Comment by banku_brougham

12 days ago

for every episode of the A-Team, for Saturday morning cartoons, for I Love Lucy, and for Miami Vice, I give thanks.

Edit: And Star Trek, and Cosmos

11 comments

banku_brougham

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nephihaha  12 days ago

Diamonds on a dung heap. For every good series which we love there are dozens of terrible/forgettable ones.

A shame since TV has so much potential as a medium.

  • HelloMcFly  11 days ago

    I think this is likely to be true for every artistic creation that requires lots of capital and widespread human coordination. Ultimately for a TV show to be great many, many things have to go right, and much of what could go wrong happens after the money is spent and the air date is already assured. I'm grateful we've had so many great things, certainly far more than I'll have time to watch in my life. But I'm not a heavy TV viewer.

    • account42  11 days ago

      TV has a fairly bad record of keeping shows that are already shown to be good alive though because good does not equate profitable for the network or individual decision makers (which are again no the same thing).

      1 reply →

    • nephihaha  11 days ago

      I think the problem nowadays is that there are so many channels and so much space to fill. TV runs 24/7 now on hundreds of channels. In many cases, it isn't worth the while of a small channel to make an expensive programme as they would lose money.

      Sometimes, the "wrong" programme is the hit. I know the History Channel started off with serious documentaries (some of them excellent quality) which not enough people watched. They then tried Nazis and Ancient Egypt, but it seems to be "Ancient Aliens" which is their biggest hit. Its version of history is questionable, to say the least.

      3 replies →

  • banku_brougham  11 days ago

    Well, A-Team was objectively terrible but I have a nostalgic connection to kids shows like that, Knight Rider etc. In retrospect Bay Watch was an effective CPR training tool at unprecedented scale.

    I would be hesitant to pass judgement.

    • nephihaha  11 days ago

      The A Team was objectively terrible, but I think it had a good main cast and never pretended to be anything it wasn't. Ditto Knight Rider.

      I think Glen Larson was behind both of these.

      Baywatch was often terrible, but many of us watched for other reasons.