Look how many of those 80's shows are still shown in re-runs, i.e., M*A*S*H, Cheers, Alice, Simon & Simon, Miami Vice, Three's Company, and I'm sure many more, including Magnum P.I.
Well, there was plenty of great programming in the 90's, and some good stuff in the 00's, too. And the same could be said of the 70's and 60's, too. Each era had its classics (I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, The Bob Newhart Show, MASH, Rockford, Seinfeld, Friends) and also some unspeakably bad stuff (Facts of Life, anyone?) Some shows were made extremely cheaply but were very good (WKRP in Cincinnati) and some shows had huge budgets and were pretty bad (Battlestar Galactica - the original).
A LOT of the stuff from the late 90's and early 00's didn't go immediately into reruns, but first got rerun on the media conglomerate's sister cable channels. Note how F/X would rerun Fox's Buffy and only THEN would it get sold into general syndication, and ABC Family would rerun Alias first before selling it into syndication, and even now, SciFi is rerunning Heroes, even while it is still airing on NBC in primetime. With the huge media conglomerates that own both broadcast networks and several cable channels, and new broadcast networks appearing within the past decade or so (and the corresponding disappearance of independent TV stations), the syndicated rerun market has changed considerably from what it was even a decade ago.
What's interesting and startling to see is how much stuff from the 80's still holds up. It is not a decade that I personally would've considered any sort of a golden age of television, or an age that pushed many boundaries. I guess looking at the entire decade's worth of primetime scheduling, it sort of refutes that.
Compared to the US, in those years, we merely had 3 to 4 TV channels per country.
Ah, but we also only had three "channels". That is to say, there were three networks, and each had local stations that were affiliated with them, which broadcast the programming provided by the network headquarters. In larger cities, there might by one, two, or even three independant channels, that were unaffiliated with any network, and that broadcast a hodgepodge of old movies, old television show, and ad-hoc local talk shows or children's shows, but in many cities there were only three channels to chose from. By using networks of affiliated television stations throughout all the States, everybody more or less watched the same programs.
The difference between what you saw and what we saw was due to how large the US is. In 1980 there were 226+ million people. In contrast, consider that each country in Europe is about the size of one of our larger states. The UK, for example, is physically about the size of Michigan, with a population comparable to say, California or New York (the state, not the city). In the States, at that time, virtually all television programming was financed by advertising. That was the power of having 226 million eyeballs to advertise to. And that advertising paid for original and unique progamming on all three networks, during daytime hours, the primetime hours (8 pm to 11 pm 7 days a week), network nightly newscasts, weekend sportscasts, and the occasional late night show. Buying a tv show from a place other than the US, even one made in Britain or Canada, was almost unheard of then, and is still extremely rare in this country.
The dynamics of the television industry has shifted slightly since cable appeared, and since DVD sales of television shows, but advertising to 300 (estimated in 2006) million eyeballs is still the main driving force in the industry.
I can see why I skipped many episodes in the first season of Magnum: it aired between the soapy Waltons and the soapy Knots Landing. I spent Thursday nights that season watching the comedies on ABC: Mork and Mindy, Bosom Buddies (I knew Tom Hanks was a star even then), and Barney Miller.
higgybaby1: I live in Appleton.