Agreed!
I know that people will find Golden Girls dated, with their crazy 80s shoulder pads, and their Reagan Era vibe. But the razor sharp wit and comedy gold in that series is ageless. Love it.
I think the clips are endlessly entertaining, but the entire episodes can be rather tedious if you don’t like the particular bit they’re doing and have to sit through it.
I think Magnum, P.I. and Miami Vice have held up well. I started re-watching the first season of both and am enjoying both.
NY Times article about 60s shows on DVD.
I’ve been watching a bunch of old shows (Route 66, Maverick, Combat!) for nostalgic reasons, and they hold up well enough for me. The writing is decent–how much do those kind of stories change over the years, anyway? The acting is of it’s time, but not particulary cringe-worthy. Plus it’s kind of refreshing to watch actors that don’t have a bunch of current media hype swirling around them.
Emergency! is still quite entertaining for me, even though I have to look past some of the firefighting and emergency medical technology they used. The stories hold up quite well.
BTW, even though a cardiac code is a bitch to work, I flip the caps off the epinephrine just like Johnny did… 
Nothign compares to the holding-up powers of El Chavo del Ocho. There are episodes that only after having watched them 100 (literal) times that the jokes start losing strength.
Get Smart never disappoints.
They all talk like Tolkien characters! It really is a better story than TV show.
WKRP in Cincinnati still holds up. Good writing and a good cast.
Not all of them. Peter Jurasik as Londo could take that stuff and make it really believable. Maybe it was the accent, I don’t know. Andreas Katsulas…sometimes. Mira Furlan was pretty good at it, too. Watching, you could almost feel the truth that this woman was a total fanatic and had one of the best armed forces in the galaxy at her back.
I don’t remember Garibaldi having any of those big speeches, but the small ones he would make were always believable. “What is wrong with you people?! He’s not the Pope! He doesn’t even look anything like her!” being a particular favorite.
-Joe
I’ll be interested to see how American Dad! ages, since the show tends to rely on Stan’s outdated and extremist Conservatism for its humour, with a few political references that may or may not be relevant or humorous 20 years from now. As fond as I am of Family Guy, I have to say I think American Dad! will be the show with the greater longevity.
If you think that we as a society don’t have a different view of race relations than we did in the 70s, your living in a very different part of America than I am. And I’m living in the middle of the South.
No, we haven’t conquered racism by a long shot. But the reason we don’t like hearing people make the sort of jokes Archie Bunker was making at the time is that they lack an awareness of what the person on the “other” side of the joke is thinking or feeling. Which isn’t to say that we haven’t at times let “political correctness” (as it is misnamed) carry us to extremes on the subject. But I stand by my assertion that Archie Bunker wouldn’t be funny today mostly because our viewpoint is substantially different on many of the subject he used as fodder for his “humor.”
Northern Exposure has aged very well probably because the setting is so odd and it is a character driven comedy/drama. You could put it on TV now and it wouldn’t be much out of place especially for the early seasons.
Our Gang episodes, the earlier version of the Little Rascals, is very dated in most ways you might use the term but even many of the 1930’s episodes and hysterical and easy to be really entertained by even for young adults.
That brings of a problem with the real definition of ‘dated’ however. I love The Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island, and The Addams Family. I consider them both timeless and dated at the same time.
I think that’s why Mary Tyler Moore aged well and Murphy Brown did not.
Twin Peaks aged really well, in the sense of not seeming dated, because the backdrop of the show was set up so as to be “timeless” - the town of Twin Peaks is not really identifiable in any time frame. There is zero pop-culture in it; practically no references at all to the world outside of Twin Peaks. Almost no technology is used. The only real gauge of the time period it’s set in are the vehicles used on the show.
After 20 years, it’s also still probably the single weirdest show ever to be on television. I’m still amazed that it was ever on mainstream television channels and that average people used to watch it. When I first saw it, I figured it was some bizarre cult show.
I think Are You Being Served? is still hilarious.
Really? But its big schtick was lampooning the class distinctions, and associated levels of politeness and formality, that were already on the way out at the time it was made.
If you consider the animation in The Flintstones to be “good” I shudder to think what you consider to be “bad” animation. H-B have always been notorious for their use of cheap limited animation, with excessive and sometimes even gratuitous use of continuously looping backgrounds, partial body animation, and stock footage/music/sound effects. All of these H-B hallmarks are quite evident in The Flintstones.
To each his own.
Yep.
Maybe the problem was the not-yet-mentioned other lead actors who were really awful compared to the ones mentioned.
I sometimes get in the mood to watch my DVDs of Space: 1999. It doesn’t seem to have aged badly, at least to me.