Childhood Television

Today’s blog hope asks what television shows from our childhoods would we bring back and why?

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Wow! I had to google television shows from the 1960s and 70s to even remember what shows there were and I will admit — I didn’t find a lot I’d want to bring back and the ones that I would like have already been brought back with mixed results.

My childhood television viewing window was 1965 through 1979, and it was a sea of episodic banality. Most shows simply sought to fill in a half-hour or hour with something that people wouldn’t turn off and so, they didn’t try all that hard. I watched them and some of them I loved at the time, but I watch them now and wonder at the very poor writing choices.

I will give nods to some shows I think you should find on Netflix and watch – The Waltons showed a good family dynamic and my mother (who grew up in that era) said it was a fairly accurate presentation except you didn’t see the kids working that hard. Mom and her siblings worked very hard.

The Andy Griffith Show and Mayberry RFD were good for showing police as they ought to be — peace officers instead of law enforcement officers. I don’t see that being reality anymore, but I think it should be. If cops were more like that, there’d be less crime and fewer people wanting to shoot cops. I liked All in the Family and MASH. Actually I’ve watched MASH several times as an adult and it was a great show. All In the Family doesn’t play well in this era, in my opinion.

I liked the family movie nights. From Disney when I was a little kid to the CBS Movie when I was a teenager, it was a good opportunity to hang out with my parents. I wouldn’t want to see the same shows, but the concept of a family movie night is a good one.

I can’t really think of a single show I would bring back from my childhood. A few have been brought back and, frankly, ruined. Television remakes in general have an abysmal track record. The Bionic Woman, Knight Rider, Get Smart, Love Boat, Dragnet, Charlie’s Angels, Wonder Woman, Dallas (that was when I was in college, actually) have all been redone and stank like last week’s fish left out on the counter. Now that we have the ability to go back and watch the original shows, I can see why. They weren’t very well-written to begin with. They didn’t think they needed to be. People would get to see it once … maybe twice … and then it would be forgotten. There was no need to write anything with the thought that people would come back and want to redo it. So there wasn’t much to work with and writers don’t want to bypass what was great about the original shows and thereby bypass a built-in audience, so they end up writing something not worth watching by a modern audience who has grown accustomed to well-written dramas and actually funny comedies.

Shows that have been brought back successfully have mostly done so by re-imagining the classic series. Battlestar Galactica was quite different from the 1978 show as is Hawaii Five-O. Twilight Zone followed a similar concept with new content. Star Trek (I know it’s a movie, not a television show) keeps some of the elements that made the show great writ large for the big screen and updated for a modern audience. Mostly, it’s saved by the current casts ability to make you see the former cast in them without being slavish to the original.

What I would like to see brought back is not so much individual shows as the concept of families watching television together because the shows were not written for a particular age group, but for the entire family. That would mean easing back on the sex talk and controversial subjects and I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Hollywood is not through with remaking American society in its own image and American society no longer has any gatekeepers for what is appropriate, so I suggest we just leave those old shows available on Netflix et al so that people who want to see them in the original version can find them and binge watch. Maybe some of the older-era dynamics and worldview will wear off, but you know what they say about bringing horses to water.