Those Seventies Shows

Dig up details about DFL players' actions regarding American Bankers? Kudos.

Rip on Garrison Keillor's hypocrisy? Raves from the whole blogosphere.

But slip in an offhanded dig about seventies TV? Now I've gone too far, as I seem to have hit a nerve with the Fraters, when I very mildly shunned the '70's Goldberg/Schwartz cop drama SWAT (now a major motion picture, despite the fact that it last aired 27 years ago after a season and a half):

"Maybe I was just a bit a younger, a bit more idealistic, and a little less cynical than Mitch when the show aired because S.W.A.T. was must see TV for me as a youth.

I watched the first few episodes of SWAT fairly eagerly as a fifth (sixth?) grader; my far-left Mom didn't allow toy guns or violent TV in the house, so it involved sneaking over to Mike Aylmer or "Radish" Widmer's house to watch.

And after the forbidden fruit thrill of watching a show with guns wore off, I realized - this show is so implausible! Their tactics made no sense! They did things no cop would ever do! Robert Urich's hair never moved!

I know the questions already: Why did you insist on tactical plausibility? Why were you doing it as a pre-adolescent?

Mea Culpa. I have no explanation. I just did.

Perhaps that's why I watch so little TV today; so much was so depressingly awful when I was a kid. It was the era of The Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch, Three's Company, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, The Love Boat, TJ Hooker, Fantasy Island... TV that was desperately un-musical, un-funny, un-sexy, un-suspenseful, un-affirming, un-interesting...depressingly un-watchable.

Worst of all, of course, were the sixties-dreck reruns in which most of the kids in my little North Dakota neighborhood marinaded their brains after school most days. Gilligan's Island. The Munsters. The Addams Family. I cordially detested each of these shows; thei crappy production values, cheezy laugh tracks, and most of all the fact that most of my friends would sit and park in front of them every moment after most school days, rather than coming out and actually doing something.

And yeah, I know there were exceptions. After Mom realized that MASH, despite the presence of uniforms and the occasional rifle, was actually anti-war, it was allowed on TV (an early-sixties Philco we'd inherited from Grandma, followed by a '75 Silvania GT-Matic that survived until the mid-nineties). Mel Brooks' sole TV outing, "When Things Were Rotten" (both episodes - it seemed like the show lasted much less than the official four months) was a stitch, and I snuck in the occasional "Rockford Files", and realized even then that it was great stuff. And yes, I was the only 11-year-old in town who really dug "Upstairs, Downstairs".

Elder continues:

What icon of my childhood will Mitch go after next? He best not even think about ripping Emergency! . You go after Johnny and Roy at your own peril my friend. "

Emergency? Now you're talking real TV! The theme song, the Jack Webb-induced moral absolutism - and a young Deirdre Hall - alone were worth stopping by every Friday night!

No, now you're talking!

Posted by Mitch at August 15, 2003 12:05 PM