I’m posting from 15 years into your future, when The Big Bang Theory had been cancelled 14 years ago after all its “fans” realized Sheldon Cooper wasn’t funny as a bully and an asshole, and Penny, to pay for her apartment as a waitress, was hooking on the side.
Miami Vice – one of my kids gave me the first season DVD for Christmas a few years back. It still looks good and the music is fine, but the acting is awful. Don Johnson yells all his lines.
Same kid also gave me Soap and the laugh track/studio audience (?) takes all the fun out of it.
Are sitcoms without the laugh track/audience a fairly recent thing? Will it make any difference in how they hold up?
I tried to re-watch Dream On… the HBO series from early 90’s… I use to love that show… watched it every Sunday Night before getting ready for school… HULU has it now…
OOPS… man… didn’t age well at all. THe clothes are funny enough… i have no idea now who found Martin charming… its just… well… I got my lady to watch it with me… two episodes she’s staring at me thinking… this succckkksss
Gilligan’s Island.
The Beverly Hillbillies.
Petticoat Junction.
Green Acres.
Rin Tin Tin.
Circus Boy.
I loved these shows when I was a kid. Now I can’t stand them.
When I rewatched Disney’s Zorro series a few years ago, I quickly realized it was meant for younger viewers. There were way too many oversimplified story plots.
Roseanne
Sanford and Son
The Bob Newhart Show
Laverne and Shirley
The Jeffersons
Rhoda
Alice
One Day at a Time
And more recently:
The Middle
I think pretty much ALL of the shows I used to like have since become dated and no longer hold the appeal as when they were first-run.
There are very few re-runs of shows I used to like that I will watch again today.
Oh, definitely. My husband will watch Cozi-TV when there’s nothing else son, and every so often I’ll join him. We’ll both shake our heads over some 70s detective series we both remember and had liked as kids…as he says, “You gotta remember that we we think is lame now was very cutting edge then. And the generations after us are going to think the same about the shows we watch now.”
Yeah, um … I don’t think she was showing that she could tie a knot in his dick.
I agree about Miami Vice. Back in the '80s, it was the epitome of cool, especially the first couple of seasons. But I tried watching it twenty years later, and found it downright comical and very easy to mock.
In the early '70s, MASH*** was one of the first sitcoms to experiment with a minimal laughtrack (and none at all in the OR scenes). The Odd Couple actually did a viewer-interactive episode in its first season to get audience feedback on its laughtrack. The results led to the show switching to a live-audience–three-camera format for the rest of its run.
Gotta disagree with the Twin Peaks pile on. It was brilliant, season two was definitely a step down, but still the best show ever.
For me, game shows are now awful. Jeopardy was great in the Art Fleming days, before the video clips and before they had a smug arrogant prick of a host. Family Feud was great in the Dawson-Combs days, is completely unwatchable now.
I Love Lucy hasn’t aged well in my opinion. Not that Lucy wasn’t a comic genius, the premise of her having to go behind Ricky’s back to do things that moved the plot along is quite dated.
Happy Days was never really one of my favorites, now when I see it I wonder how it lasted so long. More or less any sitcom where someone has a catch phrase (“Kiss My Grits”, “Dy-no-mite”, “Ayyyyyyy”) seems so incredibly lame.
I watched it when it was first aired in Russia (1993, I think), and I loved the first season (you could hear the actors speaking English under the Russian overdubbing). I tried watching it again a couple of years ago, and it just wasn’t the same—there was no longer any mystery to any of the episodes, or the anticipation of what was going to happen next.
Like Crime Story, it pretty much shot its bolt in one season and was never as good afterwards. A great, great pity.
If I’m not mistaken, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976–77) was the first sitcom not to have a laughtrack at all.
Two from the '60s:
Bonanza: Then: “must see” Sunday night viewing. Now: unwatchable.
Bewitched: Then: Great show. Now: Darren is such a sexist asshole. Endora was perfectly correct.
I watched an old episode of “Wonder Woman” on a plane and was amazed that I actually loved that lame cheezy show as a kid. But then again, when I was 4 I guess that was cutting-edge special effects.
I haven’t actually tried to watch Hill Street Blues again (I’m not even sure it’s being shown anywhere) but I’m very much afraid it’s going to suffer the same fate. I’d like to introduce the spouse to it but I don’t want to have it end up being lame and have him wonder what I ever saw in it.
I used to watch it every week in college–it was very cutting-edge for its time.
I’ve just finished the first season of it via Netflix and while I found some of the little comedy bits fell flat and some the attitudes expressed toward women irksome, it overall held up pretty well.
i think it is sometimes useful to put yourself in a mindset to re-view old shows.
Rocky & Bullwinkle Show was crude animation. it was full of puns and addressed elements of that world sometimes very subtly. the show was made by people that knew old time radio and added lots of that flavor to the show.
Hill Street Blues (i also don’t know where it actually exists now either) has lots of elements new to tv. it was a drama with a number of subplots, some of which might be serial. it had terrific black comedy; Hunter was funny because of what that character was, there was a scene where a politician was doing an interview about infrastructure repair needed and to illustrate that shook an upper story window grate, this let loose and he fell to his death.
with the right mindset you can re-watch and might re-enjoy.
There’s a FISH in the percolator!
But Elizabeth Montgomery was one beautiful lady. That in itself makes it bearable. Not to mention great fun whenever Paul Lynde guest starred.
through her previous decades of acting her talent and skill showed she could make a character come alive. drama quality acting in a comedic show.