Day 18: TV from the Olden Days

There’s a passage in the book I’m reading to my class these days where the main character and his friend are trying to decide how to pass the time before “Happy Days” comes on. The book is set in the early 1980s. One of my students asked why they would wait for the show to start, and I tried to explain how there was a time when there were only five channels to watch and no way to record any programs. They seemed just as surprised about this as some of the facts they’ve recently learned in Social Studies about Ancient Egypt or Ancient China. It didn’t occur to me until that moment that a story set in the same time period I think of as my childhood would be considered a period piece now.

I tried to think about the shows we would have considered appointment television back then, and the list that came to mind was much more about the after school / evening reruns we watched than what was on prime time, with a few notable exceptions. "M*A*S*H" was the king of all that was television back then. The rerun schedule was so saturated with "M*A*S*H" reruns I remember thinking how great Mondays were because not only could you plan out an afternoon and evening of flipping channels to see four episodes like you could every other weeknight, but there was also a new episode on in prime time. “Happy Days” was the other show that gave us a bonus new episode each week (Tuesdays). As much of a staple as “Happy Days” was in the middle of its run (before Ron Howard left and the show lost its direction) they were already stretching themselves thin with franchising spin-off attempts: “Laverne and Shirley,” “Mork and Mindy,” and, since I have to include it to be complete, “Joanie Loves Chachi.” (I can honestly say I only watched one episode of that, out of curiosity, before deciding it wasn’t for me.)

With only a few channels to pick from, we usually wound up watching whatever the local networks decided to put on in the after-school time slots. I never cared much for “The Brady Bunch,” especially when the kids grew up and turned all groovy, but I probably saw each episode. “Welcome Back, Kotter” was hilarious in a way that made us feel like we were probably getting away with something our parents didn’t know about. I watched “Leave it to Beaver” pretty regularly due to a lack of options, but I was a die-hard fan of “Gilligan’s Island.” One of my prized possessions in second grade was my very own Gilligan hat. The other would have been the TV mail order double album by The Monkees that was advertised during the commercials of their show, which I bought with $5 worth of my first communion money. My sisters and some of my cousins would play “Hogan’s Heroes” whenever we were up visiting our grandmother; since we were staying at Grandma Schulz’s house, it only made sense that we gave her the role of Sgt. Schulz in our adventures, whether she ever knew it or not.

I kind of feel sorry for the kids today with three our four entire networks devoted to programming exclusively catering to their age group. Because, believe it or not, as much as something like having seen the whole scary Brady Bunch Hawaiian adventure story arc was almost a rite of passage for kids from my generation? The only Brady that the kids today know anything about is the one who just got suspended by the NFL.