I still enjoy watching Bewitched, though even back when I was a kid I used to wonder why Samantha bothered to stay with Derwood. I mean, seriously–she’s a witch! She’s immortal! She’s beautiful! Why would she stay with this schlub who wants her to give up everything she is in order to make him feel good about his inadequacies?
I guess maybe she felt like since he was going to die soon (in her timeframe) she could put up with it for a few years. Maybe he was really good in the sack… 
A few years ago, I introduced my wife to St. Elsewhere via DVD (only Season 1 was released). She was working in an underfunded urban hospital at the time. The acting and stories largely held up okay but she really thought that, even today, the show captured the general feeling of the workplace better than any of the ER/Chicago Hope/Greys Anatomy/etc modern hospital dramas she’d seen.
Heh. No, that much was me being snarky. But I still don’t get how that trick instantly landed her a job at Blackie’s whore-house. How exactly would she be pleasuring a guy that way?
A few years in her timeframe? After a few years period, she just wiggled her nose and replaced him with a younger and taller version. 
his film Eraserhead shows much of his style. his other films also have elements brought into this show.
Rewatched some Gilligan’s Island recently. It was always a brainless fluff show from the outset, but with hindsight the real star of that show was Jim Baccus, he’s an underrated comedic genius. Everyone else was simply terrible and unfunny.
The Munsters is pretty painful now.
I tried watching old Dr. Who episodes and anything withOUT Tom Baker is just hard.
Roseanne just gives me a headache - all that anger. Whew. It had its place at one time but surely TV has evolved?
The Cosby Show - likewise a headache. The cheery positive spin on everything.
OTOH, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is still wonderful, and my all time fave, Upstairs, Downstairs (from the 70s-80s) is still classic viewing.
If that’s the case, then it’s proof that his style is horrific and unbearable. Blech.
I second Northern Exposure.
Everyone loved DuckTales. We watched it every day, right?
I grabbed a few episodes this winter and couldn’t stand the nephews’ duck voices. Didn’t even get to decide wether or not I liked the plot.
Many of the shows mentioned so far (Northern Exposure), I disagree with. I started watching it again a while back and enjoyed it.
For me Welcome Back Kotter is truly painful to watch. I remember enjoying it as a kid, but honestly have a hard time believing it lasted for 4 years.
The Breaking Bad finale kinda soured the rest of the show for me. It’s still a great show, It’s just that I’m not as interested in re-watching it.
I just read for the first time Gil Scott-Heron’s poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, and these three shows were among the things that would not be relevant post-revolution.
But due to Endora’s meddling, the new version turned out to be gay.
Valerie/Valerie’s Family/The Hogan Family. I loved this family sitcom as a middle-schooler in the late 80s, but I’m sure I would find it incredibly lame if I were to watch it again. I don’t think I’ve seen any reruns since the mid-90s, which is just s well.
How old was she? If she was centuries old, I could see her hooking up with husbands over the years, jut to avoid the boredom of immortality. "OK…My dear Wentworth died in a buggy race in 1910, but… 50 years later, time to move on and spend a couple of decades living this curious mortal life with
dear Darren…" so it goes over the years. Because I think just doing whatever you want, living however you want, getting whatever you want would get boring if you lived a long long time. Besides, she retained her powerz and was sort of dumbing herself down to placate Darren, role acting for a while. What fun would it be, mashing him like a bug? Let him order her around, it would be a passing thing!
Plus, I suspect Darrin’s attitude toward women had been the norm through most of Western history. She was used to it.
Samantha was at least 300 years old in the 1960s; Darrin once came across an engraving titled “Maid of Salem” that clearly showed her in Colonial garb. :eek:
To keep the neighbors from getting suspicious, I suppose she could have made herself “age” at Darrin’s speed and then rejuvenate herself when the time came to move on.
I always just assumed that Endora, et al., preferred the “mature” look for themselves.
WRT the “Revolution”, assume it focused on the “rural purge”?
I don’t know if children’s shows count, but when I was very little, I loved the show Caillou. Looking back, Caillou was an incredibly obnoxious, whiny brat who though the world revolved around him. OK, OK, that’s common in many toddlers and such, but he was especially bad. Sometimes I question my younger self’s taste in television - I hated Sesame Street and was never a big fan of Mr. Roger’s, yet Caillou seemed like high art. 
I got trapped into watching an episode of Bonanza recently. Not long before I finally watched all three seasons of Deadwood. Mental whiplash.
OK, you expect that Bonanza would be slow and talky and have an obvious plot with a simple moral at the end. What’s really hilarious is how clean everybody was. (I mean physically, not just the dialog.) How anachronistic and unrealistic the clothing was. How totally Hollywood sound stage the sets were. It was practically a cartoon. You have to wonder how anybody ever took it seriously.
Almost nothing from that era holds up. The only drama I can stand is Burke’s Law. And that’s because it was a spoof on all the cliches of the cop shows of the time, with the characters, dialog, and plots deliberately insane and supposed to be laughable. It remains fun while all the serious shows turn inane.