Comfort TV: old nostalgia reruns that you love watching

We have a HD antenna and ME-TV and the new Antenna TV have scratched some great itches for me

Go-to faves that I dvr:
Gunsmoke
The Andy Griffith Show

others that I watch when they’re on
M*A*S*H
Welcome Back Kotter

New favorite that I am dvring
Family Ties. Ahhh srsly this is some enjoyable comfort tv for me. It’s still genuinely funny & sweet & the cast are all so great, I even like the episodes with dumb little Andy

Antenna TV is adding Benson in January :D

Do you guys have old shows you watch on the reg? I don’t necessarily mean bingeing, just an episode or two, or maybe a marathon when yr sick etc

Star Trek TOS
Bob Newhart (the psychiatrist one, not the inn one)
Night Court

Blackadder II, the Third, Goes Forth

Night Court is otm

also Blackadder

I watched the Newhart one in the inn for the first time, it was p funny but i don’t have much of a connection with it
Have never seen shrink Newhart

i watchec Hawaii Five O

jeez i never realized how GROUCHY Steve is. He’s pretty much a dick to everyone 24/7

i get a station called Laff and it's basically Roseanne 24/7 and that is ok by me.

Shows I can put on anytime and watch for hours regardless of how many times I've seen any of the given episodes (which is usually 'many'):

Roseanne
Parks and Rec
NewsRadio
Star Trek: TNG
Kids in the Hall

I hadn't seen it for forever but I got sucked into hours of A Different World while half-snoozing on the couch this weekend.

Veg you have got to watch OG Newhart, it's so, so good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrubGTIrlk4

I used to comfort-watch old TV shows a lot: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, My Three Sons, Batman, then later on things like Cheers and Roseanne. I was going to say shows that were mild and didn't require a lot of thought, but I don't know if that generalization will work--Roseanne had an edge to it, and recently I've been comfort-watching House of Cards on a local network (missed a couple of weeks--my guess is they've pulled it since then).

Oh, Dallas and The Rockford Files, too. And Gilmore Girls.

(I have most of this stuff on DVD, so it's not uncommon for me to throw in a disc and just let it play in the background for hours while I do other stuff.)

Thin line. The one show falling under this trope for me is Seinfeld. It's a paradox though: if I am watching Seinfeld seasons back to back again, I am *not* in a happy place.

It's comforting, but only at times when I am in dire need of a sort of comfort Seinfeld can't provide. I just fool myself at those times.

Seinfeld
Jeopardy
Peep Show
It's always Sunny
Curb

Yes minister

others that I watch when they’re on
M*A*S*H
Welcome Back Kotter

Ha

Family Ties was great. Some killer comic timing among the cast, and Tom Hanks’ guest bit on a Very Special Episode was surprisingly funny.

yeah the comedic timing is SO good

Columbo and Magnum PI for sure

The variability of old shows seems so weird now - like with Magnum, some weeks are so good you could be watching a lost Don Siegel movie, then next week it's just an 80s bouffant explosion with plastic sets and wall-to-wall ham acting

Andy Griffith Show is one I never saw growing up & have no nostalgic connection to, but that I really genuinely enjoy now as a newbie. It has v good belly laughs.

Mr Veg will even sit & watch those with me sometimes. And it’s fun to whistle the theme song.

The Sweeney

i watched Hawaii Five O

jeez i never realized how GROUCHY Steve is. He’s pretty much a dick to everyone 24/7

― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl)

I've always felt that the premise of this show is essentially "Steve McGarrett solves crimes by getting angry at people"

otm

andy griffith in the don knotts years is possibly the perfect television show.

Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, baby!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8RtP_p2oLo

Also: The Golden Girls.

Can't believe I'm the first person to mention any Law & Order incarnation in this thread. The Ion channel is currently running original L&O on Wednesdays and Fridays, SVU on Saturdays, and Criminal Intent on Sundays. It's fantastic. Unfortunately, they run Criminal Minds all day Monday and Tuesday, which is just grim torture porn I've got no time for, and Thursdays is Blue Bloods, which amused me at first but got old fast.

early Beverly Hillbillies, Ironside, Hawaii 5-O, McMillan and Wife, shrink Newhart, SCTV, Dick Van Dyke

somehow I find I Dream of Jeannie comforting even though it's incredibly frenetic

I'd probably watch The Patty Duke Show if that came on

Gilligan's Island
Munsters
Dick Van Dyke
Mary Tyler Moore
Love American Style
Three's Company (secret shame)
Twilight Zone
Star Trek (original)

Laverne and Shirley
Facts of Life
Golden Girls

Andy Griffith
The Beverly Hillbillies
Bewitched
I Love Lucy
this youtube channel of old local news opening sequences
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpfi6WdDH6ov4qU7lMvpTCw/videos

i used to enjoy Bewitched & Gidget as a kid but I never see Gidget reruns!

Barney Miller is a good one. I'd love to have seen that Chicago theater group that would act out episodes live on stage.

I got caught on the road and watched a few hours of MASH for the first time in years and it was enjoyable too.

As a kid, my faves were Gilligan's Island, I Love Lucy, Bewitched, Andy Griffith and Happy Days, all of which ran constantly in reruns during the 80s. I started watching Good Times quite a bit in high school when one of the local stations started showing it during the 90s. I image that all of these would make for good comfort viewing now, but I never seem to see then when I'm channel surfing these days (I realize this would only account for a couple of these shows, but are stations hesitant to show B&W?). Perhaps if the Comedy channel (Canada's version of Comedy Central, more or less) would stop running 50 episodes of fucking Big Bang Theory per day...

These days, I'll usually pause on Cheers, Friends or The Simpsons. I'm kind of Seinfeld'd out, but mostly I don't watch it any more because my husband can't stand him. None of the stations here seem to ever rerun The Golden Girls anymore either, but we own the DVDs (because of course we do), and it and the classic-era The Simpsons are by the DVDs that we have put the most wear on.

this youtube channel of old local news opening sequences
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpfi6WdDH6ov4qU7lMvpTCw/videos🕸

Oh, and Family Ties is definitely one that I would comfort-watch if it were on more. Ditto The Facts of Life and Silver Spoons--or at least I'm assuming, as I haven't seen those since I was a kid.

Roseanne is great too, as long as you don't get any of the late-period ones which. No matter what anyone says about later Simpsons, late Roseanne is considerably more painful (The Simpsons at least manage to land a couple of good gags in otherwise mediocre episodes).

And, duh, Columbo! My mind was on comedy, so I didn't think of this one til I saw it upthread, but Columbo may be the ultimate comfort show for me!

It's really a shame that no one seems to show Fernwood/America 2 Nite anymore. I used to love watching it when it was on Nick at Nite (and thankfully have a cache of all the episodes on my computer, although it isn't the same as just happening upon it while flipping channels).

xpost Roseanne is maybe the best show ever until the season when Roseanne came back with a new face. It soldiered along for a bit after that but it was a steady decline until it dropped all the way off the cliff in the final season. So my pro-tip: unless it's the pot smoking episode, be wary of any post-facelift installment.

xxpost La Lechera yeah i loved Gidget but i never see reruns anywhere. Only the Flying Nun

PERRY MASON
mission: impossible
rockford

always hated all in the family as a kid, but sometimes i stop on one and it's good except that meathead's terrible posture drives me crazy

never liked night court, still don't
mash is great but i never see it

All in the Family, M*A*S*H* and The Brady Bunch were the three rerun standards of my childhood that I never cared for at the time. The first two always felt too dry and adult to me, and the third one struck me as insipid even as a kid.

I never see Gidget reruns!

Antenna used to show them on weekends before rotating them out. The problem with Gidget is that it was only on for one season (32 episodes), which is less than ideal for a show in syndication. When I was a little kid (late '80s), one of the local UHF stations had the novel idea of only airing Gidget* reruns on weekday mornings during the summer. The same station did a similar thing with the Monkees* in the afternoons.

*Which ran for two seasons and 58 episodes. Antenna also used to show it on weekends.

All In The Family is one that i never saw growing up, i’ve tried a few eps but i don’t enjoy it. Archie makes me recoil, the way he talks, his angry tone, I always expect it to be followed with a backhander & actual physical blows :(

Dinosaurs and aliens in the family

I should have mentioned The Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched. They pretty much defined comfort-TV for me in my 20s (i.e., shows you watched as a kid). Not sure if they'd still work for me today.

They never air the sort of stuff I'd love to rewatch. Mostly old cartoons like:
- the Beatles
- Cool MacCool
- Wacky Races
- Astroboy (original versh not this fancy new CGI one)

I comfort watch Simpsons and Futurama but I spose that doesnt count does it?

Otherwise also yeah Blackadder, the Young Ones used to be a big go-to. I dont watch free too air/commercial TV at all anymore and we dont have cable so nothing much else comes to mind. I mean if I'm hungover and its on anyway, I'll watch Cops or Highway Patrol or Love Boat.

wacky races?? my kind of human Trayce

One of the retro TV channels (Antenna or Cozi or MeTV) showed the pilot of Gidget a few weeks ago but I'm not sure if they followed up with further episodes,

Fernwood/America 2 Nite would be great to see nowadays, as would the parent show, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, where fans of Lady Dynamite could see Mary Kay Place in her breakthrough role as country singer Loretta Haggers.

MH, MH is at least finally available on DVD (only 38 discs!), but yeah, it's a little mystifying that no one has taken up the reins on airing that collection of shows (including the post-Louise Lasser Forever Fernwood, which I've never seen at all). They're pretty much the only Norman Lear shows from that era that get no love from rerun-centric TV stations.

Dr Katz