TV Tuesday: TV You Grew Up With

[yourlibrarian]

Time for another TV Tuesday! The topic today is TV shows you grew up on (and how they've aged).

What were your favorites? What did everyone else seem to like but you didn't? What still holds up and what doesn't?

Comments are at your own risk for spoilers.

Comments

[misbegotten]

First show for which I ever wrote a letter to a network to protest its cancellation: Max Headroom

I was recently watching it, actually. It holds up pretty well since it was set in a dystopian future.

[yourlibrarian]

Isn't this returning soon?

[misbegotten]

I hadn't heard that. Matt Frewer, upon whom Max was based, is still acting I think but I can't imagine him starring in a reboot. I liked Max as a supporting character more than a main one.

[shadowkat]

Assuming, the WGA/SGA-Aftra didn't derail it further... apparently it is...

I loved that show as well, it was delightfully quirky.

[rocky41_7]

One of the odder shows I grew up on was Angry Beavers...I rewatched it as a younger adult and it was NOT good XD Also, it had that flavor of 90s cartoon where they were still working out what was child-appropriate.

Avatar on the other hand, is still great!

[yourlibrarian]

I never watched it myself but a nephew did when he was growing up and he loved it! No idea what he'd think now.

But yeah, ATLA definitely endures 🙂

[yourlibrarian]

I actually didn't see much TV as a kid but I did watch as a teen. The only one I've seen recently in a rewatch is Star Trek TOS and Trek the Animated Series, both of which I watched 2 years ago.

Surprisingly I found it held up quite well. It just seemed like more of a real workplace than the more modern Treks. And the animated series, while really not great on the animation front, still had some enjoyable stories for a pared down half hour show.

What surprises me most looking back is how little I heard people discussing TV shows. It was much more often music.

[senmut]

Huh. The point about shows and music is a good one.

We were rewatching Trek TOS a couple years back and yeah, it is still solid. And I think that might be one reason I am not overtly fannish over later Trek; the newer shows are like the movies, all action all the time.

[senmut]

I was fed a nightly dose of M*A*S*H, which I find very relevant still, Johnny Carson who can still make me laugh when I watch old clips, though yeah, some have aged badly, and pretty much all the sitcoms of the 70s and early 80s. The format of those, and some of the lessons, still hold up.

Show type I miss? Variety shows. The Carol Burnett Show and The Muppet Show shaped my love of vignettes, sketch and improv humor, as well as Guest Stars.

[yourlibrarian]

Yeah variety shows were such an early success on TV, as were talk shows. But while the latter endures, it seems like the 70s were the last gasp for variety shows.

[adafrog]

True. The only variety style show now is Let's Make a Deal-Wayne Brady manages to throw in singing and dancing.

[yourlibrarian]

Oh interesting! I'm glad too, because he's so talented.

[adafrog]

He really is.

[shadowkat]

You can still see them here and there on streaming but it's mostly just various types of sketch comedy or talk shows - but yep, they kind of died in the 1980s, and while they kept trying to bring them back in various guises - the best they could do was the sketch comedy shows, which do endure.

Reality shows kind of took their place. I preferred the variety shows - there was at least singing and dancing.

[yourlibrarian]

That's an interesting observation about the growth of one and decline of the other. I think a lot of it has to do with the segmentation of the audience so that there are fewer "family shows" where multigenerations can watch together.

[adafrog]

I watched a lot of those, as well. Also Star Trek (TOS reruns).

OMG, The Muppet Show. <3

[senmut]

The Muppet Show was THE BEST and it was not just a kid's show and I respect that so much.

[adafrog]

It really was. And the two eagles making fun, and Piiiiigs in Spaaaaaaace!

[shadowkat]

MASH - wrote a meta on it in college for a course about comedy writing. I don't know if it holds up well or not, it's still relevant in some respects about the craziness of War.

Battle of the Planets (it doesn't hold up well, and it went through a lot of iterations, becoming eventually Voltron - and got rebooted).

Fame - I loved the first iteration of this series, which was opposite Magnum PI ( which I wasn't into). It lasted maybe two years.

Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys Mysteries (I had a crush on Shaun Cassidy and adored Pamela Sue Martin's Nancy Drew)

Battle Star Galatica - loved it, but alas only two seasons

There was this weird sci-fi series called Fantastic Journey with Roddy McDowell and Ike Eisenmann in it.

Batman & Robin with Adam West (in re-runs) - watched when we got home from school on my friend's color television set. (We only had black and white at that stage)

The Monkeys - I adored the Monkeeys - it was my favorite television series as a child. I don't know if it holds up well.

The Brady Bunch and The Waltons, also Little House on the Prarie, Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman

Wonderful World of Disney - had some fun series on it.

Twilight Zone

***

Others loved and I really didn't: Lost in Space (no), Space 1999, Mork and Mindy, Three's Company,

[adafrog]

Was the Disney one the Sunday movies? Apple Dumpling Gang, etc?

[shadowkat]

Not really? It was usually a series of shows? Sometimes old Disney movies, sometimes nature documentaries, sometimes weekly series or reruns of them. They did an adaptation of The Incredible Journey (the book about the pets whose family moves and leaves them behind for reasons, and they travel across country to find them). And various other programming. Not unlike the Disney Channel or Disney + now, actually.

Later, the reboot (in the 00s was the movie). But this was back in the 1970s and 80s, where they tended to reserve films more for theaters and didn't show them on television until a couple of years past their release. The Apple Dumpling Gang was in the movie theaters in the 1970s.

[adafrog]

I'm pretty sure I was watching it then, too, but apparently I don't remember enough. lol

[senmut]

I watched all of these!

[yourlibrarian]

I only watched a few of these (I firmly agree about Pamela Sue Martin), and I remember hearing about Fantastic Journey but not seeing it. And I too wonder about the Monkees, as I haven't watched any of the shows in a long time. Sometimes ground breaking content doesn't hold up well decades later.

One I never saw but would like to try sometime is Space 1999. It predated SW and BSG so I'm curious what post-Trek scifi TV was like.

[shadowkat]

True about ground-breaking content not holding up as well decades later. MASH - is well dicey. As is a great deal of Star Trek, and the Monkeys. Heck, even Buffy.

Space 1999 swung towards horror. It was about a Space Station on the Moon, and somehow it got separated from Earth and was trying to get back? Martin Landau and his wife Barbara Bain starred in it. Each episode was scary. I used to leave our house during it - because it scared me. They had one episode in which they were fighting a Giant Spider Like Monster in the engineering room, another where people didn't age, then they did - and a woman was holding this guy's hand, only to discover a skeleton next to her (I can't remember why). Another was about a lovely group of people welcoming them to a new Earth Style planet, when in reality they were monstrous plants trying to eat them (Battle Star Galatica did the same story in the film in the 1980s, as did Angel S4, Shiny Happy People was very similar to that storyline).

I hated that show - but I was also only 8 at the time.

[yourlibrarian]

That's disappointing alright, turning a potential ST Voyager storyline into just monsters of the week 😒

[shadowkat]

It did have some interesting storylines? Moon Base Alpha got separated from Earth, and it was somewhat similar to say...BSG in the sense that they were hunting a home and trying to fix problems. But at the end of the day it leaned far too heavily towards horror for my delicate eight year old sensibilities. (The bigger themes would have been lost on me.)

[saddlerfan]

One of my all time favorite shows when I was a kid was ALF. He was THE guy over here, everbody knew him and there was TONS of merchandise. Pluishies, buttons, even books. The show was REALLY big here in Germany.

And... I still watch it. And I still laugh at most of the jokes even though I literally know seasons 1 and 2 by heart. (Some scenes have aged, and not for the better, but the concept of the show still works today although I'd say ALF would feel way less isolated now because he'd have social media to communicate with people who aren't the Tanners.)

What still angers me is the dreadful final episode. I know they didn't intend to let the show end on this sad note but ughhhhhhhh. (And don't get me started on the movie they made after that. lol) Ignore! Ignore! lol

[senmut]

ALF always felt like good clean fun and I kind of wanted a crossover with Full House just because of the last names being the same... distant cousins kind of thing.

Namely because I think ALF and the younger kids would have been into Shenanigans.

[saddlerfan]

And ALF isn't even THAT squeaky clean, some of those jokes just REALLY went right over my head when I was a kid, haha. And I read somewhere that they tuned down his desire to eat Lucky significantly after the first few episodes when they realized that the show seemed to appeal the most to kids in a lot of countries. (Not sure if this is true, I just read it on a trivia page or something.) Kiddo Me wasn't bothered tho, I made do with Lynn's explanation that went like "we eat cows and his people eat cats, he's an alien, so yeah".

But yeah that crossover sounds interesting to me! Maybe they ARE distant cousins, who knows? And given how ALF always corrupted Lynn and Brian (and later also Jake Ochmonek) it seems like a given that he'd get into more shenanigans! lol I think this is why the show appealed so much to kids - he just seemed like this super cool best friend to have.

[dancing_serpent]

We didn't have a tv when I was growing up. My mother decided to get one after my parents divorced, but I was already 17 at that time. I tried to catch up on pretty much everything, but even so, people are always surprised when I tell them that I haven't watched a certain show or movie.

[senmut]

Then you are one who gets to see things brand new and filter it through the modern lens, whenever you do see an oldie. How Wonderful!

[dancing_serpent]

Yeah, that can be fun. But I don't get that feeling of comfortable nostalgia, either.

[jo]

This was initially difficult to answer because I was drawing complete blanks re: what shows I watched "growing up" -- which I am sort of limiting to shows that aired primarily during the 1970s, when I would have been 7 to 17 years old.

Oddly, the first one that came to mind was Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. I say oddly because Laugh-In aired between 1968 to 1973, during which time I was 5-10 years old and clearly not the target audience. But I think what I liked about it (certainly not most of the jokes which I wouldn't have understood at that age) was how colourful and zany it was. Growing up, we had only 3 channels -- and one of them was French (the French version of the CBC). I have memories of Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday (mostly my dad wanted to watch that), and also the Tommy Hunter Show, which was a long running (1965-1992!) music show featuring mostly country/folk type artists from Canada and the US.

Anyway, I googled for "1970s TV Shows" and going over some of those lists, I was reminded of the oh so many shows that I watched during that time period. I started to note them all down, but there are just too many, so I will highlight personal faves.

There were so many great sit-coms/dramadies during that time. To name a few of my faves: MASH, Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, Taxi, The Bob Newhart Show, Barney Miller, Welcome Back Kotter, One Day At A Time, WKRP in Cincinnati, SOAP, Benson, Maude, and of course, SCTV. We also got the occasional British comedy on the CBC and I do remember Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, and Mind Your Language, which I recently read the BBC won't ever re-air/make available online because of ethnic stereotyping or some such. It was a show about a group of foreign students taking an English as a second language course and as someone who was bilingual and understood the funny stuff that arises when you mix up languages, I found it hilarious.

Others have mentioned variety shows, and yes, I too loved The Carol Burnett Show, as well as Sonny and Cher, The Flip Wilson Show, and even the Donny and Marie Show.

Some of my fave dramas from that time include The White Shadow (man I LOVED that show), Six Million Dollar Man, Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, Emergency, Space: 1999, Eight is Enough, Family, McMillan and Wife, Beachcombers, Little House on the Prairie...

I guess the first real big TV "event" that I remember was the whole "who shot JR?" thing with Dallas. And of course the "it was all a dream" thing, also with Dallas...

[senmut]

Excellent List of things, but OH YOU GOT me with Laugh-In. I adored that show in reruns!

[jo]

Sock it to me!

[yourlibrarian]

My partner and I both watched WKRP and while it's fine, I think it was more fun at the time.

I watched Donny & Marie and certainly saw various episodes of different shows over the years, but for the most part that was the main one. I also watched Wonder Woman, Bionic Woman and some of Six Million Dollar Man. I'm curious to watch Bionic Woman again because the reboot they tried some years back was just a dismal failure. Other than Katee Sackhoff it was not worth watching. It lacked the warmth and familial aspects of the original show.

[svgurl]

I was a 90s kid so my earliest memories are watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and then I switched to a lot of ABC Family (and related) shows, some reruns and some airing at the time - Saved By The Bell, Sabrina The Teenage Witch, Step by Step, Family Matters, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Boy Meets World ... that kind of thing. Boy Meets World was definitely a favorite. I don't really know what everyone liked, since I don't remember my friends and I talking much about TV shows. Obviously Friends was big during that time but I didn't start watching it until years after it started airing. I was a little too young for it and I don't think my parents would've let me.

I am not sure how well they've aged - assuming as well as shows like that could've (for instance, obviously, Friends didn't age all that well). They all were lighter but they did touch on some serious topics too but certain aspects and the way they did handle things probably didn't.

[linky]

I grew up on a mixture of 2000's shows and 90's reruns. A mixture of anime/animation and live action too. I watched a lot of television as a kid, across multiple channels. PBS, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, Nickelodeon GAS, Disney Channel, 4Kids TV, Jetix, etc.

Just a handful of these are: Sailor Moon, Kim Possible, Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, Yu-Gi-Oh (Duel Monsters, GX, also 5Ds but that was when I was more of a teen), Drake & Josh, The Amanda Show, All That, Teen Titans, Avatar The Last Airbender, My Life as A Teenage Robot, and Xiaolin Showdown. There's so many more though! I cant really say just how well each of the aged, since for a good number of these shows I haven't seen in 10+ years. But I can say that Avatar The Last Airbender, and The Teen Titans cartoon still really hold up.