Me-TV's wonderful lineup of old-fart programming

(I think "The Twilight Zone" and "Bob Newhart" and some other shows are taking the summer off.)

I'm perplexed by He-Man and She-Ra being on Me-TV. I was born in '74, and I dutifully watched He Man as a kid. But almost all of the rest of the shows were already in syndication as "oldies" at that point. Hmmm...

I don't even know where this is on my local cable system, but I'd be down with watching a lot of these again.

Brady Bunch obv not really a "good" show but I can watch it over and over, zenith of sitcominess. Dick Van Dyke best sitcom ever.

Whoa, this is like perfect-era Nick at Nite hypercharged.

Wait, no Rockford Files?

i totally slept on the dick van dyke show all these years, discovering now how great it was.

Bilko is my spiritual leader

love this channel. almost impossible to choose, but i'll go with honeymooners which still gets my vote as the single greatest sitcom of all time.

only one of these i think i wouldn't get sucked into watching if i came across it flipping channels is the lucy show -- always found lucy's post-desi shows so depressing to watch.

at least it inspired a good band name...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucy_Show_(band)

Hawaii Five-O is probably the best cop show ever... incredible cinematography, tons of location shooting, great music. Dragnet and Adam-12 are "realistic" cop procedurals made by the same production company and sharing many of the same stock actors - both enjoyable though both constrained by low budgets. Peter Gunn was a groundbreaker, a wonderful integration of jazz, noir, and police investigation; hugely influential. Peter Gunn himself is basically Cary Grant as a cop. Ironside holds up well, with its attractive cast - especially Barbara Anderson - and its late '60s San Francisco vibe. Kojak is a highlight of '70s TV... Season One is the only one filmed in NYC (before production moved to LA) and I'm pretty sure it's the best season - '73-'74 if you're counting, but the show was on for four more years. I like how Telly Savalas's real-life brother plays a character unrelated to Kojak working in the same police station. Columbo is the best of the "NBC Mystery Movie" series from the '70s (see also McMillan & Wife; Banacek; McCloud; et al)... completely formulaic but very funny and a pure joy to watch. Most of the show's "guest stars" totally rise to the occasion. Emergency! was about paramedics, kind of a sister show to Adam-12. It taught a generation of kid viewers to hope for some major catastrophe when they tuned in. Naked City was an early '60s cop show featuring amazing, priceless footage of NYC at that time and a future star in almost every episode.

With The Beverly Hillbillies the rule of thumb is, the B&W episodes are better than the color ones (the same rule applies to The Andy Griffith Show).

Bewitched is a pretty great show - I think it was the most popular ABC show in the '60s - but it falls off when Dick Sergeant replaces Dick York and they start re-shooting old scripts.

Mission Impossible seemed so serious when I saw it as a kid. I tried to watch it recently - the first season - and now it looks laughably contrived. I'm not sure if it gets better later... I know Leonard Nimoy joins the cast at some point.

Gunsmoke is not my favorite TV western. I'd rather watch The Virginian or The High Chaparral or The Big Valley. Never got into Bonanza.

That Girl is about a sporadically employed young woman who lives in midtown Manhattan and wears about three different designer outfits every day.

Have enjoyed and would like to see more of: Car 54, Where Are You?; Route 66; The Saint

That Girl is about a sporadically employed young woman who lives in midtown Manhattan and wears about three different designer outfits every day.

That Girl, New Girl, Same Girl.

naked city

I only caught a few minutes of 'Star Trek' last week, but I'm hoping they are airing the original episodes and not those ghastly "modernized" versions with the new graphics.

Voting 'Columbo', which only gets better with age.

Great competition but I have to go with Get Smart for sitcoms. And Green Acres should be on the list, woefully underrated.

Write-in vote for Svengoolie.

voting Dick Van Dyke -- only started watching it recently, genuinely hilarious. Also Dick was sooooooo handsome back then!!!
honorable mentions to Get Smart and MASH and the Odd Couple

Gotta go with Get Smart.

Night Gallery successfully managed to terrify the shit out of me on at least 2 occasions when I was 7 or 8. (Nightmare carousel horses and spiders in the bathroom.)

no Andy Griffith? damn.

toss up b/t naked city and route 66.

unfortunately the dragnet they'll be showing this summer is the color 67–70 version... more campy, not as good as 1950s b&w incarnation. but the 1950s stuff is mostly in some kind of legal limbo.

i chose those b/c they're a little harder to see than dick van dyke (which is awesome obvs), etc. which i saw a lot in my childhood (as reruns).

combat! is hit-and-miss but a lot of it is really damn good.

also fun to see all the commercials for prostate problems, penis pumps, etc. in between the shows.

but srsly my partner and i will watch this for hours on weekends. sometimes we have good plans for picnicking, going to the movies, etc. and we'll just get sucked in.

peter gunn another good one but the masters they're using look like 16mm... very blurry and dark.

Dobie!

Night Gallery is seriously creepy and wonderful.

that girl is amazing

Marlo Thomas truly was the Zooey of her time.

I will say, Me-TV has schooled me in the awesomeness of Kojak. We need to poll Antenna-TV (Father Knows Best, Monkees etc.) next!

Columbo forever.

I never watched "That Girl" back then. Did Marlo Thomas have any actual talent or did she have a father with pull to get her into the business?

Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Batman, Get Smart=sick day home from school

I never watched "That Girl" back then. Did Marlo Thomas have any actual talent or did she have a father with pull to get her into the business?

― Thank you for talkin' to me Williamsburg (WilliamC), Tuesday, June 4, 2013 7:18 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Little of both, plus BANGS:

http://www.palzoo.net/file/pic/user/That-Girl.jpg

I was convinced that Marlo Thomas was not wearing a bra on the last season of TG, and the way she bounced around all perky-like just emphasized that even more. She and Barbara Feldon were my pre-teen crushes.

Mary Tyler Moore first, then Honeymooners and Dick Van Dyke. Lots of nostalgia for Bewitched--especially the secondary characters--not confident that it's not somewhat misplaced. It's been ages since I watched Columbo--suspect that would look even better today.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Kojak is pretty awesome. Dude is a class-act.

the 10 p.m.-and-on lineup is pretty reg watching for me. TZ (now night gallery during summer break), perry mason, and kojak is good evening wind-down tv

this is the channel that shows the rifleman sometimes, right? i dig the rifleman.

yes. and the kid from the rifleman does a station promo. as his grown ass man self obv.

lol just got cable again for the first time in seven years, flipping thru channels the first night and came across me tv and thought 'omg they made a channel for ME', that first night i caught the 'abyssinia, henry' episode of mash. voted sgt. bilko but i think odd couple and kojak's what i've somehow ended up watching most of so far (i'm not even sure bilko's on the schedule right now tbh). antenna tv's got some good stuff too, as does bounce. some channel is showing wkrp's w/ original music, i caught the episode where johnny fever 'sells out' w/ a disco tv show, 'xanadu' was one of the OBV AWFUL songs they used to show how far johnny had fallen, found myself getting pissed off at a thirty plus year old sitcom episode.

ok hawks finally won. i can watch kojak now.

i refrained from voting at first but finally went with night gallery.

i need to actually watch 'sgt bilko,' i've been hearing about how great it is for like 20 years. i can't remember ever seeing it in reruns.

i never regret deciding to watch bewitched. poor original darren.

I only get Antenna. I like the Maude reruns.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Just getting into this bigtime upon discovering my meager basic cable package has it. Submitted for your approval: Night Gallery as the show I had great memories of and most wantted to see, so far let down by extremely predictable, one-dimensional writing.

i get this on broadcast tv, along with Bounce TV and Movies! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movies!)

missed it by *that* much!

Write-in vote for Svengoolie.

― Trip Maker, Tuesday, June 4, 2013 12:55 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, consider me shocked and amused that this sort of old school horror host exists in 2013. I forgot he was on this channel! If this is the last TV station ever, it would make a fitting tombstone. Those are all some classic shows. I had no idea Star Trek or Batman was on this channel!

no votes for "combat!"?!

I'm related to Svengoolie, but never met him :(

Sick at home. Watching a Bonanza from '64, with MARLO THOMAS playing a radicalized Chinese girl accidentally delivered as a mail-order bride to Boss instead of the fireworks he ordered.

It's...very strange.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1bq3ebEmp1qd97av.jpg

radicalized like... she's a Communist?

totally forgotten when Bonanza is supposed to take place tbh

i'd say the 1870s or '80s?

When ppl cringe at Mickey Rooney's Japanese character in Breakfast at Tiffany's -- admittedly the most over-the-top example that has endured -- i think they are generally unaware of how commonplace Caucasian actors in ____face was on TV through at least the early '70s or so.

yeah apparently there's an episode with Mark Twain (?!) so I think you have the era right

does Hop Sing even appear in that episode Grisso y/n?

wiki says set around 1860's - close enough Morbs!

i pretty much never watched it even as a kid; never really hooked on to any TV westerns.

as a kid I always found it too boring. but it was always on at the barbershop for some reason

i thought about taking a look at some of the Altman-directed eps recently

Bonanza was the usual western schlock of its day. No better, no worse. As a kid I enjoyed the episodes that featured Hoss, the big lovable galoot among the sons, because those generally reached for simple, ham-fisted humor as opposed to the never-ending plots about fighting injustice and damsels needing succor.

i used to love Lorne Green as a kid

and Michael Landon <3

he was in like every other show i watched as a kid

does Hop Sing even appear in that episode Grisso y/n?

Yeah, he's in it. In the ep, the Thomas character boasts of being educated by this famous revolutionary teacher whom the Chinese government had executed (and it's implied that how her character ended up at the Ponderosa is that she was thrown out of the country). She preaches for worker's rights, starting with making Hop Sing demand better cooking gear, and moving onwards to making some hired cowpunchers go on strike for better accommodations. Then the local Chinese foreman of the railroad construction shows up to claim her (he got Hoss' fireworks), and all hell breaks loose when she starts talking to his workers, who form a revolutionary cell of sorts. But everything goes back to normal at the end when Thomas falls in love with the foreman (after a ceremonial dual with Hoss), and in Green's words, "...trades politics for matrimony."

XP There's a cool episode of Johnny Staccato (John Cassavettes' detective show) with Landon as this fake Elvis singer* who's being blackmailed.

*His manager is called "The Governor"

sooo ... it's some bizarre half-baked vietnam analogy?

They must of had a period of doing socially conscious episodes. The one today featured William "Blacula" Marshall as a famous opera singer brought to Virginia City by the city mothers for a benefit concert, only to be greeted with hostility when it's discovered he's black (ironically, the concert was to benefit local Indians, or as one of the old ladies puts it, "our Red brethren"). He's then mistaken for an escaped slave who killed his master and Hoss keeps him a step ahead of a lynch mob.

The period detail in this one was pretty interesting. Pernell Roberts brings up the Dred Scott decision re:harboring fugitive slaves, and obviously the whole incident places the story pre-Civil War (or at least the war is never mentioned).

I wonder if Hoss would have protected an escaped slave who killed his master