of TV Land showed, among other shows, St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues, so the notion that they are “supposed” to only show shows from the 50s and 60s is just wrong. But as long as we’re all wishing, I wish they would start showing The Ed Sullivan Show again, which Wiki also says they showed in their first season.
ETA: I hereby claim the record for the most uses of “show” in a sentence on the Dope.
As long as they never show anything with Lucille Ball in it, I’m good with their lineup.
FWIW Zombie Thread
Anyways, I started to watch TV in the early 70’s and remember watching I Love Lucy. And thinking how ancient it looked.
Now in 2011, sitcoms like Cheers and The Cosby Show are just as old as I Love Lucy was in the 1970’s.
Don’t think of it as a zombie. Think of it as a rerun.
Not “rerun”, it’s “encore showing”. Just like there are no “used cars” but “previously owned”
Fewer kids these days watch TV, period; the median age of TV viewers is 50 now.
So… what happens when your entire market has aged out of your advertisers’ target demographic?
Halo 7 - The Burger Wars™
That show only reinforces the stereotype that George Lopez is funny.
She is so talented. I never realized it until I realized (after many viewings) she was the weird neighbor from Uncle Buck, she is so pretty. :eek:
I could watch Roseanne ALL day. Despite some of the clothes/hair cuts, this one of the few sitcoms that doesn’t come off as dated IMO.
Actually, Roseanne owes her show to Metcalf and Goodman. They did a show (I forgot what season) where Roseanne was away. Metcalf and Goodman were featured. The producers wanted to nix Roseanne and have the show star Metcalf and Goodman. They both stuck up for her and informed her of the shady dealings. I can’t imagine other costars would turn that down.
I don’t have cable, so I don’t know what channels like TVLand are carrying, but with the introduction of sub-channels for over-the-air digital TV, some new networks, like this and MeTV, are showing a lot of the older shows. In the Raleigh-Durham market, I’m used to seeing regular showings of Patty Duke, Mr. Ed, I Love Lucy, Highway Patrol, Addams Family, Munsters, Brady Bunch, Petticoat Junction, the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and so forth. On the other hand, the main channels have cut way back on programs, and there are a surprising number of infomercials during the day.
Initially, Nick at Nite featured programming that no one else wanted, so they could get it cheaply. And since it was supposed to keep the channel active when kids were asleep, it really didn’t matter what was on, until the Boomers found it and decided they liked it and made it popular enough for its own spinoff channel.
One observation I’ve made is that nostalgia tends to be about 20 years ago, relative to the current generation of the parents of school-agers, tweens and teens (or people of that age group, if they don’t have kids). Right now, that’s 1980s to 90s, because Gen X is that current generation. I think it started in the 70s, when Happy Days, Grease were popular. In the 1980s and 90s, that period was the 1960s (remember MTV’s promoting The Monkees’ 20th anniversary?) and 1970s. (Barry Manilow and the Bee Gees charted again in 1997, making me feel like I was in a time warp.) I think it’s because, as our kids get older, we’ve got more adult problems and we want to go back to a time when we were young and relatively responsibility-free. This is just an off-the-top observation; I haven’t done any hard research on it.