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What's a show you love that's from before your time?
Before your time = you weren't old enough to otherwise follow the zeitgeist at the time the show was made. If you grew up watching reruns of The Honeymooners with your grandparents or something, that still counts.
Easy. Twin Peaks. I would have been 5 when it first aired. Watched it for the first time when it was on Netflix circa 2010ish. One of my absolute favourites of all time.
edit: I also absolutely loved season 3 when it came out. What a special show.
I recently binged all 3 seasons for the first time - man are they (mostly) amazing. I find it bonkers that the season 2 finale was on regular network TV. Then season 3 comes along 25 years later nothing short of a masterpiece.
I quite like Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me, but could not stand season 3. I dropped out after 3 or so episodes. I’ve seen a decent bit of Lynch’s works but some of his stuff is lost on me.
Twin Peaks was at its best when Mark Frost kept Lynch on a leash to prevent him running off into the abyss without coming back.
I'm not really sure what you're implying here. Mark Frost and David Lynch wrote season 3 together, and Lynch directed every episode.
While season 3 is a very different Twin Peaks, it was never going to be the same show from 25 years earlier. The last shot of the season was absolutely terrifying. As a fan of most of David Lynch's films, I think The Return is probably my favourite thing he's done.
Here's an interview with Mark Frost about writing S3 with Lynch: https://www.indiewire.com/awards/industry/twin-peaks-the-return-mark-frost-david-lynch-writing-collaboration-1201975099/
Monty Python’s Flying Circus. As a kid in the 80s I grew up listening to the albums, reading the books, watching VHS tapes.
Fawlty Towers was juuuuust before my time.
Twilight Zone is still great.
Star Trek: TNG and DS9 are two obvious ones for me. Also Stargate SG-1. That sort of episodic sci-fi is the absolute peak of television for me, though I wasn't born / was too young.
Nothing I've seen in the modern era scratches that same itch - although I do need to sit down and watch The Orville, which I've *heard is the closest thing to TNG out there.
Not sure if you’re saying you've never seen The Orville but want to, or you have seen it and want to rewatch… but either way I approve this message. It starts out rough and I think we can blame Fox for that, but once it finds its voice it gets so good. IMHO it’s the best Star Trek since Galaxy Quest.
The Orville is the best Trek since Voyager. I wish they would finally bring it back.
That last season explored contemporary issues with incredible execution -- in the sort of way that weepy, ham fisted ST Discovery could only dream of
I can still vividly remember seeing the commercial for ST:TNG for the Season 4 premier and being hyped. It feels like that took forever. I don't know if it's better or worse that you didn't have to wait for Season 4, but man it's all my friends and I talked about that summer.
Thanks for making me feel old.
Similar here. Back in the early 90s, I caught a few episodes of TNG syndicated on one of the few TV stations that came in over the air at my house. The station aired it late (around midnight I think) and I was very young though, so it didn't become a staple. I saw enough for it to be somewhat familiar, so when my family rented the TNG movies later in the 90s I wasn't totally lost, but all in all I think I might've seen like 5% of the whole show when it was airing.
During the first dot-com boom in the late 90s we bought the TOS movies on VHS for cheap from some online video store that was no doubt furnishing its discounts (and free pack of microwave popcorn in each shipment) with VC money, so those served as my introduction to the original crew. By then I was old enough to properly take interest in things and became a bit obsessed, but those movies had become old by then.
Missed the boat on DS9 and Voyager entirely because we didn't have cable and the OTA channels we got never picked either up. The next Trek I'd see while it was airing was some of Enterprise, but we dropped that during the mediocre first season or two.
I made a point of filling the gaps back around 2017-2018, when I marathonned through all the treks. It was almost all enjoyable in one way or another but the 90s treks were particularly great at being great to come home from work to. They were just good TV.
Whose Line Is It Anyway is kinda recent in comparison, but it'll always be close to my heart, I think
I used to love watching this show with my grandfather, we would watch it weekly live. Still so funny.
Some absolutely legendary moments that still come to me and make me laugh.
One of my favorites was the prop based game where each player holds an item and has to do an impression tied to that item, so like a flashlight would mean Scooby Doo, a map would be John Wayne, and a scarf would be elvis.
I can't remember exactly how it happened, but at one point Collin hands Ryan Stiles both the flashlight and the map and Ryan combines his impressions of Scooby Doo and John Wayne.
One of the funniest things I've seen in my life, bar none
Seinfeld is probably mine and as you could tell by my username, I’m a fan. Seinfeld was big in my household growing up in the 2000s. My parents immigrated to the states in the 90s and my dad attributes the show to teaching him a lot about American culture.
"Vandelay Industries. Kel Varnsen speaking. How may I help you?"
Seinfeld is mine too. Sounds like I'm a little older than you, because I was a little kid when the show was still airing. But its an early TV memory of mine. I watched the syndication religiously as a teenager, but by the time I "got the jokes" beyond laughing at Kramer it had already ended.
Its funny to say but Seinfeld massively influenced my expectations about what adulthood would be like. I moved to NYC at 18 years old for many reasons, but one of the biggest reasons was Seinfeld. Around that time one of my close friends was really into it, and we became experts at Seinfeld trivia, and won many free drinks competing in Seinfeld bar trivia nights all around NYC.
I still watch the show all the time. Its my comfort show, the way "The Office" is a comfort show for a lot of folks. I can recite most of it from memory. I'm going to stop rambling now but the last thing I'd like to say is: I love the idea of your dad immigrating to the US and when people ask why, he just says "well you know, my home country had its positives and negatives, but... yada yada yada, now I'm here!"
So did you become an importer/exporter of fine latex goods?
I can't watch it anymore that he's come out as pro Palestinian genocide. Gross human.
Columbo (1968)
Great detective show, arguably the best of all time. Had some impressive celebrity cameos like Johnny Cash guest starring in a few episodes.
I like how the show doesnt rely on constant tension and danger, Columbo is always in control of the situation and even when it seems like someone is planning to kill him, hes already one step ahead from the start.
But hes not an arrogant dick like Sherlock is in Sherlock. Hes still humble and likable despite being smarter than everyone else.
When I watched the show for the first time, I was surprised to see that I recognized a couple of plot elements from the Ace Attorney games. For example, my favorite Columbo scene, the fingerprints on the artwork reveal, is given an omage in the 3rd Phoenix Wright game when Phoenix pulls the same move on Luke Atmey.
It's campy and muscle more than brains but I've been on a McCloud binge recently. I'll have to check out Columbo!
That the man could pull dental records for the killer based on the cheese he bit into.
Gold Jerry, gold!
I Love Lucy. My mom loved to play the reruns on TV when I was a kid, so there's some nostalgia there, and granted a lot of the social norms are outdated by now. But it's amazing how well the comedy holds up:
The Chocolate Factory
The Sculptress
Translating down the line
Vitameatavegamin
Locked in the freezer
Baking bread
Lucy and Ethel get a new look
And it's funny to think how the pop cultural juggernaut of the whitebread 1950s was helmed by a woman and a Cuban immigrant.
Wholeheartedly agree, that show has held up better than most of its contemporaries. From the bits and pieces I’ve heard about Lucy and Desi off-camera they weren’t great people to work with but credit where it’s due for their entertainment chops. And their business acumen too, as much as it was tangled up in not being great people to work with, they got stuff done. If it hadn’t been for Desilu, Star Trek would have never happened; and as someone who was profoundly shaped by that, I’m grateful to Lucy.
It really feels like she should have had an acting school. Comedy is the hardest form of acting to get right, and I don't think there is a modern performer who can match her breadth of skills, especially when it comes to timing, exaggeration, and understatement.
The Addams Family (1964 TV series)
It aired more than a decade before I was born, but the humor is oddly timeless. I've even shown my kids a fair number of the episodes and they've enjoyed it.
If you include "shows that were on when I was a kid but that I was too young to be allowed to watcH" then lots of them. Mostly 50's 60's 70's early 80's sitcoms that were on TV the many many days I played hooky in the 5th through 9th grades. The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, Gilligan's Island, The Addams Family, The Munsters, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, I Dream of Jeanie, The Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch, MAS*H, The Jeffersons, Sanford & Sons, What's Happening, Fat Albert, All in the Family, Maude, Taxi, Cheers... that's... that's what I can think of off the top of my head. I usually zoned out for the dramas or changed the channel or played video games. Most of the old animation was pretty much Cartoon Network running old Hanna-Barbera stuff, and I'm not sure who ran Looney Tunes but it was all way before my time. I also used to watch a bunch of old Disney cartoons on the Disney Channel, back before they started making a lot of original content.
I always loved Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Snagglepuss, Quickdraw McGraw, Peabody & Sherman, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Scooby-Doo, Tom & Jerry, Hong Kong Phooey, Inch High Private Eye, Secret Squirrel (the OG and the later revival)...
I watched a ton of TV as a kid, come to think of it.
I wanna say it was Boomerang which aired he old Looney Toons, at least in the 90s.
That sounds about right. I actually saw a YouTube about all this recently but I forgot it all and am too lazy to look it up again.
I recently started watching Moonlighting with my significant other. We’ve been together a long time and it’s always been one of her favorite shows but she was scared to show it to me in case I didn’t like it. We had some friends over a few weeks ago and ended up watching the episode Atomic Shakespeare. I loved it and a few days later she showed me The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice and I was hooked.
Ostensibly, it’s a show about a former fashion model who goes broke and has to go to work at the detective agency she owns as a tax dodge. Said agency is run by David Addison (Bruce Willis). They solve mysteries. But it’s basically just a pretext on which to hang a bunch of fun adventures with the main characters. Sometimes they solve a mystery, sometimes they chase the man who stole Maddie’s fortune to South America. Sometimes they do a Shakespeare riff.
We started watching it from the beginning and are halfway through season two now. It’s amazing how the show knew exactly what it was right from the first episode. They make some minor adjustments, but the only other series I can think of that was fully formed this early in its run is Community.
The chemistry between Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis is electric - and again, it’s right from the first episode. The dialogue and rapport between them is so snappy that it makes the episodes feel like they’re only 10 minutes long.
One of the things I love most about the show is that you never know what you’re going to get with each episode. Is it a serious drama? A black and white mystery noir? A buddy comedy? A comedy of manners? Musical numbers! And it does a good job with each of them.
The other thing I love is the fashion. Maddie’s (Cybill Shepherd) outfits are GORGEOUS. Every time she is on screen, they have a diffusing gel over the lens to give Maddie an ethereal glow and gives the show a very distinct, beautiful look. In shots with both of them, they custom made lens gels that only covered the half of the screen Maddie is on. So she has a glow and David looks normal.
Lastly, major shoutout to Allyce Beasley as Mrs. DiPesto, the secretary. She’s made me double over in laughter multiple times with tossed off one liners.
I’ve got my fingers crossed that it stays good!
🎵Moonlighting strangers
Who just met on the way 🎵
The Avengers (1961) - I adore this show for the coolly composed and wholly modern duo and the quirky suspects they encounter. There are some genuinely genius moments in the show but every episode is enjoyable.
Batman (1966) - We've all seen clips from this show. The actual thing is just as zany.
Salvage 1 (1979) - The weirdest dystopian show out there. "Junkyard owner Harry Broderick assembles a team to pull off the ultimate salvage operation. With former astronaut Skip Carmichael and fuel expert Melanie Slozar, Harry builds the spacecraft Vulture in order to bring back the equipment left on the moon during the Apollo moon expeditions."
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981) - The best rendition of Adams' work. It's dripping with BBC charm.
Jim Henson's The Storyteller (1987) - Some of the best use of The Creature Shop's puppet-making abilities combined with some great stories. It's not for kids but not grossly adult; a space where Henson's team thrives.
...salvage 1 was one of the few english-simulcast shows i saw growing up in puerto rico; i've never met anyone else who's seen it!..
Thanks for mentioning this! Despite watching a lot of Andy Griffith I had never heard of this. I just watched the full movie on youtube with my sister. She though it was too campy but I loved it. All the little explanations and pre-internet computer hacking were so very charming!
Batman (1966) - the Adam West version.
Gilligan's Island was pretty great too.
The Flintstones
For context, these shows came our 20 years before I was born.
Looney Toons + Tom and Jerry as well. Those are even older.
Throwing in another for The Twilight Zone! The Syfy channel would run marathons on holidays (I think it still does), so I have some fond memories of it.
Also, I grew up in the late 90's, early 2000's, which is when Cartoon Network aired a TON of older cartoons. Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry, Scooby-Doo (the New Scooby-Doo Movies and The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo (screw that animated movie that came out a few years ago retconning it to not be supernatural), Johnny Quest, Super Friends, Hong Kong Phooey... I also watched a lot of Boomerang once that channel came around.
...also, if you count "shows I was too young to watch
but watched anyway": I adore Cowboy Bebop and got it on DVD for my birthday a few years back. I also still love Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, and Sealab 2021. (My parents put a TV in my bedroom, and I liked Inuyasha which played at midnight on weekdays. So I saw a LOT of shows not meant for kids waiting for Inuyasha.)I really need to watch more old adult-oriented shows. I don't outright love them, but I do have fond memories of watching Gilligan's Island reruns after school, and liked all the episodes of MAS*H I happened to catch on MeTV a few years back. I really need to watch more old shows.
CHiPs
Charlie's Angels (old school)
Get Smart
Dragnet
Lost in Space
The 6 Million Dollar Man
Get Smart and Dragnet were huge staples of my childhood TV experience (reruns I believe).
Get Smart is mandatory watching for fans of Bond.
Dun, DunDun Dun. The sound of Law and Order, before Law and Order.
I remember also watching Inspector Gadget around the same time. I always found Smart and the Inspector to have a similar obliviousness / ineptitude. Penny and 99 were the real heroes.
Aside: Inspector Gadget is only a kids show if I set aside the body horror of having all that equipment inside his body. I feel a gritty remake in the making.
I also used to watch Get Smart reruns with my father when I was a kid! Good memories. I only found out later in life how old the show was.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
The Twilight Zone
The Prisoner
Monty Python's Flying Circus
The Twilight Zone is probably number 1 for me. Great writing in that series.
Hogan's Heroes! My dad and I would watch episodes on TV Land, as he grew up watching it. It's such a goofy show with some heartfelt moments. And a great reminder that Nazis sucked then and Nazis still suck now. Also, I worked with a guy who was an exact doppelganger of Kinchloe, except he was a Navy man and not Army.
Gilligan's Island and Star Trek were of course in the same vein, but Hogan's Heroes has a special place in my heart.
Earlier this year, I binged a lot of Taxi, which is one of the only shows I've watched that aired entirely before I was born. From my understanding, it was a pretty groundbreaking show for its time, and it feels much more like a modern sitcom compared to other shows of its era. Also, the theme song is a fucking banger once it kicks in.
Other than that, it's really just Columbo and The Twilight Zone. I used to watch The Brady Bunch, I Dream of Jeannie, and some old cartoons when I was a kid, but the only thing I enjoy about them as an adult is the pure childhood nostalgia.
Classic Doctor Who (thanks to PBS airing reruns). Yeah it was lower budget than Star Trek and went a bit overkill with monster-of-the-week but there was also a lot of great writing, especially the non-earth episodes that imagined how all kinds of different societies might function. A real shame so many episodes were lost forever in that studio fire.
Most shows, because I had that type of parent who would eagerly show you all the stuff they already love and show no interest if you tried to talk to them about modern shows.
So, I grew up with Doctor Who (this was before the reboot mind you), Quantum Leap, Red Dwarf, etc etc. Tons and tons of Old Guy Sci Fi, as a little girl. And I ate it all up. I still love it, even if it did make me a social pariah back then.
I think the funniest part is that I became a much more obsessive Doctor Who fan than my dad ever was. He doesn't even listen to the Big Finish audio dramas, smh 🙂↔️
I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched.
I haven't watched either of them in a very long time, but who doesn't want to watch a wish fulfillment show where you can be a gay man with a pretty wife with whom you have a purely platonic relationship with who magically solves all of your problems? Plus they were made when color TV was pretty new so everything was so pretty and colorful (or weird and gross)!
The Bewitched movie they made a few decades back was complete garbage, though, and the world is a worse place for having made it.
Most of the shows that others are mentioning were not before my time. Most were right in the middle of my time, the stuff I grew up on.
Soap -- On the cusp for me. My parents occasionally let me watch it, even though I was too young to really get all the dirty jokes and stuff. Truly ahead of its time.
Also, going waaaay back, Burns and Allen -- they started out doing Vaudeville together for a decade, then graduated to radio for another decade, then helped to invent the "TV sitcom" ... After Gracie died, George Burns continued to make hit movies (and do pretty decent stand-up) for another 30 years, before passing away at 100.
Most of my favorite shows are before my time.
The Dick Van Dyke Show
I Love Lucy
Seinfeld
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
If it's specifically from before my time (and recognizable outside of the Netherlands) I'd probably say:
The A-Team.
Police Squad.
The A-Team being something I liked as a kid while Police Squad is something I would come to appreciate more and more as I got older. Police Squad, and the Naked Gun films of course, were my father's influence. He was always a fan of Leslie's nonsense.
Nowadays it's the type of humor you have to grow up with or you probably won't like it at all. It's strange, over the top and very difficult to recreate. I know of only one other person that likes it as much as I do.
I don't think I'd purposefully watch the A-Team nowadays, but I wouldn't mind having a little refresher on Police Squad every now and then.
The A-Team movie that came out in 2010 was the perfect amount of excessive, for a one off viewing that I laughed at, enjoyed, and hardly thought about again ever since. Worth a watch if you're in the mood for it.
Is that the one where they fly a tank? If I'm right then yes I agree with you, I think that says enough about that film too lmao.
Police Squad! With the exclamation, starring Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin and Alan North. They got cancelled after only 6 episodes because they relied on a lot of visual humour that audiences just listening in didn't get. They did better with the film follow ups, The Naked Gun series.
The Prisoner is a delightfully weird mini-series from 1967. It's a show about a British secret service agent who who resigns in anger for reasons never told and is then spirited away to a dream-like prison island where people cannot leave because huge balloons that are apparently organically grown in the island will incapacitate them.
There's no way it is not a product of drug use.
Major themes: collectivism, individualism, overreach of governmental authority.