What do you miss about old school tv?

I kind of miss the old clunking sound of the early remote controls. Really.

Four things:

  1. Great cartoons. The late 80’s-to-90’s was a golden age for cartoons that were astoundingly well-written and tackled subjects most live-action shows wouldn’t even sniff (X-Men, Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, Exo Squad), bursting with color and energy and humor with the occasional touching moment (Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, early Powerpuff Girls), rife with unapologetically zany hilarity (I Am Weasel, Freakzoid, The PJs, Duckman), grand and majestic (The Pirats of Dark Water, Conan The Adventuer), or just plain loads of fun (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Darkwing Duck, Dexter’s Lab). This period also had seasons 2-7 of The Simpsons, easily the show’s absolute apex. Nothing since then has held my interest in the slightest. Family Guy has range from “tedious” to “rage inducing”. Samurai Jack puttered along, introduced an insult-spewing sack of crap, and that was it for me. Powerpuff Girls, likewise. SheZow did NOTHING for me. Don’t even get me started on South Park. The last cartoon I was a regular viewer of was Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi, and even I have to admit that was more a novelty than anything.

  2. Reality TV that didn’t make me want to punch someone. Remember the original Survivor? 16 contestants are dumped into an unfamiliar wilderness, they compete directly against each other with only minimal input from a single official, and the object is to figure out how not to get voted out and then to get four of seven contestants on your side. No stupid crowd booing for one fourth of the damn show, no grandstanding, no posturing, no fits of hysterical laughter, no self-righteous finger-wagging, and no freaking screaming. Remember when American Idol actually was a singing competition, and the “worst” judge was quiet and didn’t get in anyone else’s faces? Remember when The Amazing Race was okay with a blowout victory if that’s just how it turned out? The last reality show I thought was any good was Whodunnit, and that’s just way too difficult a premise to pull off more than once.

  3. Offbeat or outright weird shows that were allowed to be offbeat or outright weird shows…the old Batman TV series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Quantum Leap, and Herman’s Head just to name a few…without having to worry about drowning in a thousand labels. Look, The Muppet Show wasn’t “camp” or “ironic” or “postmodernst” or “second wave” or any of that crap. It was a show where people interacting with puppets and lots of corny stuff happened. Can you even imagine a network trying to seel something like that today without it being picked to pieces before the casting’s been finished?

  4. Sumo Digest. Watching the rise and fall of Akebono was a thousand times more riveting than anything Tim Tebow ever did.

Not to be too much of a cranky old bastard, but mid-late 90s reality TV (Survivor, Amazing Race, etc…) is hardly old-school.

I think for the most part in this thread, “old-school” typically means pre DVR, pre reality show, pre digital cable/satellite, pre streaming video, so probably 1999 and earlier.

I think I see where you’re going with your comment about weird shows, and I suspect that a lot of the programming differences that people lament are likely due primarily to a combination of market fragmentation and the rise of reality TV. I mean, if you want science fiction/fantasy, you’re more likely to see it on Syfy, HBO or Showtime than on the major networks, and all the truly strange shows I’ve seen in the past five years have been reality shows of one kind or another, usually about sub-cultures or backwoods weirdos.

As for the cartoons, there was a sort of renaissance in prime-time animation starting in the early 2000s, but it’s kind of run its course by now, and has moved to Adult Swim on Cartoon Network.

Go watch “Venture Bros.” or “Metalocalypse” and see if you think the cartoons still suck.

Not to nitpick but Survivor premiered in the summer of 2000.

The only show I could think of that was in the mid to late 90s that we would recognize as a modern Reality Show is The Real World on MTV.

I disagree and could list a bunch of awesome toons of the '00s, but I do think there’s a gap to be filled. You don’t see batshit crazy shows like Ren & Stimpy, Aeon Flux, The Maxx, or The Head anymore in Western animation.

I would call “Old-school TV” before 1985. I know there were VCRs then, but not everyone had one yet, and they were still kind of hard to program.

TiVo came out in 1999, flat screen TV came out in 1998, and it was around 1996-7 that internet connections fast enough to stream video were available (IIRC, I might be wrong on that one-- it may have depended on where you lived).

The cable explosion was around 1992.

Now, HBO came out in the 1970s, and it really did just show second-run films, uncut, which was kind of thrilling in itself. We didn’t even have color TV at my house, or cable, but I had neighbors who had a huge color TV, plus two other color TVs, one in the kitchen, and one in the parents’ bedroom. They had cable, of course, and they got HBO as soon as it came out.

But anyway, I’d be willing to go “before 1990,” but not later. Even if all the technology wasn’t available, shows like Law & Order, Friends, and Seinfeld feel more like 21st century TV than 80s TV. Because the networks were competing with cable in a way they hadn’t before, network TV dropped a lot of pretenses and became more sexual, and more violent, developing the ratings system mid-90s by way of compensation. It changed the whole look of TV.

Just compare something from the 1970s that was racy for the times, like Three’s Company, with something considered a “family” show in the 90s, like Everybody Loves Raymond.

The only thing I “miss” is the old assumption that almost everyone I knew was watching the same shows I was… which meant we could all talk the next day about what we’d seen, and rehash our favorite scenes/jokes.

Today, it’s a lot harder to find anyone who watches what I watch. The people I see at the proverbial (not real) watercooler at work are mostly watching shows I’ve never seen (like the “reality” talent shows).

I’m far more likely to find people on the SDMB who’ve seen the shows I have than in “real” life.

TBS in the 80s was the perfect channel. Everything started at 5 after so if you were flipping around looking for something…you might just settle on TBS because you probably didn’t miss the opening. Sitcoms, Godzilla movies, Kung-fu movies…man… perfect channel.

Oh, forgot music videos. Yeah, definitely music videos.

If you were a kid in Hawaii in the early 80’s, unless you were incredibly lucky, your music choices were limited to the following:

  1. Early 80’s bland, vanilla, white bread, rice cakes, unsalted jook mainstream radio
  2. Early 80’s bland, vanilla, white bread, rice cakes, unsalted jook Hawaiian contemporary
  3. Songs your parents liked
  4. Songs your grandparents liked
  5. The public domain, if you know what I mean and I think you do
  6. Hula
    Good FSM, we barely got any disco, for crying out loud.

The moment MTV came along, that changed everything. Forever. Totally. The big advantage was that it was so simple. Building a decent music library took work back then, and no way could I afford CDs or even tapes on the pitiful childhood funds I had. But turning on the TV? No sweat.

This was, quite literally, my first ever taste of coolness. This was where I discovered Janet Jackson, John Mellencamp, Peter Gabriel, Vertical Horizon, Smash Mouth, Enya, Natalie Imbruglia, and scores of other artists which not only expanded by boundaries but blew them to bits, who set my standards for what’s creative and inspiring and wonderful in music to this very day. This was my first ever exposure to M.C. Hammer, who took a reviled art form and made it fun and colorful (and to this day I still don’t think we fully comprehend just how monumental this was). To They Might Be Giants, who turned weirdo lyrics and an ironclad defiance of mainstream convention into works of beauty. To Bon Jovi, who forever broke me out of my “metal = ugly incoherent screaming devil worship” ignorance and opened my eyes to an amazing stark, raw, powerful, world. (Okay, it’s pop metal, gotta walk before you can run, all right?) To R.E.M., and need I even elaborate on how awesome it was to get my first taste of alternative rock, my most beloved music style ever?

Music videos made me a better person. And that’s something I’ve never said about video games, movies, or theater.

Now, of course, it’s something of a lost art. The internet had something to do with it…with amateur jobs like Friday and ironicamated nonsense like 2 Be Simple (has anyone even tried to guess why Leslie David Baker made this?) racking up gazillions of hits, there isn’t any motivation to produce something good. But I think it’s mostly a sea change in the television industry itself, a new era of reality TV and viral news pieces where Don Henley longing for a lost romance in black and white just doesn’t have a place.

The average now is 46 minutes per hour, according to the LA Times.

Yes, and to make things worse, when they had to vote on, say, the party platform, they needed to call every state separately, the way they still do when voting on the Presidential nominee. The two worst words you could hear (and the people at the convention agreed, based on their groans) was, “Roll Call!”, when somebody from a state objected to how that state voted; they would have to have each delegate from that state announce his vote publicly.

IIRC, this stopped in 1980 when the Democrats had voice votes for passing the party platform - almost certainly as a bone thrown to Ted Kennedy’s supporters so they wouldn’t tie up the convention in some desperate attempt to win the nomination over Carter. Today, every state votes electronically, and the only reason for the state-by-state roll call to select the Presidential candidate is to give each state TV time to shill itself and its other nominees. (IIRC, for VP, one party doesn’t bother with the roll call, but just asks for a voice vote; the other goes something like, “Alabama” “Alabama yields to (some state important to the Presidential candidate’s VP choice)” “(new state) moves to nominate by acclimation” “All in favor? Motion to nominate by acclimation passed!”)

I didn’t realize how much I used to do it, but as a cable-cutter, I really miss channel surfing. I found some of the best shows and movies just hitting the up or down button when I felt like vegging out in front of the TV. Now I have to look for a particular show to watch it.
It’s more like nostalgia but I miss reading a new comic and seeing the ads that the big three had touting their new Saturday morning cartoon line-up. Planning your entire morning’s schedule based on the cartoons’ names and a crappy little drawing.

Peace - DESK

I think that’s with theme music and credits. Without those, it’s 44 minutes. More or less. Aside from trying to thwart DVRs, one of the reasons for overlapping opening and closing credits from two different shows as one begins and the other ends, in reruns, is to gain a minute of ad time every hour.

One thing I hated about DirecTV was the user-unfriendliness of the online channel guide. You couldn’t dock it to the browser window so you always had to use the mousepad rather just tapping the page and arrow keys. Even worse, you could only position the three hour window at multiples of three hours, like 6 - 9pm or 9pm - midnight. You couldn’t see in one glance what was on HBO between 8 and 11, for instance. I nevet got how a company could design satellites and still come up with such an awful UI.

And after mousing through a gazillion channel listings, there was still hardly anything to watch.

Well that felt good.