Murder, She Wrote holds up surprisingly well, if one can ignore the 80s-isms. Same with Magnum, P.I.
The Rockford Files, not so much. I found it to be extremely slow-paced and boring.
Also The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Dallas, T.J. Hooker, Night Rider, etc. are all shit. There’s going to be a lot more crappy shows than good ones. Some of you younger folks may not understand this, but back in the day most people only had 3 channels, maybe 5-7 if you include PBS and a few random UHF channels. Many nights you only had a choice between Joanie Loves Chachi, Little House On the Prairie or CHiPs, which is the only thing that kept most of these shows on the air. There’s a reason that when they tried to revive Night Rider and the Love Boat, nobody cared.
Love me some Gunsmoke. I think some of the character actors on there were great.
I’d love to see a new grittier western on cable. Like Deadwood.
I love some of the scripts of Star Trek still but the old special effects are hard to take.
Hawaii 5-0 was on the other day and I watched half a show and that was all I wanted.
I still get a kick out of some of the old Andy Griffith shows. Barney? Earnest T? Still some classics.
Gilliagan’s Island seemed to be in reruns forever but I don’t see them anymore. Don’t want to. Still some classic moments on Beverly Hillbillies but I’m fine without them.
I actually found it so unwatchable that I stopped watching, and I rarely do that to a long running show. I did come back for the finale, sadly.
Dude, 2004 was over half a decade ago. In today’s everything nownownow world that’s pretty old.
Anyway…
It occurs to me that when I catch a rerun of the old B&W Twilight Zone, it usually holds up pretty well. There are exceptions, sure, as is to be expected of a show with an anthology format, but overall, still very watchable today. Certainly better than either the 80’s or 00’s revivals.
Once in a great while I’ll catch a Tales From The Darkside rerun on syfy, and those are usually pretty watchable too.
Um…to me alot of the old shows are funnier because they are dated.
I Love Lucy, Bewitched, Leave it to Beaver, Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, etc…are hilarious and entertaining because of the outdated clothes, attitudes, and lifestyles as much as anything else. It’s also fun to see the cars they drove.
Andy Griffith, MAS*H, and All in the Family have this same appeal, but are elevated to higher level by superb acting and writing. Those are my top three comedy shows ever.
As for dramas, Twight Zone is timeless, ageless, & classic forever & always.
I said almost this exact same thing the other night to my husband when one of those color eps was on that had the Howard-Goober-Emmett combo. All three of those guys did not add up to one Barney. Sadly, Don Knotts pretty much stank in anything else he was in because he always came off as a Barney looking for his Andy. Andy & Don had perfect comic chemistry, and that is not confined to a single era.
We recently bought the entire series of “Space: 1999” and found that the show is extremely slow-paced compared to what we’re used to now (we didn’t find it boring, though). It struck both of us (my husband and me) that we watched that show as kids and sat enthralled by it for an hour.
Aged well: The Golden Girls. God, I love me some Betty White. There’s never been another show like it - middle aged single women living together. You can catch every episode on Youtube by searching for a “channel” called GoingGoldenAgain.
Also Nash Bridges I think, has aged well. The clothes are sure out of date, but nothing else feels like it is to me.
I just watched Anchorman with my little brother this weekend, since he had somehow never seen it. I chuckled at various parts, but never once laughed uproariously like I had the first two times I’d seen it, months after it came out. It’s also really irritating to hear every third line repeated, and realize that people say them often in socially awkward situations, or just because they think they’re funny when they too deliver them.
ETA: Cat Whisperer, DMark, Hazle, you can watch every season of the Golden Girls on Youtube now!
I’m going through DS9 for the first time. I’m in the middle of Season 4 and this show is awesome. I regret always changing the channel back in the day when I realized it wasn’t TNG.
The detail that always stands out to me is women wearing high-waisted pants up until around 2000. It just looks so very dated. Friends is the ultimate for this, but also the first couple seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I never saw it in the day but recently watching some DVDs of “Peyton Place” and it is bad. Perhaps it got more interesting later on. At its height it was on prime time TV three nights a week. Looking at Mia Farrow makes you want to shout “just wait 20 years from now when your boyfriend is humping your adopted daughter!”.
Went through the “I Love Lucy” a couple years ago and while you wonder whether prices used for clothes, cars, etc were cheap or expensive, it is still funny.
I watched “Man from UNCLE” dvds and was disappointed. Saw it a few times as a kid and thought it was good. But now it was mainly “what are they doing?” Although the casting 45 years later are interesting: William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy in one episode" Sonny and Cher in another.
Maverick episodes with James Garner are still great. Avoid the later ones after when Garner last when they started casting Robert Colbert yet another member of the family
I’ve only started watching MASH recently on digital. It’s a fantastic show and holds up well. I never saw it first time round. The mix of comedy and tragedy is well done. My only criticism is that it seems the Korean characters aren’t really fully realised.
Quite true. I always hated LItB, but the one episode I could tolerate was the one in which Beaver got pushed around by a bully and Wally, hearing about it, immediately wanted the bully’s name so he could go beat him up. Ward & June (reasonably) objected, prompting Beaver (equally reasonably, from his POV) to say, “But what the point of having a big brother if he can’t go beat up bullies for you?”
I watched DS9 through much of its first run – by which I mean erratically the first two and a half years, then religiously from midway through the third season onward. I’ve recently been rewatching it, and my GOD is it great. Just as good as I recalled.
Oddly, I have also been rewatching TOS for the first time in years, and found to my surprise that there were far fewer watchable episodes than I recall. TOS is an odd case, though, as it tends to be either bloody awful or bloody brilliant, with very little in between.
From days of long ago, from unchartered regions of the universe, comes a legend. The legend of Voltron: Defender of the Universe!
A mighty robot, loved by good, feared by evil. As Voltron’s legend grew, peace settled across the galaxy. On Planet Earth, a Galaxy Alliance was formed. Together with the good planets of the solar system, they maintained peace throughout the universe, until a new horrible menace threatened the galaxy.
Voltron was needed once more. This is the story of a super force of space explorers. Specially trained, and sent by the Alliance, to bring back Voltron: Defender of the Universe!
Voltron and Robotech are both on Netflix VOD and I have to say that while I remember them both fondly, Voltron comes off pretty crappy now; Robotech OTOH, while not the ultimate triumph of animation I remember it to be, still holds up pretty well.
