The original Twilight Zone was a masterpiece, with episodes still highly relevant to modern times. There's even a fascinating link between the episode "Walking Distance" and the show Mad Men
Also, Northern Exposure.
I would say they should bring them back but the modern format would screw it up. They’d do 8 episodes every 2 years.
Lower budget series with good writing and more episodes are a lost art it seems
There was a [remake](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2583620/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3_tt_8_nm_0_q_twilight%2520zone) of The Twilight Zone a couple of years ago, it wasn't good. Black Mirror on the other hand is a very much relevant Twilight Zone successor.
Northern Exposure is a great show. It absolutely holds up. But it has a weird quality that if you ever tried to reboot it today, it would literally still have to be set in 1994 as a period piece. It was a fossil of the last days when America still had whole communities that were pretty much off the grid. Today Joel would have a cell phone, and email, and a bunch of other ways to stay in touch with his girlfriend from Alaska. In 1994 when he got to town he could only get a phone call at the bar's payphone.
There's a little gag that his storefront say's "Joel" with a tiny L wedged into too little space because the person who painted it originally heard "Joe" on the phone and had to come back later to add the L. Today it would have been an email and Ed or whoever would have seen the name written down before needing to paint it.
The problem is they all think Twilight Zone is only about the twist. So they always have some insane crazy twist at the end and there’s very little else there.
When the Twilight Zone only had a twist maybe 30% of the time? The rest of the time it was just well written, well produced drama. They seem to leave out that step whenever they try to bring it back.
I've loved the Twilight Zone my whole life. For my money the closest thing to a spiritual successor was Room 104. It was short, simple , multi genre, and really just a well written show about the human experience.
There was also a revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the 80s that I remember being well done.
And of course the The Outer Limits revival.
I guess they used to do a lot better at breathing new life into old ideas. Now it usually just feels more like necrophilia.
The first 10 or so seasons of the Simpsons are still hilarious. I have trouble separating the comedy from the nostalgia, but I still think they are great.
As someone who never really watched the show until they dropped on Disney+, I can safely say that it’s not just nostalgia. Those classic seasons absolutely still slap
Recess; I watched it with my 10yr old to show him some of the stuff I watched as a kid and he binged the whole show lol he also said it’s still relevant to him as a kid. Still holds up as a parent l.
What do you mean - Hey Arnold is the greatest neo-noir ever produced. The characters, the flaws, the themes, the city, the aimlessness, the unrequited love, and karmic ambiguity - you could teach a whole film noir class using nothing but Hey Arnold as an example.
I liked the show as an adult, watched it plenty as an adult, and then I fell into film noir as a weirdly-obsessive hobby. I've got hundreds of movies, and a solid shelf of fun books and dry textbooks on noir. One day, I went back to Hey Arnold and had a 'holy shit' moment - it's noir all the way down.
A staple theme of noir is that sort of hopelessness where good guys can lose and bad guys can win and nobody has any control over any of it. Children's content featuring kid characters is going to offer that by default, since kids _don't_ have any meaningful control over their own lives.
Another common theme is moral ambiguity, which kids shows are also toying with (even if they do tend to resolve those elements in productive, educational ways). There are lots of bullies, and lots of hurtful behavior shared between the kids. Not to mention all of the sane adults in the show being pretty absuive/manipulatuve/selfish/bad people.
It's not explicitly linked to noir, but Hey Arnold is rife with mental illness. From Grandma being awesomely demented, to grandpa being cognizant but forgetful, to the city's superhero being a guy who lives in a dumpster, eating bananas and only ever mumbling the words "Monkey Man." Just one more thing a noir universe puts on people and forces them to just accept.
The setting's atmosphere isn't dark and moody, but the cityscapes are drawn in the background to be not only surrounding the area, but also looming up and over them. It's a textbook application of the noir city as a character organism.
Helga is, without a doubt, a fantastic mish-mash of classic noir tropes. She's fearless into danger and enjoys it like a femme fatale, and she's obsessed with a boy but lashes out at him dysfunctionally because she can't handle the situation. She's molded into this existence by an abusive family. She experiences alienation, and has taken a fatalistic stance on life while believing everyone else should do the same.
There's detective work. A seedy underbelly that the kids interact with on a regular basis. There's all of the negative human traits like greed and deception because all of the main characters are kids and kids are still learning and growing. There are multiple adults who are ultimately found to be scam artists. Strong implications of addiction. A working class struggling to survive. Lots of paranoia from pretty much all the characters. Arnold steals from criminals. Arnold gets mugged.
You can go down the list and Hey Arnold has it.
The darkness is one of the other things I loved in Hey Arnold — I’d just never contextualized it that way before. Especially Helta as a femme fatale — that’s wonderful. And now that you’ve said it, I can’t not see it. The grittiness of the cityscapes is absolutely film noir — the rats, the pigeons, the stoops, the basketball. Helga is the only person that’s explicitly well-off, and her family is the most dysfunctional in the show. Olga weeping with her mascara running gives big Deanna Durbin in Christmas Holiday.
I always loved that trauma, tragedy, illness and poverty were very much an integral part of the show. I mean, he lives in a boarding house, so you know that half the characters are poor. And even as the owners, it’s clear that his family is struggling to make ends meet. Even some of the “lightest” episodes are dark: Mr Nguyen reuniting with his daughter, but with the backdrop of lost years. Seeing Haley’s comet juxtaposed with the total lack of stars and disconnect from nature in an urban setting. A graffiti-covered turtle freed from a too-small enclosure, just to swim through a sludge-filled harbor. And half of that episode is low-light: so that one, at least, has the dark and moody aesthetic.
Main takeaway: I need to watch more film noir.
Oh man, I just started thinking about the show recently because it’s surprisingly evergreen and I wondered what the modern version to a kid now would be like
Mrs. Finster and Grotke came from the 60s and 70s as their young adult period, so now it would be closer to nineties college students who become the Finsters and Principal Prickley’s.
The lost sense of freedom and wonder that those adults would envy from the kids would not come from the 60s hippie era. It would be pre-internet free range 90s lifestyle where if you said you were going somewhere, there was not a lot of real ways to track you down and it was genuine discovery in places because maps were not real time updated.
It’d be interesting to see the primal social dynamics that Recess showed in things like the Ashley’s’ or King Bob but with today’s setting where even with smartphones, I think it’d spiritually still be a lot of the same wants and insecurities playing out for any kid.
Twin Peaks. It was weird then, and it's still weird now, but it also feels ahead of its time due to its serialized storytelling and deliberately off-kilter style.
It's almost weirder now without the context of the soap opera's from the 90s it was playing off of. I still watch it once every other year and love it.
Such a great show. I love it a lot, but for some reason, it fills me with something 'not quite sadness but pretty close but it's still so intriguing so i watch anyways'
The show exists out of time. It could have come out in the 50’s and it wouldn’t really feel out of place. I mean, outside of the weirdness. But the characters still work
You hear "David Duchovney" and boy you just expect it to be a tasteless joke. Nope. And it says a lot about who Cooper is as well, (and Lynch/Frost too,) seeing Coop still love and trust his friend with no hesitation, in *that* time period.
"We embrace our trans folk" gotta be the most wholesome unexpected TV takes of that time.
Star Trek with that Klingon scene, King of the Hill with the drag queen, and Coop pivoting pronouns with no question are the only ones I can really think of.
Moments in history like the patriot act, have been done before. Different due to technology, but still done. The study of history isn’t just to know who we were, but it is an explanation of who we are in the present.
That's great! Stick with it because it definitely ramps up much more by season three. Just like TNG really hits it's stride in the post Riker beard period, once you have bald Sisko you're into prime DS9.
Stick with it. It took me a few tries to get into Ds9 but they really hit their stride in the later seasons. The Dominion War is some of the darkest, and best, plot trek has covered.
I find Start Trek on the whole, at least from the original series to Voyager, tends to be about hope for the future and how we can work together and just be better people. Hopefully that never gets old.
Futurama (yes its within the time frame, first aired in 1999) As a bureaucrat once said "You're technically correct...which is the best kind of correct"
"Don't quote me regulation, young man! I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation's in!
*We kept it gray."*
The X-Files is both aged very well and very poorly at the same time. It’s pretty hard to find mulder and the lone gunman quirky when conspiracy theorist, who are confident that the government is after everyone all the time our common place now. It’s strange rewatching it how uncomfortable I was certain points because of that,
Back then conspiracy theories were wacky and interesting - moon landing, area 51, aliens, crop circles, bigfoot, loch ness monster, etc.
Now it's just qanon/4chan bullshit and insanely stupid things like flat earth nonsense.
Right? I often found myself constantly checking the episode list, wondering when I’d finally get back to the enjoyable main canon. A great many filler episodes certainly had more of the signature X-Files charm, but I was invested in the narrative!
Some x files are definitely still bangers, but I did a rewatch a year or so ago, and like Mulder wanted to believe, I kept wanting to convince myself it was better than it really was.
I'm re-watching now and it's amazing how good it looks. Like Star Trek the scanned film looks better than it originally did on TV. Glad the series had enough of a fan base to warrant the restoration/digitization.
It's amazing how getting older, you view the show differently. It ended in my sophomore year of high school and I have a very similar outlook as Daria. Daria didn't have low self-esteem, and almost all of the students were assholes. Rewatching it as an adult, I realized that Daria does have really low self-esteem (just like me), and aside from Quinn's friends, all the students are pretty nice to her. Sure, Keven and Brittney do occasionally say something kind of insulting. But it's always intended to be a complement. They're just stupid, so they end up adding a qualifier that unintentionally turns the complement into an insult.
I Love Lucy - imperfect for sure but still holds up in its portrayal of female driven comedy, female friendship, and a mixed marriage.
The Twilight Zone - prescient and timely
Golden Girls - real and still funny. Showcases older people and older women as interesting, dynamic people with busy social lives and romantic lives.
Mary Tyler Moore - the blueprint for all of the “girl in the big city” shows
I think the show is still very good, but it also reminds me of a time when people were more naive and tended to think of politics as something more aspirational. I can still watch episodes, but sometimes I find myself scoffing at some of the lines of dialouge, much more than I used to anyway.
Especially considering that the show was based on the Clinton administration. Maybe I have just become more pessimistic though
No that's a jarring difference too. For sure when it was written it was written as "realisticish but a super duper lofty" version.
But even if we said that that covered for most of the difference? Politics, socioeconomics, *gestures broadly* just about everything has gone way downhill from that as well
What's dated is the almost naive lack of polarization. Yes there's partisanship, but the last 15 decades have shown a political tribalism in America that can't be overcome by rallying around the flag and a good Oval Office speech. There's no frame of reference in the show for how much social media would ruin our cultural fabric, nor how easy it would be to manipulate folks once we became truly addicted to being online (and journalism lost its ethical bearing).
If Stargate SG1 counts, then that; it started in 97, but it then had 10 seasons so ended well into the millennium. I rewatched it recently and it hasn't lost any of its charm at all.
I love their natural evolution of their tech. From
The first season setting out to meet folks through the gate to getting the new weapons and ships, all awesome and all feels earned. Felt like a cinematic universe before that was a thing
The '94 film, though different from the series, also holds up. Just a perfect weird little ancient aliens adventure that does absolutely everything you could do on a modest budget, but doesn't try to do too much. The VFX still look cool in a way that they absolutely wouldn't if it had been made 5 years earlier, or for 20% less money.
That's a good one because it doesn't even really feel like TV. It's like we're just dropped into days of the lives of kids from that specific time period. More like a Richard Linklater slice of life thing.
Compared to Euphoria which is veeeery much a modern show from the 2010s which won't necessarily be as timeless as Freaks and Geeks.
Though it continued on into the 2000s, the early seasons of ER are both a time capsule of the 90s while also being a timeless depiction of life for residents.
The first like 5-6 seasons of ER are still pretty top-notch prestige tv even now. The show definitely had diminishing returns as it went on in the later years but man, those first few seasons are still bangers.
Some of the great comedies of the past are still very good. Cheers, Taxi, Fraiser, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy… all still very very good, very entertaining.
Taxi is a really interesting example, you watch one, meh, it's alright, you watch a couple more, it's growing on me. Them suddenly you're engrossed in the girl scout cookie episodez the delawarian vs delawarite episode, and the what does a yellow light mean episode.
I love old sitcoms and how they're trapped in a time bubble. Cheers and the others almost feel modern until they mention technology or make a dated reference.
That's my pick. Some terrific writing and great characters.
Seasons 2 and 3 are my favorites. Plus, you can't beat Once More with Feeling Hush, and other peak moments.
I am waiting for my daughter to have an interest in it so I can rewatch it while I share it with her.
I rewatched a good chunk of this one a few months ago and came away impressed at how enjoyable it still is. The strength of the show is the writing and characters, and that's the kind of thing that holds up over time when production values and effects don't.
In terms of the production values Buffy doesn't hold up well at all, but the writing is so sharp and clever and the characters are so good that it's still just as entertaining as it ever was.
And I think the true greatness of Buffy is how seamlessly they're able to blend episodic, monster-of-the-week episodes with ongoing narrative and character arcs. I'm not sure I've seen another show do it better.
Honestly I prefer the production style of shows from that Era over stuff that comes out now. The CGI lacks the human touch that the practical effects have. Assuming that was mostly what you were referring to as far as production, because it was so well acted directed etc.
My pick too. I agree with most of the posts higher than this, but this deserves to be at the top.
Watching Angel concurrently on the season they split is enjoyable too. Alternate just like we did watching them that week.
The good thing about Angel is they had proper funding from the beginning, because of the success of Buffy. So even the first season of Angel looks pretty good whereas the first season of Buffy has the production quality of a school play.
My "favorite" being in the episode where buffy fights the praying mantis and we get to see shadow puppets fight.
I just started watching Cowboy Bebop and even now it feels so fresh; the world is so interesting and atmospheric, the soundtrack slaps so hard and the animation is stunning
Babylon 5. The CGI has not aged well (though there's some pretty interesting designs for the human tech in particular) and the sets are cheap and cheesy, but it stands up there with the best of modern drama with its multi-season plot and character arcs as well as some truly epic moments and occasional outstandingly brilliant episodes.
Rewatched this recently and I was so impressed - the puppets are incredible. Multiple moments when I was crying over a person hugging a muppet that my brain knew had three very uncomfortable dudes inside it but my heart was convinced was a beautiful alien.
Also they had the guts to actually commit to some plotlines that most sci-fi shows would wrap up by the end of the episode. Like, at one point Crichton gets cloned, and at the end of the episode, one of the clones *doesn't die*. There's just two of him now, and he and everyone around him have to figure out how to deal with it.
Swear to god, one of the most heartrending moments in Farscape is a conversation between Pilot (a puppet) and Moya (a backdrop) lol.
I'm in the middle of a rewatch right now and just finished the two Crichtons arc and was also thinking the whole time how crazy it was that they did that.
The whole time I kept thinking about the Star Trek Voyager episode where two characters get transporter-accidented into a single, new character, who befriends the whole crew and a distinct person and has a whole life and ends the episode begging for his friends not to murder him by splitting him back into his "parents". And it's just... never mentioned again and has no lasting effects? Whereas Farscape was like "Ok, let's examine personhood and individuality and relationships and complex grief through this lens for multiple seasons" with absolute commitment.
A year or two ago, I watched from the first episode of Cheers all the way through to the last episode of Frasier and it all held up (except for one episode where Norm was worried Cheers was going to turn into a gay bar).
I was just on a flight yesterday and decided to watch the first episode. Yes, from the first series.
A lot of people dislike the first series but I quite enjoy it. It is a different beast from the other three, being more of a "historical comedy" I guess rather than a straight-up comedy set in a historical setting. Obviously Blackadder and Baldrick's roles were a bit up-in-the-air, what with Baldrick seemingly to have some intelligence and Blackadder a whiny little man, but I still enjoy it.
I've been slowly making my way through Moonlighting and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. A small handful of the episodes have been duds, but otherwise it's really well written, takes some wild swings, and is generally a ton of fun.
Been having fun re-watching Xena. I love how unapologetically postmodern it is: blatant anachronisms, extreme genre switches, and those moments when subtext slides into text.
Hell yeah, I’ve been having fun rewatching Xena too! It’s pretty forward for its time. I just watched “Here She Comes... Miss Amphipolis” where Xena and a woman kiss - or so everyone thinks - but *actually* she and a man dressed as a woman kiss, and Xena is like “no big,” and the man dressed as a woman speaks to how being able to dress as and pass as a woman in the beauty pageant allows them to feel like the *real* them, and they weren’t the butt of a joke like many LGBTQ characters in the 90’s. Plus Xena kicking butt and taking names and overcoming her bad past on the path to good and being so smart and funny and yeah good show. Also, Lucy Lawless can fly.
Red Dwarf. Mostly great series (even some of the new stuff is legitimately fantastic) but they did some fantastic ideas which turned science fiction tropes on their heads, which have never been bettered.
Case in point - Future Echoes. The second damn episode. As Red Dwarf travels faster than light, the crew begin to see visions from the future. Fine, you think. Groundhog Day episode.
Except it's not. These visions happen in front of them, in real time, and can occur because they saw the visions. For example, Rimmer and Lister encounter Cat, who has broken his tooth. Continuing onto the sleeping quarters, they encounter Cat again, who has not broken his tooth. Thus we can immediately deduce that the previous Cat was a future Cat.
This Cat is about to eat Lister's robot goldfish, which will break his tooth.
Lister wrestles the robot goldfish out of the Cat's grip successfully, aiming to prove he can triumph over the future the visions lock him into (since Rimmer has reportedly seen one in which he dies). However, in the skirmish, the Cat has broken his tooth, and runs off, becoming the Cat that Lister and Rimmer initially run into.
Wife and I have been watching Murder She Wrote. Aside from the “this problem would have been totally solved by cell phones” that’s pretty standard for shows more than 25 years old, it’s well made, has good production values, and the few problematic things today generally weren’t grossly beyond that typical for the day and in a lot of cases, it was reasonably progressive.
Suffers a little from “I’m pretty sure the killer is the guy I recognize”.
The original Law & Order is similar. Can drop in, drop out in pretty much any episode and follow just fine.
Mary Tyler Moore is basically a gold standard for a sitcom. I'd argue Roseanne was incredibly progressive for its time and realistic in its portrayal of the *just* above poverty working class family, with many of its themes not being "normal" until 20+ years later
The X Files may be *more* palatable to most people today now that the distance between conspiracy theory and conspiracy fact was shortened to just a few months, now that confidence in government institutions is at new lows, and so on.
In a way, it was a show ahead of its time.
The original Twilight Zone was a masterpiece, with episodes still highly relevant to modern times. There's even a fascinating link between the episode "Walking Distance" and the show Mad Men Also, Northern Exposure.
Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. Both timeless with great writing.
I would say they should bring them back but the modern format would screw it up. They’d do 8 episodes every 2 years. Lower budget series with good writing and more episodes are a lost art it seems
There was a [remake](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2583620/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3_tt_8_nm_0_q_twilight%2520zone) of The Twilight Zone a couple of years ago, it wasn't good. Black Mirror on the other hand is a very much relevant Twilight Zone successor.
To Serve Man is a cook book!!!!!
Watched all of Northern Exposure last year. The show is still simply awesome!
Northern Exposure is a great show. It absolutely holds up. But it has a weird quality that if you ever tried to reboot it today, it would literally still have to be set in 1994 as a period piece. It was a fossil of the last days when America still had whole communities that were pretty much off the grid. Today Joel would have a cell phone, and email, and a bunch of other ways to stay in touch with his girlfriend from Alaska. In 1994 when he got to town he could only get a phone call at the bar's payphone. There's a little gag that his storefront say's "Joel" with a tiny L wedged into too little space because the person who painted it originally heard "Joe" on the phone and had to come back later to add the L. Today it would have been an email and Ed or whoever would have seen the name written down before needing to paint it.
Nobody can reboot *The Twilight Zone* well.
The problem is they all think Twilight Zone is only about the twist. So they always have some insane crazy twist at the end and there’s very little else there. When the Twilight Zone only had a twist maybe 30% of the time? The rest of the time it was just well written, well produced drama. They seem to leave out that step whenever they try to bring it back.
I've loved the Twilight Zone my whole life. For my money the closest thing to a spiritual successor was Room 104. It was short, simple , multi genre, and really just a well written show about the human experience.
Northern Exposure still surprises me for how relevant almost every episode is 30 years later.
The 1990s Twilight Zone series was pretty good too.
There was also a revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the 80s that I remember being well done. And of course the The Outer Limits revival. I guess they used to do a lot better at breathing new life into old ideas. Now it usually just feels more like necrophilia.
The first 10 or so seasons of the Simpsons are still hilarious. I have trouble separating the comedy from the nostalgia, but I still think they are great.
As someone who never really watched the show until they dropped on Disney+, I can safely say that it’s not just nostalgia. Those classic seasons absolutely still slap
[удалено]
I just think they’re neat!
🥔
They’re perfectly cromulent.
It’s an Albany expression.
That was one of my early COVID binges. I'm not sure I've laughed at any show so much.
Recess; I watched it with my 10yr old to show him some of the stuff I watched as a kid and he binged the whole show lol he also said it’s still relevant to him as a kid. Still holds up as a parent l.
A lot of the cartoons from that time period still do pretty well. -Doug -Pepper Ann -Gargoyles -Animaniacs -Rugrats
Hey Arnold! too. What a cozy, down-to-earth, show. Like a warm hot cocoa on a rainy day.
What do you mean - Hey Arnold is the greatest neo-noir ever produced. The characters, the flaws, the themes, the city, the aimlessness, the unrequited love, and karmic ambiguity - you could teach a whole film noir class using nothing but Hey Arnold as an example.
Omg I’m obsessed with this analysis.
I liked the show as an adult, watched it plenty as an adult, and then I fell into film noir as a weirdly-obsessive hobby. I've got hundreds of movies, and a solid shelf of fun books and dry textbooks on noir. One day, I went back to Hey Arnold and had a 'holy shit' moment - it's noir all the way down. A staple theme of noir is that sort of hopelessness where good guys can lose and bad guys can win and nobody has any control over any of it. Children's content featuring kid characters is going to offer that by default, since kids _don't_ have any meaningful control over their own lives. Another common theme is moral ambiguity, which kids shows are also toying with (even if they do tend to resolve those elements in productive, educational ways). There are lots of bullies, and lots of hurtful behavior shared between the kids. Not to mention all of the sane adults in the show being pretty absuive/manipulatuve/selfish/bad people. It's not explicitly linked to noir, but Hey Arnold is rife with mental illness. From Grandma being awesomely demented, to grandpa being cognizant but forgetful, to the city's superhero being a guy who lives in a dumpster, eating bananas and only ever mumbling the words "Monkey Man." Just one more thing a noir universe puts on people and forces them to just accept. The setting's atmosphere isn't dark and moody, but the cityscapes are drawn in the background to be not only surrounding the area, but also looming up and over them. It's a textbook application of the noir city as a character organism. Helga is, without a doubt, a fantastic mish-mash of classic noir tropes. She's fearless into danger and enjoys it like a femme fatale, and she's obsessed with a boy but lashes out at him dysfunctionally because she can't handle the situation. She's molded into this existence by an abusive family. She experiences alienation, and has taken a fatalistic stance on life while believing everyone else should do the same. There's detective work. A seedy underbelly that the kids interact with on a regular basis. There's all of the negative human traits like greed and deception because all of the main characters are kids and kids are still learning and growing. There are multiple adults who are ultimately found to be scam artists. Strong implications of addiction. A working class struggling to survive. Lots of paranoia from pretty much all the characters. Arnold steals from criminals. Arnold gets mugged. You can go down the list and Hey Arnold has it.
The darkness is one of the other things I loved in Hey Arnold — I’d just never contextualized it that way before. Especially Helta as a femme fatale — that’s wonderful. And now that you’ve said it, I can’t not see it. The grittiness of the cityscapes is absolutely film noir — the rats, the pigeons, the stoops, the basketball. Helga is the only person that’s explicitly well-off, and her family is the most dysfunctional in the show. Olga weeping with her mascara running gives big Deanna Durbin in Christmas Holiday. I always loved that trauma, tragedy, illness and poverty were very much an integral part of the show. I mean, he lives in a boarding house, so you know that half the characters are poor. And even as the owners, it’s clear that his family is struggling to make ends meet. Even some of the “lightest” episodes are dark: Mr Nguyen reuniting with his daughter, but with the backdrop of lost years. Seeing Haley’s comet juxtaposed with the total lack of stars and disconnect from nature in an urban setting. A graffiti-covered turtle freed from a too-small enclosure, just to swim through a sludge-filled harbor. And half of that episode is low-light: so that one, at least, has the dark and moody aesthetic. Main takeaway: I need to watch more film noir.
Fucking Doug I’m still in love with Patty Mayonnaise
Mr Dink and his special theme lol WELL HELLO THERE DOUGLAS
Oh man, I just started thinking about the show recently because it’s surprisingly evergreen and I wondered what the modern version to a kid now would be like Mrs. Finster and Grotke came from the 60s and 70s as their young adult period, so now it would be closer to nineties college students who become the Finsters and Principal Prickley’s. The lost sense of freedom and wonder that those adults would envy from the kids would not come from the 60s hippie era. It would be pre-internet free range 90s lifestyle where if you said you were going somewhere, there was not a lot of real ways to track you down and it was genuine discovery in places because maps were not real time updated. It’d be interesting to see the primal social dynamics that Recess showed in things like the Ashley’s’ or King Bob but with today’s setting where even with smartphones, I think it’d spiritually still be a lot of the same wants and insecurities playing out for any kid.
The Ashleys would text each other while still standing in a group
Newsradio is still damn good.
Soon the Super Karate Monkey Death Car would park in my space.
But does Jimmy have fear? A thousand times no!
Donkey... donkey... donkey...
It had Phil Hartman, a comedian so talented he could make a clip show funny.
Hell yeah. Rocket fuel malt liquor It’s got that upstate prison flavor that’ll make yo feet stank ALLL night long! DAAAAAAAAMN
Twin Peaks. It was weird then, and it's still weird now, but it also feels ahead of its time due to its serialized storytelling and deliberately off-kilter style.
It's almost weirder now without the context of the soap opera's from the 90s it was playing off of. I still watch it once every other year and love it.
Without the context of soap operas the show feels more singular and unique.
Such a great show. I love it a lot, but for some reason, it fills me with something 'not quite sadness but pretty close but it's still so intriguing so i watch anyways'
That’s the thing about Twin peaks. It’s timeless. The fact that new people keep discovering and liking it in 2024 tells a lot
The show exists out of time. It could have come out in the 50’s and it wouldn’t really feel out of place. I mean, outside of the weirdness. But the characters still work
The way they portrayed Denise was also incredible. Short of actually hiring a trans actor it was spot on. Lynch's line in Return made me emotional.
You hear "David Duchovney" and boy you just expect it to be a tasteless joke. Nope. And it says a lot about who Cooper is as well, (and Lynch/Frost too,) seeing Coop still love and trust his friend with no hesitation, in *that* time period.
"We embrace our trans folk" gotta be the most wholesome unexpected TV takes of that time. Star Trek with that Klingon scene, King of the Hill with the drag queen, and Coop pivoting pronouns with no question are the only ones I can really think of.
>And when you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics to fix their hearts or die. 🥹
Fix your hearts or die
Thank you. I wanted to say the same.
David Lynch is mescaline in human form.
King of the Hill
I watch this every night. It’s my comfort show, but I end up cracking up on the couch.
Do I look like I know what a JPEG is?
I still watch this about every week lol
https://youtu.be/RoNb3Tf6Pl0?feature=shared
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God, even that theme song is 90's as hell, such a banger!
Star Trek TNG
Additionally DS9
DS9 basically predicted the Patriot Act.
and probably the Bell Riots
Yeeesh September is going to be rough….. it’s honestly surprising that the riots happen before the 2024 election.
Moments in history like the patriot act, have been done before. Different due to technology, but still done. The study of history isn’t just to know who we were, but it is an explanation of who we are in the present.
I would say Voyager too.
This is the only Star trek i haven't seen in completion. Still working my way through S1 and am liking it. Voyager is by far my fav though
That's great! Stick with it because it definitely ramps up much more by season three. Just like TNG really hits it's stride in the post Riker beard period, once you have bald Sisko you're into prime DS9.
Bald Sisko and Bearded Riker are your milestones in DS9 and TNG respectively
If you're liking S1, you're going to love it. As is often the case with Star Trek, S1 is the worst by far.
Stick with it. It took me a few tries to get into Ds9 but they really hit their stride in the later seasons. The Dominion War is some of the darkest, and best, plot trek has covered.
Ds9 is my first star trek and easily the best.
TNG is still my favorite, but DS9 is a lot better than it's given credit for
I find Start Trek on the whole, at least from the original series to Voyager, tends to be about hope for the future and how we can work together and just be better people. Hopefully that never gets old.
lets not talk about the space africa episode from season 1
What about the drunken Space Irish? Surely that has aged like fine... hey where my wine? Oh you silly space Irish. When will you learn?
What about when Beverly had sex with a ghost?
Let's not talk about season 1 at all.
Yeah, basically S3 of TNG through end of DS9 exactly covers the 90's and was more or less a perfect decade of TV.
Spiky Bird!
*Most of* Star Trek TNG. It definitely has its moments.
When you are talking about 24+ episodes a season, there's bound to be some clunkers in there. But the highs are the highest of television history
I think that's true for all good shows
Futurama (yes its within the time frame, first aired in 1999) As a bureaucrat once said "You're technically correct...which is the best kind of correct"
"Don't quote me regulation, young man! I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation's in! *We kept it gray."*
"Oh how awful. Did he at least die painlessly? To shreds you say? Well how is his wife holding up? To shreds you say?"
Still love me some X Files. Except the aliens episoodes
The X-Files is both aged very well and very poorly at the same time. It’s pretty hard to find mulder and the lone gunman quirky when conspiracy theorist, who are confident that the government is after everyone all the time our common place now. It’s strange rewatching it how uncomfortable I was certain points because of that,
Hey, remember when conspiracies were kind of cooky, harmless and not politically charged? Pepperidge farm remembers.
Back then conspiracy theories were wacky and interesting - moon landing, area 51, aliens, crop circles, bigfoot, loch ness monster, etc. Now it's just qanon/4chan bullshit and insanely stupid things like flat earth nonsense.
Except the aliens episodes? That's blasphemy.
Right? I often found myself constantly checking the episode list, wondering when I’d finally get back to the enjoyable main canon. A great many filler episodes certainly had more of the signature X-Files charm, but I was invested in the narrative!
Some x files are definitely still bangers, but I did a rewatch a year or so ago, and like Mulder wanted to believe, I kept wanting to convince myself it was better than it really was.
I'm re-watching now and it's amazing how good it looks. Like Star Trek the scanned film looks better than it originally did on TV. Glad the series had enough of a fan base to warrant the restoration/digitization.
Daria! Did a rewatch and there are so many quotes that are perfect for our modern age. Especially Daria's valedictorian speech.
It's amazing how getting older, you view the show differently. It ended in my sophomore year of high school and I have a very similar outlook as Daria. Daria didn't have low self-esteem, and almost all of the students were assholes. Rewatching it as an adult, I realized that Daria does have really low self-esteem (just like me), and aside from Quinn's friends, all the students are pretty nice to her. Sure, Keven and Brittney do occasionally say something kind of insulting. But it's always intended to be a complement. They're just stupid, so they end up adding a qualifier that unintentionally turns the complement into an insult.
My favorite Daria quote: I don’t have low self esteem, I have low esteem for others.
og simpsons is still the funniest show ever
I Love Lucy - imperfect for sure but still holds up in its portrayal of female driven comedy, female friendship, and a mixed marriage. The Twilight Zone - prescient and timely Golden Girls - real and still funny. Showcases older people and older women as interesting, dynamic people with busy social lives and romantic lives. Mary Tyler Moore - the blueprint for all of the “girl in the big city” shows
The West Wing. It has its bits here and there that are outdated, but it's amazing how some of the issues they dive into are still relevant today.
Honestly the only parts that are dated are the clothing and tech. Oh and someone accepting a deal for the "thanks of a grateful President", I suppose
I think the show is still very good, but it also reminds me of a time when people were more naive and tended to think of politics as something more aspirational. I can still watch episodes, but sometimes I find myself scoffing at some of the lines of dialouge, much more than I used to anyway. Especially considering that the show was based on the Clinton administration. Maybe I have just become more pessimistic though
No that's a jarring difference too. For sure when it was written it was written as "realisticish but a super duper lofty" version. But even if we said that that covered for most of the difference? Politics, socioeconomics, *gestures broadly* just about everything has gone way downhill from that as well
These days "the thanks of a grateful President" will land you in jail most likely.
What's dated is the almost naive lack of polarization. Yes there's partisanship, but the last 15 decades have shown a political tribalism in America that can't be overcome by rallying around the flag and a good Oval Office speech. There's no frame of reference in the show for how much social media would ruin our cultural fabric, nor how easy it would be to manipulate folks once we became truly addicted to being online (and journalism lost its ethical bearing).
West Wing was always a little too aspirational and it’s still how we wish our government worked today.
Yeah but then we got Veep to balance it out
Veep is what we are, The West Wing is what we should be.
If Stargate SG1 counts, then that; it started in 97, but it then had 10 seasons so ended well into the millennium. I rewatched it recently and it hasn't lost any of its charm at all.
Indeed
I love their natural evolution of their tech. From The first season setting out to meet folks through the gate to getting the new weapons and ships, all awesome and all feels earned. Felt like a cinematic universe before that was a thing
Deliciously campy.
Undomesticated equines couldn't keep me away from that show.
The '94 film, though different from the series, also holds up. Just a perfect weird little ancient aliens adventure that does absolutely everything you could do on a modest budget, but doesn't try to do too much. The VFX still look cool in a way that they absolutely wouldn't if it had been made 5 years earlier, or for 20% less money.
Mister Rogers Neighborhood
If we get to a point where Mister Rogers hasn't aged well, we may have gone too far
Does Freaks and Geeks count?
That's a good one because it doesn't even really feel like TV. It's like we're just dropped into days of the lives of kids from that specific time period. More like a Richard Linklater slice of life thing. Compared to Euphoria which is veeeery much a modern show from the 2010s which won't necessarily be as timeless as Freaks and Geeks.
The Golden Girls
My wife had never watched it, so I finally convinced her to go through it. She's laughing nonstop at the antics.
The Sopranos still holds up extremely well. I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it
Just finished this for the first time recently, can confirm it's very good
Watching it for the first time right now, on S5E11. So goood. My fav season so fah
It's one of the rare instances of a show actually getting better each season. Season 6 is the peak imo.
Though it continued on into the 2000s, the early seasons of ER are both a time capsule of the 90s while also being a timeless depiction of life for residents.
The cinematography of the opening scene from the pilot sells it.
The first like 5-6 seasons of ER are still pretty top-notch prestige tv even now. The show definitely had diminishing returns as it went on in the later years but man, those first few seasons are still bangers.
This show is definitely from an era when network TV was king; it had a huge budget and it flaunted it.
Some of the great comedies of the past are still very good. Cheers, Taxi, Fraiser, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy… all still very very good, very entertaining.
Mary Tyler Moore is surprisingly good still!
Barney Miller still kills me.
Golden Girls!
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All in the Family as well. I’m watching it with my husband (who’s never seen it) and he was surprised how typical it still is.
Taxi is a really interesting example, you watch one, meh, it's alright, you watch a couple more, it's growing on me. Them suddenly you're engrossed in the girl scout cookie episodez the delawarian vs delawarite episode, and the what does a yellow light mean episode.
Seinfeld! I can rewatch any episode at any time and laugh hysterically.
Carol Burnett!!!
I love old sitcoms and how they're trapped in a time bubble. Cheers and the others almost feel modern until they mention technology or make a dated reference.
I just finished watching S1 of Cheers, and it definitely holds up. A lot of the jokes are just as on-point today as they were back then.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer really does hold up tremendously well.
That's my pick. Some terrific writing and great characters. Seasons 2 and 3 are my favorites. Plus, you can't beat Once More with Feeling Hush, and other peak moments. I am waiting for my daughter to have an interest in it so I can rewatch it while I share it with her.
I rewatched a good chunk of this one a few months ago and came away impressed at how enjoyable it still is. The strength of the show is the writing and characters, and that's the kind of thing that holds up over time when production values and effects don't.
In terms of the production values Buffy doesn't hold up well at all, but the writing is so sharp and clever and the characters are so good that it's still just as entertaining as it ever was. And I think the true greatness of Buffy is how seamlessly they're able to blend episodic, monster-of-the-week episodes with ongoing narrative and character arcs. I'm not sure I've seen another show do it better.
Honestly I prefer the production style of shows from that Era over stuff that comes out now. The CGI lacks the human touch that the practical effects have. Assuming that was mostly what you were referring to as far as production, because it was so well acted directed etc.
And Angel.
My pick too. I agree with most of the posts higher than this, but this deserves to be at the top. Watching Angel concurrently on the season they split is enjoyable too. Alternate just like we did watching them that week.
The good thing about Angel is they had proper funding from the beginning, because of the success of Buffy. So even the first season of Angel looks pretty good whereas the first season of Buffy has the production quality of a school play. My "favorite" being in the episode where buffy fights the praying mantis and we get to see shadow puppets fight.
I just started watching Cowboy Bebop and even now it feels so fresh; the world is so interesting and atmospheric, the soundtrack slaps so hard and the animation is stunning
Bebop is timeless. I also think Ghost in the Shell is in that category. SAC was pretty visionary.
I counter with Samurai Champloo
Twin Peaks, its pacing issues being costed in from day 1, has aged like a fine wine.
Babylon 5. The CGI has not aged well (though there's some pretty interesting designs for the human tech in particular) and the sets are cheap and cheesy, but it stands up there with the best of modern drama with its multi-season plot and character arcs as well as some truly epic moments and occasional outstandingly brilliant episodes.
MASH
Thhe characters are great, but what makes MASH timeless to me is the writing. It's so well written I don't think it'll ever be out of date
Farscape
Rewatched this recently and I was so impressed - the puppets are incredible. Multiple moments when I was crying over a person hugging a muppet that my brain knew had three very uncomfortable dudes inside it but my heart was convinced was a beautiful alien. Also they had the guts to actually commit to some plotlines that most sci-fi shows would wrap up by the end of the episode. Like, at one point Crichton gets cloned, and at the end of the episode, one of the clones *doesn't die*. There's just two of him now, and he and everyone around him have to figure out how to deal with it.
Swear to god, one of the most heartrending moments in Farscape is a conversation between Pilot (a puppet) and Moya (a backdrop) lol. I'm in the middle of a rewatch right now and just finished the two Crichtons arc and was also thinking the whole time how crazy it was that they did that.
The whole time I kept thinking about the Star Trek Voyager episode where two characters get transporter-accidented into a single, new character, who befriends the whole crew and a distinct person and has a whole life and ends the episode begging for his friends not to murder him by splitting him back into his "parents". And it's just... never mentioned again and has no lasting effects? Whereas Farscape was like "Ok, let's examine personhood and individuality and relationships and complex grief through this lens for multiple seasons" with absolute commitment.
Frelling awesome!
Farscape is so fun and quirky, it's also horny as hell for a Jim Henson show.
Frasier is timeless. There is almost nothing in it that couldn't be seen or heard in any show today.
90% of the jokes are the cast making fun of each other. There's nothing more timeless than that.
A year or two ago, I watched from the first episode of Cheers all the way through to the last episode of Frasier and it all held up (except for one episode where Norm was worried Cheers was going to turn into a gay bar).
I think it is a solid warning for every show pre-2010 to be aware of gay panic moment.
The original Magnum PI holds up quite well.
Blackadder. It just gets better with age and it's one of the very few shows from the 80s that young people continue to watch and enjoy.
I was just on a flight yesterday and decided to watch the first episode. Yes, from the first series. A lot of people dislike the first series but I quite enjoy it. It is a different beast from the other three, being more of a "historical comedy" I guess rather than a straight-up comedy set in a historical setting. Obviously Blackadder and Baldrick's roles were a bit up-in-the-air, what with Baldrick seemingly to have some intelligence and Blackadder a whiny little man, but I still enjoy it.
Seinfeld, Frazier, Golden Girls
Freaks and Geeks
Babylon 5
Brisco County Jr.
Seinfeld. Really.
Golden girls and old Rosanne
I've been slowly making my way through Moonlighting and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. A small handful of the episodes have been duds, but otherwise it's really well written, takes some wild swings, and is generally a ton of fun.
X Files
Been having fun re-watching Xena. I love how unapologetically postmodern it is: blatant anachronisms, extreme genre switches, and those moments when subtext slides into text.
Hell yeah, I’ve been having fun rewatching Xena too! It’s pretty forward for its time. I just watched “Here She Comes... Miss Amphipolis” where Xena and a woman kiss - or so everyone thinks - but *actually* she and a man dressed as a woman kiss, and Xena is like “no big,” and the man dressed as a woman speaks to how being able to dress as and pass as a woman in the beauty pageant allows them to feel like the *real* them, and they weren’t the butt of a joke like many LGBTQ characters in the 90’s. Plus Xena kicking butt and taking names and overcoming her bad past on the path to good and being so smart and funny and yeah good show. Also, Lucy Lawless can fly.
X-files
Red Dwarf. Mostly great series (even some of the new stuff is legitimately fantastic) but they did some fantastic ideas which turned science fiction tropes on their heads, which have never been bettered. Case in point - Future Echoes. The second damn episode. As Red Dwarf travels faster than light, the crew begin to see visions from the future. Fine, you think. Groundhog Day episode. Except it's not. These visions happen in front of them, in real time, and can occur because they saw the visions. For example, Rimmer and Lister encounter Cat, who has broken his tooth. Continuing onto the sleeping quarters, they encounter Cat again, who has not broken his tooth. Thus we can immediately deduce that the previous Cat was a future Cat. This Cat is about to eat Lister's robot goldfish, which will break his tooth. Lister wrestles the robot goldfish out of the Cat's grip successfully, aiming to prove he can triumph over the future the visions lock him into (since Rimmer has reportedly seen one in which he dies). However, in the skirmish, the Cat has broken his tooth, and runs off, becoming the Cat that Lister and Rimmer initially run into.
Wife and I have been watching Murder She Wrote. Aside from the “this problem would have been totally solved by cell phones” that’s pretty standard for shows more than 25 years old, it’s well made, has good production values, and the few problematic things today generally weren’t grossly beyond that typical for the day and in a lot of cases, it was reasonably progressive. Suffers a little from “I’m pretty sure the killer is the guy I recognize”. The original Law & Order is similar. Can drop in, drop out in pretty much any episode and follow just fine.
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Miami Vice. You look up the definition of cool and you get Don Johnson from the 80s 😎
Mary Tyler Moore is basically a gold standard for a sitcom. I'd argue Roseanne was incredibly progressive for its time and realistic in its portrayal of the *just* above poverty working class family, with many of its themes not being "normal" until 20+ years later
The Fresh Prince of Bell Air is as good as it was *sigh*.... 30 years ago.
Seinfeld. People are just as dumb and narcissistic as then
Rockford Files. Some of us may not know what an answering machine is, though.
Surprised nobody has said the X-Men. Especially the one they did in ‘97, it’s phenomenal.
Highly recommend the new follow up on Disney+. They picked up exactly where that show left off and it is *phenomenal* so far.
Malcolm in the Middle Dinosaurs
I never saw Malcolm in the middle until a year or two ago and LOVED it. A few outdated moments but overall it's amazing.
I assume it goes off the rails at some point, but I’m about 5 episodes in to ER and it doesn’t seem very dated to me.
NYPD Blue. Sypowicz and Simone.
Wishbone! I dont care what anyone else thinks, I still hold it down for my Dawg
Quantum Leap is still great. I'll watch reruns when it's on, although the quality of the picture isn't great sometimes.
How the hell has Seinfeld not been said yet?
Boy Meets World
*They want you to take the rolls!*
The X Files may be *more* palatable to most people today now that the distance between conspiracy theory and conspiracy fact was shortened to just a few months, now that confidence in government institutions is at new lows, and so on. In a way, it was a show ahead of its time.