In Defense of Old TV

I Recently Started Watching TV Shows That Ended Before I Was Born - It's Been Revelatory.

If you follow me on any of the posting sites (and I assume that most of you do), you know I fucking love television. And I don’t mean this in a “I FuCkiNg LoVe ScIeNcE” ass way, I mean I really, really love television. I’d kill for television. Movies are great, but if I’m being truly honest, my heart lies firmly with glorious TV. The X-Files, Frasier, Monk, It’s Always Sunny, 30 Rock…I could probably list my favorite shows for an hour and not run out of examples. Longer-form titles have their place - I enjoy a good season of Eastbound and Down or True Detective - but at the end of the day there is something truly wonderful about the weekly episodic format. With these programs there will sometimes be a mild seasonal arc to tie everything together, but for the most part each installment is its own tidy little world - introducing villains and challenges and calamities that are almost always neatly wrapped up by the end of the 20-40 minute run. At the conclusion of an episode, the Psych boys always catch the murderer. At the end of 21 minutes of Parks and Rec, whatever absurd municipal government crisis has generally been resolved. Watching these kinds of shows feels like a warm hug - a reliable embrace from the characters and framework you have fallen head over heels for.

A couple of years ago, I ran across an interesting problem - I had watched all the TV shows I wanted to watch. I’d watched them multiple times, in fact. I cast about for new shows to fill the void, but none of them *quite hit* the same. For one, TV series now are usually around 8-10 episodes long, which is over faster than seems possible. You sit down to “binge” a season and somehow you’re done less than two goddamn hours. The new Wicked movie is longer than the entirety of a new season of Frasier, and it’s only the first half of the Wicked musical itself. Eight episodes is just not enough time to build the kind of cadence and wacky one-offs and bottle episodes that a truly great episodic needs to flourish, and so none of them felt quite right. That’s when I started looking elsewhere - not forward to new shows, but backwards - to the past.

My first “old” TV series encounter was Cheers, a show we’ve all heard of but seemingly nobody in my peer group had ever seen (even if the theme song is somehow indelibly imprinted on every Americans brain at birth). Cheers felt like a solid entry point for me - it’s where the character Frasier Crane first appeared, after all. And lo and behold, it was fucking amazing - not in a dated Keystone Cops sort of way, but in a genuine “hell yeah this rocks” way. In the same way Frasier or Seinfeld were amazing. The 1980’s were a long time ago - before I was even born - but somehow it all felt very familiar to me. The structure, the jokes, the relationships, the universality of the whole thing - I found myself slipping into a happy, comfortable routine as I watched my way through the TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THREE episodes of the original show. I fell in love with the characters, the in-jokes, the quirks and the tropes. The classic 80’s style design of the furniture, the hilariously low prices of the beer, and the situations that result from *no cellphones or internet* made me nostalgic for a time in which I never actually lived. Yes, there was the occasional reference to a then-current athlete or politician that I had never heard of before (John Kerry actually has a guest appearance, being 1000 years old), but for the most part every joke made sense to me - possessing a timelessness to which all great art aspires. And it got me thinking that maybe I should give some other shows from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s a shot. So I did.

I started my rather haphazard search for TV I might love by thinking about the shows from the American canon that you hear referenced all the time (like Cheers). One that came to mind immediately was Columbo - named after the disheveled star character {garbled first name}. The term “Columbo” has come to loosely mean “Mr. Smart Detective” in the American vernacular - I cannot name the amount of times I’ve seen a character in a modern show or movie turn to another and sarcastically utter “okay, Columbo” as they fail to work out a question or riddle. So I started in on the series (which ran from *1968 until 2003*) and was immediately hooked. If you’ve never watched before, Columbo takes a unique approach to the detective episodic. Yes, each installment features a murder that the titular character will solve by the end. But unlike most modern detective shows, we actually see the murder happen in each cold open, and the episode that follows involves the audience trying to figure out how Columbo will solve the mystery (to which they already know the answer). It helps that the lead actor, Peter Falk, might be the most charming man to ever grace the screen, but the format felt so approachable and reliable to me at its very core (especially given how foundational it was for the genre). There are fewer episodes in a season, but they each have an average runtime of about 80 minutes - roughly the same length as Men in Black. It’s campy in places, dark in others, but always extremely fun and delightfully engaging. The older episodes are also a cornucopia of weird 1960s and 1970s design, which is a huge plus in my book (there’s one where the murderer drowns his wife in a mustard-carpeted pyramid bathtub, amongst many other gems). And of course you get a healthy dose of *forehead-slapping revelation* as you realize all the things that 21st century detective series have cribbed from Columbo. It’s one of the best shows of all time, and I now totally get why there is a bronze statue of Columbo and his dog (appropriately named “Dog”) in the middle of Bucharest, Hungary. Columbo is universally amazing.

After Columbo, I branched out. I watched the 1980’s romcom/sitcom/detective show Moonlighting, which launched Bruce Willis into superstardom (and let me just say, I get it. He’s so fucking good. Classic Bruce Dub shit). The series, like many others, descends into less-than-stellar episodes and arcs in the later seasons, but the prime run of Moonlighting is as good as it gets. The dynamic between Willis and Shepherd (a woman I knew mostly as “Shawn’s mom from Psych”) is unmatched, the episodes are at once intense and light, and the side characters introduced throughout the show are also perfectly-of-their-time. Also Bruce Willis has (some) hair! After that I got into Miami Vice, Married With Children, and The Rockford Files. I’m planning to watch MacGuyver soon - a show and character I am exclusively familiar with via Patty and Selma on the Simpsons and the SNL parody “MacGruber”. I can’t wait to see what that one is all about, too.

I guess my main point here is that like with movies, there is *so much out there* in the world of American television history, and it’s kind of a bummer that most of it is being lost from our collective knowledge. This is, in large part, the fault of the streamers - almost all of these shows are fully gone from Netflix or Hulu, and I had to arrange my viewing of Columbo in piecemeal across a variety of platforms (legal and illegal) to make sure I had seen the full catalogue. For many years I lingered under the delusion that “old TV” would be over my head, unpleasantly outdated, or simply not hit the same for a lad like me who was raised on the internet - but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I was so fucking wrong. I was a moron. It’s an oft-used phrase, but classic things are classic for a reason. Classic films like Chinatown, Casino, and The Godfather all still hold strong cultural cache in 2025 - why shouldn’t these classic shows hold the same? Your grandparents and aunts and uncles had *good fucking cause* for referencing these titles constantly. They are true gems of American culture, and they directly inspired the writers of more contemporary classics that are still on the air today (the amount of straight-up thievery that It’s Always Sunny commits with Cheers is almost unbelievable once you see it). When you watch these shows, you feel connected not just to television history, but to our shared cultural history as well. What was life like in 1970’s Los Angeles? What was it like to be a working class barfly in 1980’s Boston? What did their days look like? How did everyone dress? What did they talk about? It’s all simultaneously familiar and fascinating, and most importantly - it’s just incredible goddamn entertainment. Watch old TV.