Looking Back vs. Looking Forward

Every so often I like to take a step back from blogs about specific shows or actors, and look at the bigger classic TV picture.

Lately I’ve been thinking about people who prefer watching older shows to current television. Why are we like that? The title of this piece was my first theory –some prefer looking back to looking forward. But is it really that simple?

I know I don’t look at everything this way. It’s nice that light bulbs last longer now, and I’m glad that research that once required driving to the library can now be conducted at a computer in my jammies.

However, while many aspects of our lives have improved with the passage of time, I think just as many have regressed. And that’s where “things were better in my day” thinking starts, and why it can be comforting to look back at those times. The television shows of an earlier era provide a window into that bygone world – one that reinforces our certainty that those were the days. 

For instance, if you think schools were better run and taught a more appropriate curriculum when Beaver Cleaver or Opie Taylor or Peter Brady were going to class, that belief will be reinforced by the classroom scenes from their respective shows. Familiar subjects are taught, history lessons will not assume that everything that happened in America since Jamestown was wrong, and teaching will be portrayed as a noble profession. 

If you are sure that people were more civil to each other back when you were a kid, you’ll find that reflected in how characters behave in classic television. If you have fond memories of a time when there was nothing controversial about public restrooms or police officers or “Merry Christmas,” you are almost certainly someone that feels more at home in the shows of the past.

Part of this appeal comes from the fact that we lived through these eras ourselves, and they didn’t seem so bad to us, then or now. Of course, not everyone feels this way. There are many who lived through those times less happily than I did. There are those of later generations who believe the shows of this time portray an era that was less sophisticated, less enlightened, and less inclusive.

Does that mean those of us who prefer Nanny and the Professor to Masters of Sex are less sophisticated? I don’t think so. But it might mean that we define sophistication differently.  

Does it mean we don’t care about inclusion? It actually might, to be honest. It’s not that we’re against it – we just don’t always view entertainment through that prism. I’ll watch a dozen straight episodes of a 1950s sitcom and not even be aware that I’ve never seen a person of color. But I’ll also watch Room 222 with its racially diverse cast, and be just as captivated – not because of the diversity, but because it’s an intelligent and wonderful show.  

I’ve yet to meet a classic TV fan in favor of discrimination or anyone being mistreated. But we also see through the artificiality of forced diversity – in classic TV terms, that means how, beginning around the late 1970s, every Saturday morning commercial would have three white kids and one black kid. Even as children it was hard not to pick up on the pattern, and to think it was rather silly. 

 

Now, maybe there were African-American kids watching at the time who needed to see that, and who am I to tell them they are wrong? But I wonder if the same objective could have been achieved in a less flagrant way.

The forward-looking TV fan is content with the agendas that dictate how television shows are now put together. They’re pleased when CBS is chastised for scheduling too many shows about white men on this fall’s roster – and even happier when the network quickly goes into self-flagellation mode, desperately apologizing and vowing to do better.

Are the shows good or not? No mention of that.

The forward-looking viewer is happy that today’s shows are engineered not to offend anyone (with the exception of a few acceptable targets). Ironically, the shows of the past shared that goal. But they managed to get there without focus groups and sensitivity training. 

Have I answered the question? I don’t know. I’m dancing around the obvious conclusion that classic TV devotees are also fonder of the times in which they were made. And those who find old shows to be dated and trite also believe just about everything is better today than it used to be.

That’s probably still too simple. I’m sure there are thousands of people with a more progressive outlook who can laugh at I Love Lucy or appreciate the simpler charms of Bewitched. The difference is that they see them as nice places to visit, while classic TV fans like me take a look at where the culture is headed, and wish we could go back and live in their bygone worlds. Even with a nosy neighbor like Mrs. Kravitz.