now in technicolor!

go home? back to the media glade?

This is going to be a massive self-report when it comes to my taste in tv. All of (well, most of,) these shows aired a long long time before we were all born and I watched them on MeTV in the mid-2010s while I was obsesed with being not-like-other-girls. I've since realized that I'm just like all the other girls, but the shows stayed with me.

the faves

What if I told you there was a comedy show about a group of WWII Luftstalag POWS dedicated to clowing on the Nazis with a cast of Jewish and WWII veteran comedians? Go watch Hogan's Heroes. It's great. They tunnelled out of Stalag 13 years ago and now they're running a large scale escape operation right under the German's noses. It's also funny as hell.

M*A*S*H is my ultimate comfort show. If I'm watching M*A*S*H, something is DEEPLY WRONG and I need to remember being seven years old with my nose glued to the TV screen, watching with bated breath while I waited for PAX to swap from Bonanza to M*A*S*H. Most of it is good, some of it is pretty outdated, but it has so much heart and so much family squeezed into it.

Okay hear me out: this show isn't historically accurate and was made with a budget of like $5--wait, no, £5. But it's SO GOOD!!! I love this version of Robin Hood. It's probably only overtaken by the 1970s Disney version with the foxes and the fucking great soundtrack.

It's so much fun. Robin and Friar Tuck give a butcher the most confusing business deal of his entire life, Little John wears platforms sometimes to make him look taller than he really is, the Sheriff of Nottingham is played by WalMart Peter Cushing (sorry Alan Wheatly, you're still great) and also wears shoulder pads most of the time. God I love it so fucking much.

This was on of those shows that I watched on MeTV when I was in high school. And then in 10 minute increments on YouTube. It fed my love of steampunk media, westerns, and 1960s TV comedies. The quality of this one... is not very good. Everyone is trying their best, but it kinda fell victim to the Bat Man competitor's curse where everything had to be saturated to the extreme and campy as fuck. But the first three-ish seasons are pretty solid and I do love the look of the costumes when they finally swapped to color.

THEE detective. This is like a star walk of everyone who was famous from 1950-70. They're backwards mysteries - you start the episode knowing who the villain is and then watch them sweat while Peter Faulk figures out all their tricks. And maybe also try to figure out which one of his eyes is real. They're very well produced and a lot of money and love clearly went into making the series.

These are posted together because Lewis is a spinoff of the Inspector Morse series. My old library had like every British TV show ever aired and my teenage Anglophile ass loved every second of it. I don't own any of the Morse series, but I own most of the Lewis series. (I think I'm missing the last series. Oh well.) They're really well done and as someone who read some of the Morse mysteries before watching the show, they're fairly accurate. TV Morse is nicer than Book Morse tho. Lewis is Lewis. Lewis has Hathaway, whom I love and who might also just be Morse reincarnated.

The first and only show to ever be funny.

Rod Serling is an insanely talented writer and even better at selecting good stories for his story collections and his tv shows. I haven't seen all of the episodes of either of these, but any time I see anything from Rod Serling I'm impressed. The man was brilliant.

My idiot sons in space!! All of humanity is gone except for a Scouse man named Dave. Ignore the other people on the cover, they're a hologram and what cats are eventually going to evolve into. The show has been ongoing off and on since 1988 and IMDB still lists it as ongoing.

A crime solving mathematician played by that one elf from The Santa Clause and his brother solve crimes together. It's so dumb and fun. It does kinda suffer from that early 2000s it's always the terrorists zenophobia, but compared to some of the other shows that were airing at the time it isn't terrible. Watch at your own discretion.

Remington Steele is my original TV obsession. I would sneak over to my neighbor's apartment to watch this and Dragon Tales, both of which I was expressly forbidden from watching. Remington Steele has stayed with me over the years and one year my father even got me the complete series on DVD which is kinda funny in a cyclical way. The show is supposed to be this forbidden will they won't they romance, but they will. And they do. They kinda dance around it, but they certainly do. Laura and Remington are hot for each other and they don't hide it despite Laura's insistence that she doesn't want to mix business with pleasure. Which she does less than ten minutes later. But can we really blame her? It's Pierce Brosnan!

At some point in my quest to realize that I was, in fact, just like other girls, I convinced myself that I didn't like 1980s TV shows. I was wrong. They're fun! The A Team is especially fun because it includes Howling Mad Murdoch (my fave 4ever) and lots of explosions. There's even an episode directed by Ivan Dixon, who played Kinchloe in Hogan's Heroes. And you can tell because it's structured just like a Hogan's Heroes episode. Season 4 introduces a pseudo-villain played by Robert Vaughn of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.! It's like a reunion show for a bunch of my other faves.

This was NBC's answer to both the James Bond craze AND the Batman craze. It only did on of those well and it was the one that didn't involve campifying the show to the point where Napoleon Solo was dancing with a man in a guerilla suit. Anyways. The box set of TMFU was one of the first big DVD purchases that I made and I still have it to this day. It's in a breifcase and has a bunch of behind the scenes discs that I don't think I ever watched (oops).