What tv shows from your youth just don’t hold up anymore?

Martin it’s a little too over the top even the certain episodes are still hilarious.

Candid Camera was a favorite of mine as a kid, but it falls flat now.

The Cosby Show.

Nearly all of them.

Welcome Back Kotter. Good God. How did I watch that? No wonder I got such middling SAT scores.

R4 Ok Sarah Palin.

As much as I’ll ever acknowledge Cheers as a brilliantly entertaining sitcom, I can barely watch most episodes now.

R7 I discovered Cheers about 5 years ago and think it’s awesome. But I wasn’t even a fetus for much of the 80s.

Cheers with Shelley Long hold up. After she left it just unraveled.

Yeah, I'd rewatch Cheers, but only the Shelly Long seasons.

I loved Saved By The Bell as a kid, but holy shit it was BAD when I revisited a few episodes.

The Carol Burnett Show…the sketches are mostly awful.

I loved "The Carol Burnett Show" as a kid and often watched it with my family. Now, maybe there's an occasional chuckle at best. Also I don't find "All in the Family" as funny as I remember it being. And "Seinfeld" is another one.

Dick van Dyke.

Only the most famous episodes--"It May Look Like a Walnut," "Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth," the Petries overhearing the Halperts talking about them on the walkie-talkie and then playing charades with them, Laura accidentally opening the inflatable raft--are still funny.

THE TIME TUNNEL. I thought it was so cool when I was a kid, but in recently re-watching the bulk of the series, I found it mostly silly and stupid.

OP you watch it for the happy nostalgia it brings you. Just enjoy it.

Seinfeld aged like milk. Somehow The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy feel more relatable nowadays, culturally, than Seinfeld.

Mama's Family. I laughed my ass off with the first two seasons. The syndication years made it required Saturday night viewing, second only to The Golden Girls. Then, for some reason, six years ago, I was watching my Time/ Life complete series box set, and I had to stop. Too much yelling, unnecessary insults, and Vint got on my last nerve. It's like it wasn't the same show.

Conversely, I love Sanford and Son, Sanford, and Maude more than ever and have developed new appreciation for It's a Living, The Addams Family, and The Patty Duke Show.

[quote]R8 I discovered Cheers about 5 years ago and think it’s awesome. But I wasn’t even a fetus for much of the 80s.

Hi, Catherine Zeta Jones!

Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley.

Wonder Woman

Lost in Space

MASH. Alan Alda. At 16 he was Voltaire. At 61 he's agonizing.

GI Joe.

Nothing from your childhood holds up. You can't go home again.

Knight Rider

Not TV but I enjoyed the movie She’s All That as a teen. Great cast etc (with the exception of Freddie).

It’s barely watchable.

Archie Bunker's Place

Archie Bunker's Place always stank on ice.

Romper Room

Oh! Gossip Girl. I used to love watching the clothes and the fashion.

They all look like clowns.

The first two seasons of Happy Days still hold up, because they were like small films about life in the ‘50s. The clothing and hair styling was pretty authentic, and the storylines were funny, touching, and clear. But the show really turned into a cheesy yahoo-fest when they started shooting in front of a studio audience, and storylines suffered for the sake of one-liners and catch phrases (which really date the show to the ‘70s), BROAD characterizations played to the back of the house, and set-ups for jokes. The audience would hoot and holler whenever any main character made an entrance. Another thing that really dated the show were the ‘70s hair (feathered and permed), the ‘70s jeans, and Potsie and Mrs. Cunningham losing brain cells. They would have been right at home with the Sweathogs on Welcome Back, Kotter.

R17 I still love Seinfeld and very much enjoy watching it. Jerry himself was not at all funny. It was the chemistry of the entire cast that made the show work beautifully. I know everyone worships Friends, but I still haven't seen every episode of it, and I don't think it aged well at all.

R11 It’s funny because I realized Saved by the Bell was bad then like even as a kid. The plots weren’t resolved or just nonsensical. It’s hard to explain. I like it more now for the nostalgic factor.

Three’s Company with Jack constantly badly pretending to be a queeny homo.

MASH was all kinds of problematic, yet good when it was good.

WKEP in Cincinnati somehow doesn’t hold up well at all. Feels like some 2024 douchebros’ dads were the screenwriters.

Head of the Class

R17 is absolutely trolling and its remained popular enough with millenials and Gen Z. If anything its one of the few shows from the 90s that have aged well

Small Wonder...

Oh, wait... that show didn't hold up then either!

R37 according to a 2021 study, 42% of people who streamed Seinfeld on Netflix were 34 years old or less

Amos n Andy

[quote] Seinfeld aged like milk. Somehow The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy feel more relatable nowadays, culturally, than Seinfeld.

I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners are shrill and not funny at all. There's nothing relatable about all that zany screaming.

I've never bought into the notion that young people do not watch old TV shows from the past. Why wouldn't they? There is no reason to refuse to watch something just because it aired before you were born.

I love Lucy is funny. That shit just is yo. Lucille Ball was something special. I found it funny at 9 yrs old watching Nick at Nite and I still do.

R41 Xennial here. I love ILL AND Seinfeld. There is room in my heart for a vast array of different types of comedy. Good writting is good writting. Talent is talent

I never bought the marriage between Lucy and Ricky. He was so out of her league, I don't understand how she managed to snag him in real life. It's a head scratcher.

R45 I'm going to pretend you're trolling or have eyesight....issues

R43 I would watch it in the early 90s on TBS and managed to turn my preteen niece into it now too. She loves it ñ

My Three Sons

Not funny. Bunch of robotic acting including frugal Fred MacMurray.

What doesn’t hold up to me are those legal and medical dramas from the 80s and 90s. Law & Order being an exception. I tried watching ER the other day. Whew it was a chore. There has been so much heightened realism on cable tv/streaming that they just seem phony now.

New Zoo Revue

It is interesting that every show mentioned so far has been sitcom or a children's show. Not one drama has been named.

Dynasty ---- bad acting, cheesy sets and campy plots.

R51 well the Op did say youth implying childhood/teens. I would say DL is about 70% Gen X/Boomers and 30% milllenials/gen Z. There weren’t many dramas before the 80s.

LaVerne and Shirley's humor, which was always suspect, now just seems moronic.

R17 What are you talking about? Seinfeld is as funny as it was when it was first released. I still watch clips occasionally on YouTube. It's hilarious.

[quote]There has been so much heightened realism on cable tv/streaming that they just seem phony now.

The first few years of ER with Clooney was some compelling TV. Watching Hathaway get wheeled in after a suicide attempt in the pilot episode was shocking.

To each their own, but I find that people grossly have grossly overhyped the current slate TV in the last ten- fifteen years. Not saying there hasn't been great television (there has), but the hit/miss ratio really hasn't improved much.

You get "realism" with a show like VEEP, but it's all surface. Once you quickly realize all the characters have the same biting, sarcastic style of insults, it's tedious. The writing on some these shows still leaves a lot to be desired.

[quote] The Carol Burnett Show…the sketches are mostly awful.

I think many of the sketches are solid or still funny

BUT

yes, there are some serious clunkers in there, too.

The defined character sketches (The Family, Mrs. Wiggins, etc.) hold up the best, in general.

I'm a child of the 80s and all of the "family" sitcoms from that era - Growing Pains, Family Ties, Different Strokes, Mr. Belvedere, Webster, etc.

I watched all of them as a child but as an adult I can't watch more than three minutes if I catch a rerun while channel surfing. Absolute garbage. They were fucking awful.

The only family-friendly sitcom from that era I can still appreciate is The Facts of Life because it has a certain charming campy kitschiness about it.

I forgot to mention that even as a child I hated The Cosby Show. Claire was such a bitch to those kids and Cliff was always giving some sanctimonious lecture. Of course now all I can think of is how Bill Cosby was drugging and raping women the whole time the show was on the air.

Even when I was little, watching the Carol Burnett Show, I could not figure out what was so funny about Tim Conway. Carol was always breaking character to laugh at Tim and I just didn't get it.

Watching the entire episodes of The Carol Burnett show can be torture. There are so many lousy skits and the musical numbers are often dreadful because Carol just couldn't sing.

What was wrong with Carol's singing voice? I wouldn't say it was pleasant, but it wasn't off-key or flat. I don't think she was given challenging songs to sing, though.

R45, have you ever heard of the word Dickmitized? He was talented with a 9" thick cuban sausage, and handsome. She lucked out.

Lucille Ball was a very pretty woman in her youth, before the cigs and booze ravaged her looks.

That wobble in her voice was horrible, It made me think in every song she was going to go into her Tarzan yell.

The Texaco Star Theater starring Milton Berle. He isn't funny.

I remember when cable stations began playing reruns of the first few seasons of Saturday Night Live. They were already legendary but watching them was, for the most part, a snoozefest of amateurish, drug-fuelled hubris interrupted by the occasional flash of brilliance. They had FUCKING MUPPETS!!!????

Make Room For Daddy. The hookers taking a shit on the glass coffee table while Danny Thomas jerked off underneath just isn't as funny as it was when I was a kid.

Dixie Carter was the best thing about On Our Own.

Very few shows hold up. ILL and Frasier are the exception IMO.

Exxon Presents The Helen Lawson Sunday Revue.

You can't see those chorus boys smiles as anything but - oh, I can't even say it, but we all know.

Ans [italic]Sundays![/italic]

Saved by the Bell still holds up as really bad schlock. It was bad then and remains bad now. And we can still perv out over young Mario Lopez!

The Saturday morning cartoons I used to watch in the '80s and '90s (GI Joe, Transformers, He-Man, etc.) look like garbage today. The animation was so obviously done as cheaply as possible.

Heresy to some but I tried watching a few episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore show and the comedy just didn't hit me...I know it was the " smart" sitcom of the 70s and "30 rock", one of my favorite shows, was inspired by it but....nope. I feel it was too tame/not edgy enough in comparison to more modern shows yet it didnt have the "good old days" old fashioned nostalgic appeal like ILL or The Honeymooners. I feel similarly about Cheers.

Manamal

Most of the ABC TGIF shows- boy meets world, home improvement, sabrina the teenaged witch

R75 Home improvement wasn’t TGIF.

Oh, I got it mixed up then R76. But also family matters, step-by-step, hanging with Mr. Cooper. Pure unwatchable trash.

Actually Boy Meets World had its moments.

I haven’t seen Boy Meets World since my early 20s but I imagine it still holds up. Home Improvement is a good show always and forever.

When I was a kid I'd watch tv with my parents and they liked St. Elsewhere, LA Law and Hill Street Blues. I guess these shows were "edgy" for the times but they're so dated now, in light of modern hourlong dramas and what can be shown and said.

I can't watch Laverne and Shirley at all as an adult, it's so corny and unfunny.

r21 I think the World War II episodes of Wonder Woman hold up better than the episodes that took place in the 70s, which ironically seem much more dated now.

You Can’t Do That On Television

LA Law, Thirtysomething

Penny Dreadful.

Barney

Few TV shows from my youth hold up. I thought Laugh-In and The Carol Burnett Show were the greatest thing ever. Most of it is painfully unfunny now.

Certainly the original CBS "What's My Line?", is still fascinating as the never ending thread here attests.

A lot of the The Dick Van Dyke Show is still fun to watch. A lot of "Leave It To Beaver" too. Some of "The Andy Griffith Show".

Thank God for "The Ed Sullivan Show" and the other variety shows that have given us individual performances that are still worth watching although I wouldn't want to sit through a full show.

I was still a teen when "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" premiered. That still holds up well.

[quote]There weren’t many dramas before the 80s.

Please explain, R52. The 50s-70s were chock-a-block with dramas, both one-hour and half-hour, and you can find a decent number of them on the various strea.ing services.

On topic: I find Wagon Train, Laramie, and *some* of Tales From Wells Fargo hold up VERY well. My sibs and I watched Wagon Train after school, but it wasn't exactly kid-friendly so I didn't remember anything about it. Then 4-5 years ago I caught WT on MeTV, and got hooked. Same with Laramie (the 2 hot "bachelor" stud housemates, John Smith and his VPL, and the delicious Robert Fuller).

Speaking of Robert Fuller, I've been on an EMERGENCY! kick since Cozi TV started airing it on Saturday afternoons and weekday mornings. It holds up well, and surprisingly so considering the massive advances in both emergency medicine and paramedic/EMT/first responder protocols (and also considering how much I HAAATED Athat show as a kid in the 70s). But that makes it even more fun to watch now, because I get to ask my nurse sister if Thing 1 or Thing 3 is still done today, or nah.

I watched the entire run of "Maude" a few years ago and was surprised by how well much of the episodic subject matter held up. 50 years later and those are STILL topical issues being debated. However, sadly, I didn't think it was as funny or charming as I remembered it being when I was young kid watching it first run. A lot of the "jokes" felt repetitive and obvious.

Much of the run of "Happy Days" (once Fonzie swallowed the show) was unwatchable even as a kid. I hated "Welcome Back, Kotter" and if anything it's aged even worse. Even as a little boy I though "M*A*S*H" was unfunny, sanctimonious claptrap.

While dated, I do still find reruns of "Soap" funny -- the earlier seasons had brilliant writing, and both Katherine Helmond and Richard Mulligan were genius standouts amongst a generally solid cast. Weirdly, I like "Golden Girls" more now than I did first run. The writing can be hit or miss, but those ladies were amazing to watch. During college, I would watch and love Nick-at-Nite reruns of "Our Miss Brooks", "Car 54 - Where Are You?" and "Private Secretary" -- all as enjoyable decades later as was "I Love Lucy", "Dick Van Dyke Show", and "The Honeymooners".

R88, you will then probably be glad to know that MeTV is finally (after almost 5 years) about to take ADAM-12 off its afternoon lineup and replace it with -- wait for it -- EMERGENCY! I must admit that I have never seen not one single episode (not even when it was on during its original run on NBC back in the '70s), but since I usually watch ADAM at that time, I guess I might as well take this opportunity to check it out (plus any chance to look at the gorgeous Robert Fuller is fine by me).

I liked the Cheers - Shelley Long’s Diane Chambers role. She portrayed an uppity white woman who doesn’t quite have what it takes to excel with the literary world or really success in general no matter how hard she tries to succeed.

Silver Spoons. Mind you I was at the age when I was mixing play "potions" from kitchen spices and whatever berries grew in my neighbourhood.

I loved Madame’s Place!! I was 7 yrs old and I also loved loved loved Filthy Rich

While watching "Emergency" it helps to imagine between takes Bob Fuller strapping Randy Mantooth to a gurney and having his way with him.

Another World. I mean just what the fuck was Iris's problem with Mac and Rachel???

Lassie.

R96. Iris loved her daddy...

The thing with Diane though is she THOUGHT she had succeeded and was better than everyone else.

Start a thread on ones that have held up well.

There is a very very mentally ill person on DL. Real talk. It’s sad.

No, Diane Chambers KNEW she was a loser. She thought it was only temporary, though.

“Sabrina the Teenage Witch” still has its moments, but viewing it through adult eyes reveals a lot of the seams. The laugh track is unevenly distributed and the editing sometimes off. Also, Melissa Joan Hart may have been pretty and charming but she wasn’t a great actress.

Hugely unpopular opinion but I preferred Rebecca over Diane who came of as shrill, high maintenance and corny. And though I was invested in Sam and Diane at first I soon realized they really were too different and ultimately not meant for each other, which is when their ups and downs became tedious.

Also appreciated the show more as an ensemble in the later years, because of the fact it was less focused on the central couple.

Sabrina was unwatchable for me. The cat was terrible, Sabrina looked a softball playing soft butch lez. 1 episode and I was done.

R101, isn't it you?

One Day at a Time, mainly because of Bonnie Franklin's cringe-inducing overacting. God she was awful.

OP I'm sad that Amazon doesn't have the pilot episode of "On Our Own" with shirtless John Getz parading around as model.

Brady Bunch

r108 ODAAT is DL's favorite hate watch. We can't help ourselves.

The Brady Bunch. It's really cringe-worthy. Especially when they get to the singing specials. Stop trying to be the Partridges. The kids were embarrassing singers. The perms at the end.

LHOTP

R113. Why so?

I will halfway disagree about Sabrina The Teenage Witch. Seasons 1-4 hold up well with a strong cast: Aunt Hilda, Aunt Zelda, Salem, and Libby.

It went downhill when Libby exited and was unwatchable when Sabrina went off to college without her aunts.

Any show that has Martin Mull AND the Violent Femmes is okay with me.

I remember an episode of Charles in Charge where the teenage girl is debating whether she should date a boy at her school because he's... MEXICAN!

I hope she chose not to.

It's funny when you watch sitcoms from the 70s to mid-80s and realize how much cultural sensitivity has changed. During lunch I've been streaming old episodes of Too Close for Comfort which is about as banal a TV show as they come -- yet peppered throughout are questionable references to gays, Asians, Latinos, women -- and all of it played mostly matter-of-fact straight, not for a laugh like in some Norman Lear show. Old reruns are like a time capsule.

I feel like the 70's and 80's was the last of the Vaudeville-influenced older producers and studio executives in Hollywood. The physical humor, the obvious gags, the cutesy/corny jokes.

It all screams of a different time - and I have a theory that's what these older execs remember and loved from their youth going to the Vaudeville/cinema in the 20s/30s/40s.

I remember Susan Olsen (yes - we all hate her) HATING having to do the Shirley Temple shtick in one of the latter episodes. She didn't know who she was and thought it was corny AF - but Sherwood Schwartz was like - SHIRLEY TEMPLE was a STAH! EVERYONE loves Shirley Temple!

Then TV changed dramatically in the late 80's, 90s and 2000s. Observational humor (Seinfeld), realistic portrayals (Roseanne, ER), gutting honesty (My So Called Life) - made it more real and less staged and phony.