Past TV Shows

Maybe it is just a sign of getting old, but there is not much on TV that interests me anymore. I spend hundreds of dollars on hundreds of cable channels just to watch reruns of past TV shows. I flip through screen after screen of listings only to select Friends on channel one thousand and something. I guess part of it is that I am not a big fan of the fake reality shows. The newest genre of show is either a competition which focuses more on the petty back stage antics of selfish small-minded people or a completely unrealistic reality format that manufactures and even sometimes scripts antics for the equally greedy small-minded people you find there.



Past TV shows had more to do with reality than most any of the so called reality shows that are on now. Shows from back in the day were predominantly situational comedies which exaggerated real life, but at least the audience could relate to it. There were characters in the show the viewer could recognize and situations they could remember themselves being in. I can find little to relate to never having been marooned on an island with 20 strangers or dropped in a foreign country trying to beat 20 strangers to the next foreign country. How are those situations anything that can be called reality?



Part of the charm and joy of television was its connection to the ancient Greek aesthetic element of catharsis. The beauty of drama was in what the audience came away with in their view of their own lives. The audience was supposed to see the flaws in the characters on stage and either see themselves with similar flaws or be relieved from not having them. Past TV shows gave us that in both dramatic and comedic forms. The only thing the audience walks away with today is the knowledge that the world is filled with some pretty creepy people who will do almost anything for money.



Past TV shows also seemed to celebrate the good in people. Most of the shows were about good cops, good lawyers, good teachers who were in some way rewarded for their higher character and the bad guys were somehow punished. Todays shows seem to celebrate the sick and twisted leaving the most cunning and ruthless to walk away with fame and money. The culture seems to breed deviants who lead appalling lives just to get acceptance from the viewing strangers.



As evidence of the vacuous nature of todays aesthetic is the number of remakes in movies and on TV. Past TV shows are being made into films. Old films are being remade. Old TV stars are making cameos or taking roles on the remakes of their old shows. Melrose and 90210 are just 2 examples of this phenomenon. There is nothing new being produced for todays small screen that is compelling because the medium has lost its ability to bring the audience any kind of cathartic value by manufacturing artifice and calling it reality.

About the Author

Learn more about thousands of past TV shows by visiting Rick's Past TV Shows site or if you are interested in even older entertainment, visit Rick's Free Old Time Radio Shows site.

Sci-Fi TV Shows

There has been no greater escape offered to the viewing public than Sci-fi TV shows. These shows have always been great entertainment offering chance to look at our world by learning about other worlds that might exist. The wonderful draw of these fantasy genre shows is the opportunity to ask What if. We are relieved of the burdens of our world like time, gravity, dimension, and physics. We are allowed to explore worlds totally different from our own in order to seek a universal truth. A truth that is also unbound by those very attributes of our planet that we get to leave behind.



Sci-Fi TV shows, like most other TV shows, got their start in radio and then transferred to the new medium of television. The new theater of TV gave the science fiction writer new dimensions to work with and added another level to the stories they were able to tell. The stories were able to have a grander scale and be able to weave more intricate plots since the audience could be shown signposts for new locations, times, or characters. Sound effects were no longer the only narrative cues available. Characters could be better and more elaborately drawn allowing for expanded casts and more intricate plots and subplots.



The Twilight Zone is the classic example of the early Sci-FI TV shows. It remained episodic in format like its radio predecessors giving the audience a couple vignettes each time. Occasionally, the episodes were on a common theme and allowed the narrator to educate the public on the meaning of the stories. We were led to certain conclusions and assumptions by mankind that may not apply to the rest of the universe. Further, it was implied that those assumptions or actions shouldnt be applied here. The genre allowed the show to preach a bit about humanity without directly attacking anyone here.



Star Trek is another classic example of what Sci-Fi TV shows could do culturally. The crew of the Enterprise has become culturally iconic for entire generations. At the time, the show was cutting edge in terms of special effects and launched careers for several actors. The worlds explored on the show were more elaborate than those that came before, but the moral was always the same: this could be us; do we want it to be? The point was always to question what it means to be human and decide if that is the best we can be or is there something more.



Star Trek-The Next Generation was a spinoff of sorts during a time when TV was going very retro. The show came years after the original ended and brought with it even better special effects and far better acting. Like all improvements in this genre, it allowed for more intricate plots and more dazzling worlds to explore. This show was different, however. The difference came in the fact that many of the scripts had an internal focus on the characters interactions aboard the ship and not always so much on their interaction with the outside worlds. It became more pure drama.

About the Author

Discover hundreds of television's finest sci-fi series by visiting Rick's Sci-Fi TV Shows Page or talk about your favorite sci-fi series at Rick's Sci-Fi Forum.