Long-Running Scripted TV Shows: How Irrelevant Are They?

A friend of mine asked me today whether or not I thought "Mad About You" was unusually ephemeral for a popular, long-running major sitcom. This led me to the Wikipedia list of "long-running scripted American primetime television series". As precise as they try to make the criteria, though, there are all kinds of weird caveats. "Long-running" is here defined as "seven or more seasons and 100 or more episodes".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-running_scripted_American_primetime_television_series

The short answer is that no, I don't think "Mad About You" is unusually irrelevant. In fact there are a LOT of long-running shows that were either always irrelevant, or long ago reached the realm of "wait NCIS is STILL RUNNING?" The long answer, well, I'd like to hear other people's thoughts!

I'm necessarily asking about the quality of these shows - just wondering what people's opinions are of their long-term cultural relevance. For instance, I'd say that "Murder, She Wrote" has a fair amount of long-term cultural relevance. "Falcon Crest"? I couldn't tell you a goddamn thing about "Falcon Crest". I haven't seen Dynasty or Dallas but I can tell you things about them, even if the most important thing I can tell you about "Dynasty" is that you don't have to watch it to have an attitude.

Honestly I can't tell you shit about network shows that have run in the past fifteen years or so. I know Brooklyn Nine-Nine is apparently good. I think people also liked The Blacklist? Maybe? And I gotta figure a lot of these shows can, like, outdo "Barnaby Jones" (I didn't realize until just now that Barnaby Jones and Barney Miller were different shows; I thought Abe Vigoda played "Fish" on Barnaby Jones) or "Coach". How about it? Can anyone speak up for "FBI" (as opposed to "The F.B.I."), CBS, September 25, 2018 - present?

Also, how the FUCK did "In the Heat of the Night" run 142 episodes? And four TV movies? Good Lord.

From January 1976 to July 1977, there were 325 episodes of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman written, produced and aired. I haven't seen one of them and I'm annoyed at myself about that fact! I wonder if that qualifies as "long-running", though

From January 1976 to July 1977, there were 325 episodes of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman written, produced and aired. I haven't seen one of them and I'm annoyed at myself about that fact! I wonder if that qualifies as "long-running", though

― brb (flamboyant goon tie included), Wednesday, July 29, 2026 6:13 PM (thirty-four minutes ago)

it was unusual in that it was... when people talk about "prime-time soaps" a lot of the time they're talking about stuff like "dallas", but mary hartman, mary hartman was a lot more like an absurdist take on an actual soap opera. it's kind of like "the trouble with tracy", which filmed seven episodes every five days in 1970-1971 for 130 episodes and is kind of notorious in its own way. idk. louise lasser burned out pretty quick and that kind of killed the show... it would be interesting to think of it going for seven years!

a lot of the more interesting shows that i think of as "long-running" don't qualify under the wikipedia standards. there are british shows i think of as "long-running" that don't quite qualify. "public eye", for instance, ran on british tv for seven series between 1965 and 1975, but only made 87 episodes. "the brothers" ran for seven series on BBC1 between 1972 and 1976, but only produced 92 episodes! "only fools and horses" aired over a period of 22 years... 64 episodes! shows like "the avengers" and "the saint" are also disqualified - each ran for only six series...

"last of the summer wine" would count, at least! 31 series between 1973 and 2010 with 295 episodes. so would z cars - 801 episodes over 12 series between 1962 and 1978.

Casualty in the UK has been running since September 1986 and has shown 41 series and 1,400+ episodes. I last watched an episode in the early 2000s and was amazed at how terrible it was back then

these are *primetime* american series

which are as nothing compared to days of our lives/general hospital/meet the press/etc

I still watch all the Law'norders. TBH they are way more shite than used to be, but its like tv junkfood.

My dad loved watching Home and Away right up til his stroke, bless 'im.

Ironically and not PVMIC of me - I stopped watching the Simpsons a good 10 years ago now.

But as to the relevance - I mean, I *wish* shows still got as seasons as long, and as many, as older shows. This 10-episode, 3-seasons and cancelled BS is really annoying. Give me a 25episode lowbudget Trek over a compressed and over-FXed 10 episode one. Why can't anyone take the time anymore.

/oldmanyellsatcloud.gif

yeah the criteria are very specifically calibrated to try and exclude daily soaps, game shows, reality shows, variety shows, kids' cartoons, etc. the idea of "prime time" is inherently limited, tho, because it really only does apply to US networks. syndicated shows like "star trek: the next generation" didn't _have_ a set broadcast time - that was determined by the station that picked it up. that's why the only trek show on the list is voyager. "the next generation" and "deep space nine" each ran for seven seasons and had well over 100 episodes, but were syndicated, so don't make the list. countries like the UK don't really have the same concept of "prime time" as the US does, that i can tell - the first series of the 2005 doctor who, for instance, aired at 7 PM on a Saturday... in the US, "prime time" isn't thought of as starting until 8 PM, and saturdays aren't traditionally thought of as peak viewing times. just like the trek examples above, i'd definitely put both the 1963 and 2005 iterations of "doctor who" in the "long-running scripted series" category.

cable shows also don't necessarily have the same concept of "prime time". there definitely are long-running shows airing _now_ on US cable networks that i'd put in the same category as the shows on the list - "it's always sunny in philadelphia" and "south park" spring to mind immediately. both "family guy" and "american dad" are on the list, making "south park" a notable omission.

the criteria are interesting to me because of what they exclude. 100+ episodes and seven seasons is a pretty deliberate choice. if you're running 13 episode seasons, you have to go _eight seasons_ to hit that mark. if you're running 26 episode seasons, you only have to go four seasons. however, traditionally once a show hits 100 episodes, it's considered to have enough episodes to hit "second-run" syndication - you can air it five days a week for a year without repeats. "community", for instance, had as its goal "five seasons and a movie". once you've hit that mark, it's pretty easy to cancel a show that stops pulling first-run audiences. "the dick van dyke show", a show i _think_ of as "long-running", only ran for five seasons, for instance. i think the "seven season" criterion is an interesting one, and one i'd kind of like to stick with, specifically _because_ it excludes shows like "the dick van dyke show". you throw out that criterion and there are TONS of shows that qualify. it's more interesting to me when you calibrate the list towards "the simpsons" instead of "the dick van dyke show" or "get smart", or, i mean, "kate & allie", which i watched regularly as a kid, which ran for six seasons and 122 episodes, and which is pretty much entirely forgotten. well it wasn't made to be remembered decades later! i don't know that "coach" was made to be remembered decades later either, though! that's what interests me.

the most immediately notable exclusion is "prestige television", the stuff that shows up on premium services. the wire, breaking bad, the sopranos, game of thrones, cobra kai, none of them qualify. i'm not against "prestige television". i'm glad it exists. i don't really watch it. i don't binge tv. i'm more interested in shows like murder, she wrote, the jeffersons, and yes, "copaganda" shows like law and order and NYPD Blue. (shows like "SVU" are not something i can handle, though). the last time i was out of work for an extended period of time, between 2003 and 2008, i spent a lot of my time watching reruns of "NYPD Blue", "Law and Order", and "Homicide: Life on the Street". i remember "homicide" aired at noon on WGN.

i do think there's real social significance to a lot of them. not just shows like M*A*S*H or Cheers. "walker, texas ranger", that has cultural significance. "the waltons" has cultural significance - it represents the return of the "rural" show after fred silverman's "rural purge" in the early 70s. i wouldn't really have watched either of them, and i do think they had significant cultural impact in a way that "game of thrones" didn't. funnily enough the bete noire of "homicide", "nash bridges", which regularly trounced it in the ratings, didn't make it to seven seasons. _lost_ didn't make it to seven seasons!

i'm really fascinated by the list because it's typical to have a run like:

The Flash (9 seasons, 184 episodes, 2014-2023)
Seinfeld (9 seasons, 180 episodes, 1989-1998)
9-1-1 (9 seasons, 142 episodes, 2018-present)
The Burns and Allen Show (8 seasons, 291 episodes, 1950-1958)
Wagon Train (8 seasons, 284 episodes, 1957-1965)

these are all very different shows that ran in different eras and yet (with the exception of 9-1-1, since i'm nearly completely ignorant ignorant of post-2015 TV) i'd call of them pretty significant ("Wagon Train" might be mostly forgotten, but the elevator pitch for the original "Star Trek" was "Wagon Train to the stars"!)

again, nothing against prestige tv, but long-running scripted tv shows are what i think of when i think of television. a lot of the audience for those kinds of shows has gone to other media. a twitch stream, honestly, does hit the same sweet spot that "watching" (the kind of watching where you don't have to pay attention, the kind of watching where you can have a conversation with the other people in the room) one of these shows has. one of my favorite episodes of "the wonder years" (which doesn't qualify for the wikipedia list - 6 seasons, 115 episodes) is an episode where kevin and paul and their girlfriends in the basement "watching" the star trek episode "spock's brain" and no they're not paying attention to the show, they're playing tonsil hockey. the tv nerd bonus on this is, of course, that "spock's brain" is a notoriously terrible star trek episode. it's not like they're missing out on anything. at the same time, even though they're not paying attention, it worms into kevin's head - his dream sequence later in the episode borrows from it.

i guess i might say that for me, television is what happens when you're doing other things!

yes this is a topic that specifically interests me and that i've thought about _way_ too much lol

I always appreciated the way TV stations paired (or grouped) similar half-hour shows within an hour, so they don't come to mind as single entities but as links in a chain. School to dinner, one blends into the other, you can't have the Brady Bunch without the Partridge Family.

50s nostalgia: Happy Days / Laverne & Shirley.

Urban/Black: Good Times / What's Happening / Jefferson / Sanford & Son.

Teen dramedy: Facts of Life / One Day at a Time

Wealth: Diff'rent Strokes / Silver Spoons

Supernatural/comic situation: Jeannie / Bewitched / Gilligan

Etc.

Which doesn't even touch any of the animated cartoons, also thematically paired.

Kids today watch what they want when they want and the whole ethos of programming and sequencing is lost in rain.

"community", for instance, had as its goal "five seasons and a movie"

famously

I recently had the thought that maybe I should watch Supernatural, which a lot of people (within a certain niche) liked at the time and which has I think gained retroactive cachet because its creator, Eric Kripke, also created The Boys, an Amazon show I didn't like at all. But Supernatural seemed interesting, until I realized it ran for fifteen seasons. And apparently somewhere along the line it went from a "monster of the week" show to a long-running narrative with a bunch of lore, so it's not like you can dip in and watch one at random. (From Wikipedia: "The production faced criticism for its repetitive and convoluted plotlines during its final 10 seasons.")

I'm very confused about why It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia isn't on this list

xxpost It was Six seasons and a Movie.

xpost It's Always Sunny is a cable show.

When I first visited the US in 97, I did a fair amount of tv watching in hotel rooms and it seemed like Steve Urkel was always on... Then when I moved there 18 months later it was like he had completely vanished from the culture.

there was a pretty long period of time in the 80s when you could invariably find a M*A*S*H rerun at any moment of the day, it was unavoidable

Chicago Fire
Chicago P.D.
Chicago Med

ok what's going on here

xxpost It was Six seasons and a Movie.

also it wasn’t the goal for Community. it was a fictional character on Community’s wish for the IRL program The Cape, which was cut from thirteen episodes to ten, and then the final episode wasn’t aired.

yeah, but it was taken up by fans of the show.

and the creator of the show found it amusing that after getting fired, and rehired a season later, and the episode order cut, and then the show axed, that it ended up having a sixth and final season on a search engine’s web portal, similar to the final episode of The Cape being uploaded to NBC’s website. But that outcome had not been a target anyone had set seven years previous.

yeah, it was obviously a joke because Community was always on the verge of cancellation.

Chicago Fire
Chicago P.D.
Chicago Med

All produced by Dick Wolf, and they do (or did) a lot of crossover episodes - anybody the cops shot would get taken to the hospital, the cops and fire department would team up to catch a serial arsonist, cops and firefighters and doctors/nurses all sleeping together, etc.

Inside you are two Dick Wolves

These are their stories

Dun dun

Prime time soaps (Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest) were a big part of the DNA of Twin Peaks which was a predecessor of prestige TV.

I have a real soft-spot for anthology series, starting with my childhood love of Twilight Zone & Night Gallery... I like stand-alone shit where I don't have to know anything about the characters, and don't have to 'keep up' with anything. When Black Mirror worked, I was all in

I recently had the thought that maybe I should watch Supernatural, which a lot of people (within a certain niche) liked at the time and which has I think gained retroactive cachet because its creator, Eric Kripke, also created The Boys, an Amazon show I didn't like at all. But Supernatural seemed interesting, until I realized it ran for fifteen seasons. And apparently somewhere along the line it went from a "monster of the week" show to a long-running narrative with a bunch of lore, so it's not like you can dip in and watch one at random. (From Wikipedia: "The production faced criticism for its repetitive and convoluted plotlines during its final 10 seasons.")

― wipes chooser (unperson), Thursday, July 30, 2026 7:03 AM (nine hours ago)

you should not watch _supernatural_. this show is not respected by many of the people i know. by which i mean, there are people who will swear that there are episodes of the last three seasons of "stargate sg-1" that aren't that bad, honestly, and will stan even parts of stargate atlantis, but who will go nowhere near _supernatural_. my general perception, which is probably not entirely accurate but i am a girl on the internet, what can i tell you, is that _supernatural's_ main fanbase was teen and twentysomething incest shippers.

so what about The Mentalist?

All produced by Dick Wolf, and they do (or did) a lot of crossover episodes - anybody the cops shot would get taken to the hospital, the cops and fire department would team up to catch a serial arsonist, cops and firefighters and doctors/nurses all sleeping together, etc.

― wipes chooser (unperson), Thursday, July 30, 2026 12:14 PM (four hours ago)

oh my god, were THOSE dick wolves too? god, that man has out-Quinn Martined Quinn Martin (who has several entries on the list, such as the aforementioned Barnaby Jones) at this point.

the most interesting thing about the dickwolfiverse to me is how Richard Belzer found his way into it. "Homicide" was NOT a Dick Wolf show, but ran on the same network as Law and Order, so there were a couple crossovers. After the show was cancelled, up pops Belzer's character on a law and order show. His Det. Munch is much beloved by Tommy Westphallverse truthers (um, it's tricky to explain the Tommy Westphallverse if you don't know it already).

Interestingly, while there are shows like, IMO, "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" that meet the spirit of the list but not the letter, I think one could also argue that "Homicide: Life on the Street" (not to be confused with the Australian soap "Homicide", just like Patrick McGoohan's "The Prisoner" shouldn't be confused with the Australian women-in-prison soap also known as "Prisoner: Cell Block H")...

Whew. Anyway. Homicide: Life on the Street ran for seven seasons, but the first season was nine episode, and the second season was FOUR episodes!

---

yeah, it was obviously a joke because Community was always on the verge of cancellation.

― every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in f (President Keyes), Thursday, July 30, 2026 11:46 AM (five hours ago)

that's another thing, there definitely are shows on the list that danced on the edge of cancellation early on... Homicide: Life on the Street was perpetually on the brink of cancellation, and the network was always fucking with it. It _wanted_ to be prestige TV and as it went on it got less and less "prestige", very much against the will of the creators and the main actors. Season six was the breaking point for a lot of people. You also had shows like "Cheers", "Seinfeld", and, interestingly enough, "The Facts of Life" that struggled hard to find an audience but eventually took off. Not all of these shows were hits out of the gate!

so what about The Mentalist?

― Andy the Grasshopper, Thursday, July 30, 2026 4:56 PM (seven minutes ago)

i know nothing about The Mentalist. anyone?

I watched a little bit of it ... kind of bog standard procedural with a sherlocky main dude

Kids today watch what they want when they want and the whole ethos of programming and sequencing is lost in rain.

― marzipandemonium (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, July 30, 2026 4:48 AM (twelve hours ago)

this was a whole thing! i mean it still happens with wheel of fortune/jeopardy!, but you definitely had... the whole spinoff thing as well... "Good Times" was a spinoff of "The Jeffersons", which was a spinoff of All in the Family... "The Facts of Life" was a spinoff of "Diff'rent Strokes"... Happy Days was technically a spinoff, as well as spawning spinoffs like "Laverne and Shirley" and "Mork and Mindy, but "Happy Days" was a spinoff of an episode of one of those anthology shows, "Love American Style" - so in the same way "Callan" was a spinoff of "Armchair Theatre", which is to say, notreally! In "Happy Days", Ron Howard was also sort of calling back to his character in the well-received George Lucas film "American Graffiti".

to me the absolute king of themed blocks has to have been the "TGIF" block. i didn't really watch it, cuz it was after my time, but both "Full House" and "Family Matters" were mainstays of the block. in addition Friday nights were typically seen as... well, it was kind of a kiss-of-death slot, is my recollection. and whatever network did TGIF - was it ABC? - really went gangbusters with it. it did way better than CBS's "Crimetime after Primetime", that's for sure.

Prime time soaps (Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest) were a big part of the DNA of Twin Peaks which was a predecessor of prestige TV.

― Cow_Art, Thursday, July 30, 2026 12:31 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

"prestige TV" long predates shows like "The Sopranos" IMO... there's long lineage, going back to at least the 70s IMO. In the '80s you had "Wiseguy", in the '70s you had, hell, I think "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman might have sort of counted, and if that didn't count how about "Soap"? I'm, uh. I'm not sure how well "Soap" has aged:

Mary's other son, Jodie (Billy Crystal, in an early role), is homosexual, having a secret affair with a famous professional football quarterback, and contemplating a sex-change operation.

OK look I still get asked this question sometimes, and yes it is cringe, and I want to be clear and unambiguous on this point: I did not go on estrogen so I could suck dick. I was born with a perfectly good mouth. I'll give people the benefit of the doubt, in that the relationship between gender and sexuality is really complicated, but, like... no. No, that's silly, I didn't go through gender transition because I'm "gay", though I most certainly _am_ several sorts of queer.

...detour over. Point being, honestly, the earliest show I think of as "prestige TV" in the modern sense is "Roots". I think younger people don't necessarily recognize what a huge deal it was, don't really know that Levar Burton was on shows before Star Trek. I do think "Twin Peaks" draws from the tradition of "Mary Hartman" but mostly it's just fuckin'... David Lynch, you know? It's a David Lynch show. Well, David Lynch and Mark Frost, OK.

I'm trying to figure out what kind of relevance any of these shows had and for whom. The best I can do is that young people growing up absorb a lot of social information from the shows that appeal to them, because they are hungry for every scrap of information that could help explain the adult world to them. According to my wife, her first husband, as a boy, was totally captured by the character played by Richard Basehart in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and viewed him as a sort of surrogate father. That's a lot of relevance.

My sense is that the older you get, the major relevance of any television has diminished down to providing a mild form of mental or emotional stimulation that is in contrast to the rest of your life. So only as relevant as your need for low effort stimulation.

"prestige TV" long predates shows like "The Sopranos" IMO

not sure I agree with this.. simply just down to production values. Yes, there was like, IDK, 'Masterpiece Theater' and shit like that, but most shows were done on a budget, and were carefully edited to broadcast with commercials interjected throughout

It's all subjective, and there were varying levels of quality - but this 'prestige' thing to me is totally about Sopranos>Wire>Madmen and all that followed, i.e. "new TV"

Isnt the "prestige" or "golden age" concept kind of "shows have multi-episode or entire series story arcs" thing too?

and had anyone done this prior to Babylon 5?

and had anyone done this prior to Babylon 5?

I could argue that The Fugitive with David Jansson had an extended story arc, i.e. the 'One Armed Man' and all that

classic doctor who kind of did starting with the multiple stories making up the “key to time”

Dr. Whom?

A decent budget is a big part of prestige TV. The Sopranos, Six Ft Under, the Wire, all of those shows look as good as movies and had a lot of location shots.

The wife and I rewatched Soap a few years ago and enjoyed it. It’s dated and I can’t imagine anyone younger than fifty getting much out of it.

first openly gay character! though the actor was not

I would watch Benson with my grandma as a kid. I had no idea it was a spinoff.

HBO was obviously a game changer for prestige tv, but many of the people who ended up doing shows there had been trying to do similar stuff on network tv. David Milch with NYPD Blue, David Simon on Homicide.

what can i tell you, is that _supernatural's_ main fanbase was teen and twentysomething incest shippers.

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, July 30, 2026 7:53 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah. My friend published a poetry book that the Supernatural fanbase somehow decided was full of love poems about the characters on the show. Of course the poems were written before the show existed.

Wellll---anybody who has a weakness for police procedurals not too heavy on the procedures, central character being what once would have been a private eye when there were such things, now a police consultant---might like The Mentalist now and then. TM was a slick-shit stage magician, way over-confident and irresponsible, who went on local TV talk show in urban Cali, called out a v/ active serial killer, Red John (signature: smiley face in blood), then his own wife and little daughter were found dead w the smiley face.
So the Mentalist becomes consultant to get inside evidence on Red John, and helps solve other crimes along the way: episodic vs. recurring, like for inst The X-Files, which was often the better show for a long time, but eventually got too convoluted.
This one was more reliable, on a lower level/set of levels. Fave eps I recall incl. sort of a Southern Cali Gothic involving two feuding families, in the country but not countrified, one of those valley-and-shore-and islet Cali areas, you know? Good use of atmosphere, geography, psychology of living there.
Also when he got dosed with a psychotrophic and went back several years in his memory, Mr. Slick Shit w beautiful wife & daughter awaiting him in their beautiful home (actually standing empty since their bodies were taken away).
Also his cop minder (a la Skully etc.), Detective Lisbon, is played by Robin Tunney, who often tipped the scales between watching and not watching this particular week, in my case (not quite as much a draw as Skully or Watson [AKA Lucy Liu on Elementary), but always had her moments. (One of her goofy younger brothers stumbles onto the show, and she's like, "I raised those punks." No doubt.)

Also good supporting cast, vics, perps ( RJ suspect Malcolm McDowell always welcome to recur). Series ending/last season not so good, but that's to be expected on network primetime scripted etc. TV at least.

sort of a Southern Cali Gothic involving two feuding families, in the country but not countrified, one of those valley-and-shore-and islet Cali areas, you know? Good use of atmosphere, geography, psychology of living there.

And TM was disarmingly charming, this quiet little blond guy (Simon Baker), like all those shady blonds that Robert Redford used to play on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Perry Mason and The Twilight Zone---well TM wasn't as shady or eruptive-crazy as some of them, but you know you've got to keep your eye on him, no matter your role.

Isnt the "prestige" or "golden age" concept kind of "shows have multi-episode or entire series story arcs" thing too?

and had anyone done this prior to Babylon 5?

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Thursday, July 30, 2026 5:44 PM (five hours ago)

i'll admit that "soap" as 'prestige tv' is something of a stretch, and i will rep for both "roots" and "wiseguy" in terms of "having multi-episode story arcs". certainly HBO brought something to the idea of "prestige tv" that wasn't seen in previous shows. quite honestly, i think a lot of it, particularly in the early days, was not being accountable to "standards and practices".

for me, "prestige tv" has always been something rooted in network television. david chase worked on "the rockford files". he worked on "northern exposure". he created (with a co-creator) the series "almost grown" for cbs. something like five people have seen "almost grown". i've seen a couple episodes and while i can't judge it as a whole, i can tell you that it _absolutely_ is prestige television. i don't know that what we know as "prestige television" would have been possible without people like steven bochco, who wrote the script for the first episode of "the rockford files", the one directed by steven spielberg. i think that "murder by the book" in particular is significant because it did show a distinct shift in "prestige" television away from the "teleplay" model prevalent in early television. even something like "the prisoner", which i do think of as very much "prestige television" - "once upon a time" is a breathtaking television episode, and it's a teleplay. mcgoohan of course did go on to contribute a lot to "columbo", and he's an interesting person, but spielberg is a fucking _director_, which, uh, historically isn't something tv, even "prestige tv", gave much importance to.

to be clear i'm not arguing that "columbo" was prestige television - it just happened to serve as an incubator for a lot of things that contributed to its development. "roots", "rich man poor man", "shogun", _these_ shows, i think, are far closer to what we think of as "prestige television" today.

oh and for the record i'm a pretty big "doctor who" fan, but even if i wanted to, i don't think i could possibly justify "the key to time" as "prestige television" haha. it's just six unrelated stories stuck in a rather ill-fitting trenchcoat.

thanks for your rundown of The Mentalist, dow! i'm genuinely interested in hearing more about these shows, and, uh, i know a lot more about "lassie" (which was a MUCH more interesting show than is commonly understood) than i do about, say, "blue bloods", which i for some reason thought was a british show.

so here's an interesting little thing - both "Hawaii Five-O" (1968-1980, 12 seasons, 282 episodes) and "Hawaii Five-0" (2010-2020, 10 seasons, 240 episodes) are on the "long-running series list". i'm not sure if anything else on this list is quite comparable!

first openly gay character! though the actor was not

― Andy the Grasshopper, Thursday, July 30, 2026 6:36 PM (four hours ago)

there's a 1976-1977 show that's often seen as a sort of fore-runner to "Night Court" called "Sirota's Court" that got canned pretty quickly, so it's said, after an episode where judge sirota performs a gay wedding. hard to say much about this show because there are _zero_ complete episodes of the show circulating- a brief clip from a talk show promotional appearance, and the opening credits. there are so many really interesting shows that haven't been seen in ages... i get very excited whenever one of them happens to pop up (this happened i think last year(?) with the late '60s show "turn-on")

people like steven bochco, who wrote the script for the first episode of "the rockford files", the one directed by steven spielberg.

ahem. this is obviously wrong. i uh, apparently posted an _earlier draft_ of my _message board post_ here by accident. here's the draft i _meant_ to post:

Isnt the "prestige" or "golden age" concept kind of "shows have multi-episode or entire series story arcs" thing too?

and had anyone done this prior to Babylon 5?

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Thursday, July 30, 2026 5:44 PM (five hours ago)

i'll admit that "soap" as 'prestige tv' is something of a stretch, and i will rep for both "roots" and "wiseguy" in terms of "having multi-episode story arcs". certainly HBO brought something to the idea of "prestige tv" that wasn't seen in previous shows. quite honestly, i think a lot of it, particularly in the early days, was not being accountable to "standards and practices". tits, cussing, blood-soaked weddings. one of the more impressive things about the HBO show "Oz" for me is just how many unclothed female bosoms they managed to fit into a show about, uh, men in prison.

HBO was obviously a game changer for prestige tv, but many of the people who ended up doing shows there had been trying to do similar stuff on network tv. David Milch with NYPD Blue, David Simon on Homicide.

― every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in f (President Keyes), Thursday, July 30, 2026 7:53 PM (three hours ago)

i agree completely! for me, "prestige tv" has always been something rooted in network television. david chase worked on "the rockford files". he worked on "northern exposure". he created (with a co-creator) the series "almost grown" for cbs. something like five people have seen "almost grown". i've seen a couple episodes and while i can't judge it as a whole, i can tell you that it _absolutely_ is prestige television. i don't know that what we know as "prestige television" would have been possible without people like steven bochco, who wrote the script for the first episode of "columbo", the one directed by steven spielberg. i think that "murder by the book" in particular is significant because it did show a distinct shift in "prestige" television away from the "teleplay" model prevalent in early television. even something like "the prisoner", which i do think of as very much "prestige television" - "once upon a time" is a breathtaking television episode, and it's a teleplay. mcgoohan of course did go on to contribute a lot to "columbo", and he's an interesting person, but spielberg is a fucking _director_, which, uh, historically isn't something tv, even "prestige tv", gave much importance to.

to be clear i'm not arguing that "columbo" was prestige television - it just happened to serve as an incubator for a lot of things that contributed to its development. "roots", "rich man poor man", "shogun", _these_ shows, i think, are far closer to what we think of as "prestige television" today.

oh and for the record i'm a pretty big "doctor who" fan, but even if i wanted to, i don't think i could possibly justify "the key to time" as "prestige television" haha. it's just six unrelated stories stuck in a rather ill-fitting trenchcoat.

people like steven bochco, who wrote the script for the first episode of "columbo", the one directed by steven spielberg. i think that

always worth remembering that the first episode was written by Levinson & Link, the producers of Columbo who had written the 1960, 1962 and 1968 versions of the really first Columbo, and the two-hour March 1971 first Columbo-style Columbo.

The Bochco / Spielberg one was the second 90-minute Columbo, it just turned out so well that the creators said “fuck it, put the kids’ one out first” and never wrote a full script again.

"murder by the book" in particular is significant because it did show a distinct shift in "prestige" television away from the "teleplay" model prevalent in early television.

this is not only prima facie incomprehensible, it’s particularly bemusing in that every single subsequent Bochco credit on Columbo is for teleplay

he's an interesting person, but spielberg is a fucking _director_, which, uh, historically isn't something tv, even "prestige tv", gave much importance to.

Robert Altman, Ida Lupino, William Friedkin, Stuart Rosenberg and Arthur Hiller all directed Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (Some old English guy did a bunch, too.)

The first six episodes of Homicide were directed by Barry Levinson, Martin Campbell, Michael Lehmann, Nick Gomez, Bruce Paltrow (ok but hold on) and Martin Campbell.

The third episode of The Wire was directed by Peter Medak and I think Ernie D ended up doing more than anyone else. Adam Bernstein did loads of the early Breaking Bads, and Rian Johnson did three of the later ones. There were Sopranos eps by Mike Figgis, Lee Tamahori, Nick Gomez, and Peter Bogdanovich, and the Trees Lounge guy did a bunch. Ted Kotcheff was nominated for the Palme D'or twice and won a Golden Bear before directing seven and producing 268 episodes of Law & Order SVU.

Only occasionally prestigey, but since Kill Me Again, Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, John Dahl has written 0 movies and directed 132 episodes of television.

Plus, James Burrows directed the shit out of 240 episodes of Cheers, and Pamela Fryman directed the fuck out of 196 of HIMYM. Watch any three of them back to back and see if there's a case to be made that Spielberg, or any other rando who'd done one episode of Marcus Welby MD and one of six-week wonder The Psychiatrist, would have done a better job.

Columbo was on television but it was more like a TV movie, wasn’t it? I think it came on every three weeks or once a month. It would rotate with a few other mystery shows.

HBO was obviously a game changer for prestige tv

I think we originally got cable so my wife could watch Six Feet Under.

And The Mentalist sticks in my memory as being about a guy who wears a three-piece suit but without a tie.

The suit-without-a-tie look worked on that guy.

The X-Files also had some good production values after the first couple of seasons—also continuing storyline and auteur showrunner and writers (Vince Gilligan, Darren Morgan.)

Was Peyton Place the beginning of this sorta thing? Never seen it myself.

Over 100 episodes per season goes against Prestige values a bit though.

Peyton Place was definitely a precursor to the '80s nighttime soaps, with its higher production budget, though for the most part it aired twice a week rather than once.

Plus, James Burrows directed the shit out of 240 episodes of Cheers, and Pamela Fryman directed the fuck out of 196 of HIMYM. Watch any three of them back to back and see if there's a case to be made that Spielberg, or any other rando who'd done one episode of Marcus Welby MD and one of six-week wonder The Psychiatrist, would have done a better job.

― uploading this content requires perseveration (sic), Friday, July 31, 2026 4:57 AM (seven hours ago)

siiiiiiiiiiiiiic you're fuckin' killing me here. i'm not looking for a battle to the death. i'll grant that maybe i came on too strong. i am definitely something of a spielberg stan. i _don't_ think that his direction on "murder by the book" was some work of superlative genius. it wasn't. his time in television was brief and not terribly important to the history of the medium. there are _countless_ people, both before and since spielberg, who were more important directors. "murder by the book" fascinates me because of the convergence point it represents - levinson and link and bochco are both names that are really important in the history of television. spielberg is _not_. he sort of happened to be in the right place at the right time.

i am definitely a levinson and link fan. they did a lot of cool stuff, some of which i've seen and some of which i haven't - i haven't had a chance to see, for instance, "the execution of private slovik", an oversight i really should correct soon. honestly i think you're giving bochco/spielberg more credit than i am when you imply that the creators "never wrote a full script again" as a result of the success of "murder by the book". it just wasn't how they worked. for the most part they wrote tv movies and pilot films and sometimes wrote stories for other episodes of shows they created. hell, i'm not even sure that "murder by the book" is the best episode of that first run of "columbo" episodes.

not all of the series levinson and link created were winners. i don't consider "tenafly" to be a winner. i don't consider "six-episode wonder" "the psychiatrist" to be a winner. it was part of a "wheel series" - four different shows rotating weekly - with another notable non-winner, "san francisco international airport", and two shows that i would call winners, "night gallery" and "mccloud". mccloud went on to be part of a better-known "wheel series", the nbc mystery movie, along with, yes, cow_art, columbo. "the psychiatrist" and "san francisco international airport" basically disappeared save for their pilot movies.

in the case of "the psychiatrist" i do find this to be unfortunate. "murder by the book" is, i'd suggest, the second-best thing spielberg directed for television - that's available to us. i know some people like "los angeles 2017", the dystopian future episode of "the name of the game" (another "wheel series"). it's not bad? but lucas was better at the whole "sci-fi dystopia" thing. well, spielberg did two episodes of "the psychiatrist". nobody talks about the other one, "the private world of martin dalton", and i figure that's probably because there's no real reason for anyone to talk about it.

"par for the course", on the other hand - yeah, i would fucking love to see this. when i say spielberg "sort of" happened to be in the right place in the right time, the hedge is based on "par for the course", which apparently exists as a faded print at the Paley Center, I think the one in California? i've never been myself. there are, i'm sure, a number of directors in '71 who could have directed "murder by the book" as well as or better than spielberg did. the question is, which of them could or would have done it?

getting along with people is a _talent_. arguably it's spielberg's greatest talent, though he's certainly not without enemies. that's what fascinates me about spielberg's minor role in the development of "prestige television" as we know it today. he certainly wasn't the first director to bring cinematic techniques to television. in addition to all of the "hitchcock" directors you name, there are other examples. "the fountain of youth", for instance, is one of the goddamn best orson welles things i've seen. well, i wouldn't say that getting along with people was _orson welles's_ greatest talent.

there's also Sam Peckinpah, who in 1960 created "The Westerner", a 13-episode wonder (unironic), while writing and directing several episodes. it's a damn fine series. peckinpah is peckinpah, meaning that yes, his work on the series is "cinematic". well, unlike "the psychiatrist", at least we can watch it. the character of dave blassingame, however, is notably _not_ one of the most famous american fictional characters in japan. i mean it's not just levinson and link, it's not just steven bochco, it's _peter fucking falk_, isn't it? who doesn't love this guy as "columbo"? don't answer that, i don't want to know.

i get where you're coming from in saying that "ransom for a dead man" is the first "real columbo", and honestly, i kind of take the opposite approach. watching the few episodes i can of "the trials of o'brien", i am surprised at how much of columbo's character is present in falk's portrayal of o'brien, the divorced irish lawyer. falk's character in "prescription murder" is, yes, markedly different from his character in "ransom for a dead man", but it's a lot closer to the columbo we know and (don't you dare say otherwise) love than Bert Freed's portrayal in "enough rope"!

i'd personally love to see "par for the course", but even if it's the greatest fucking hour of television ever made, _nobody fucking saw it_. david chase's _almost grown_ was probably better television. nobody saw it either. they were all watching "monday night football". the real importance of "par for the course", i'd argue, is that it got spielberg the job directing "murder by the book". he apparently went all-out on the last episode of this fucking nothing show that nobody was going to see, that pretty much nobody _has_ seen since, and he made one 90 minute tv show and then another 90-minute TV movie and nothing else he did on television is really worth talking about as far as i'm concerned. people _saw it_. people _saw_ murder by the book. people _saw_ duel. people have been directing "prestige television" since very near the start of the medium. i mention spielberg not just because of personal bias, but because the idea of prestige television was, from its inception, intertwined with its older brother the cinema.

i don't know. in some ways that spielberg played the role he did is kind of a vindication of television, for me, proof that television is more than just the shadow of the cinema. do i _know_ the names of james burrows or pamela fryman? no. five seconds after i've made this post i'll have forgotten them - sincere apologies if either of you are reading this. do i think either of them are _lesser_ than, say, rian johnson, who directed the "fly" and "ozymandias" episodes of "breaking bad", both "prestige television" if there ever was such a thing? no. no i don't.

please don't kill me for this lol. i'm just casually talking about old tv on an internet message board! sure, i have opinions, and i'm a lot more curious about this stuff than i am opinionated.

you're fuckin' killing me here

I’m saying there are a lot of modes of television and some people are really good at directing different ones.

Spielb totally cooks on his Columbo, it deserves the rep. But the intended first ep has that totally sick sequence that’s shot entirely in Robert Culp’s mirrored sunglasses. 🙌 to Bernard Kowalski, two-time Prime Time Emmy nominee I’ve never heard of.

Very informative posts, esp. Kate and sic---here's a Spiel list; I def thought of Duel first, and think it was written by the often remarkable Richard Matheson, whose works are far better known than his name---also "Eyes" was one I thought of during this discussion, set during the First(?) Great NYC Blackout:

Made-for-TV Movies
Duel (1971): A tense thriller about a motorist chased by a semi-truck.
Something Evil (1972): A horror film about a demonic presence in a country house.
Savage (1973): A media satire and investigative journalism thriller starring Martin Landau.
TV Show Episodes
Night Gallery (1969): Directed the segment "Eyes" starring Joan Crawford.
The Psychiatrist (1970): Directed the episode "The Longer You Stay".
Marcus Welby, M.D. (1970–1971): Directed the episode "The Dare Point on Eternity".
The Name of the Game (1971): Directed the episode "L.A. 2017".
Columbo (1971): Directed the famous pilot/episode "Murder by the Book" starring Jack Cassidy and Peter Falk.
Amazing Stories (1985–1986): Created the anthology series and personally directed two episodes: "Ghost Train" and "The Mission".

not even vaguely a pilot!

I watched most of these a couple of years ago:

Both his Night Gallery segments are good, Eyes is the better.

Duel absolutely rips (I watched the not-expanded TV version, not-creepily-AI-upscale), and incidentally Sugarland Express is so good I saw it again in the theatre this year

LA 2017 is totally fun for a low-budget TV-episode sci-fi-future what-if one-off, if you’re intersted in that sort of thing.

Something Evil is an unremarkable horror TV movie. The visual storytelling makes an effort but there’s nothing in the performances or script to be supported by it.

Savage is a pilot that didn’t get picked up and feels like it. Great to contrast with Murder By The Book — it’s Levinson & Link tapping the boy wonder again, but with nothing for him to enhance.

Ghost Train is his own idea, written to provide him with many chunks of spectacle to shoot — it does, but is very silly.

The Mission is much better — it starts with an actual idea*, and ramps up the production design in service of that.
*okay, a silly one. But “go with it” type silly.

My brush with network tv recently was my dad’s partner mainlining episodes of the CBS show Ghosts while we visited him in his final months. Maybe it was the context but I haven’t seen a worse show in awhile.

i know a lot more about "lassie" (which was a MUCH more interesting show than is commonly understood) than i do about, say, "blue bloods", which i for some reason thought was a british show.

It's pretty soft coporn compared to Chicago PD, which I think was OK in early seasons, but got despicable and kept going, in the wake of George Floyd etc, and I stopped even glancing at it during channel skims.

Funny, I had the exact opposite take. Chicago PD started out as a network/PG version of The Shield; sure, the lead beats up suspects and is friendly with the mobsters and blah blah blah, but it's For The Right Reasons. Gradually, they started to do more and more episodes dealing with how much the Black community of Chicago in particular hates and fears the police, often coming down on the side of, Yes, they're right, shit is very fucked up. The show actually developed more of a moral compass as it went along.

Meanwhile, Blue Bloods (in which the titular family is literally named Reagan!) is about cops who are always noble and never, ever wrong; anyone who accuses the NYPD of bias is revealed to be a crooked race hustler in it for the money; and Dad-God Selleck bestows wisdom from the Sunday dinner table (again, literally) at the end of every episode. It was one of the grossest shows I ever watched.

Lassie question: I’m a big Camper Van Beethoven fan. Was there an episode where Lassie went to the moon?

I think I slightly conflated Blue Bloods with Dark Blue, in which Dylan McDermott* is a decidedly NOT cuddly cop.

* not Dermot Mulroney

The Shield was the opposite of Chicago PD (in terms of the later CPD seasons that I saw): the former was about the deterioration of character, from kinda sympathetic to stone-cold sociopath/hapless control freak, with damage piling up and the dirty cops sufferin', like Breaking Bad but lower IQ. Chicago PD became the opposite, in terms of Hank leading his cops astray, sometimes not needing to, but either way getting them out of a jam, when they oops killed the wrong guy or maybe the right guy but got hassled by Internal Affairs or dead guy's family or whatever, Hank getting out the brandy and a cuet little smile the end Maybe it got better and he Learned His Lesson later after I stopped watching, but that would spoil it for his fans.
I mean, The Good Wife's firm had some clients who had been for inst taken to Black Locations (not CPD stations) and pretty much tortured; these could have been straight from CPD the series (as it was straight from the irl news)

Meanwhile Apple has a show that stars Anya Taylor-Joy AND Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.

Hyphenated Taylors

I watched the first season of Supernatural recently and it was all low-budget versions of popular movies. Final destination, I know what you did last summer, etc. I learned the term SuperWhoLock recently and man is that one ever the odd one out.

shows I have no knowledge of: the Chicago series, blue bloods, my three sons, the danny thomas show (who?)

Danny Thomas was a guy with a very modest talent for acting who caught a break in the earliest days of sitcoms, when television was just learning how to produce them. There weren't many networks or sitcoms. I think he may have been pre-ABC. People with tv sets had very limited choices, so they watched his show.

I’m saying there are a lot of modes of television and some people are really good at directing different ones.

― uploading this content requires perseveration (sic)

we're in total agreement! that's a lot of why i started this thread. i love tv and i like celebrating all kinds of different television shows, not just "prestige tv". vince gilligan, for instance, started out on the x-files, as a _fan_, with what seems to have been an actual _spec script_ that turned into a second-season episode. people breaking into television as ascended fans can be a, uh, bit of a sore subject for me (glares in the direction of gareth roberts), but clearly it worked in gilligan's case. he then wound up being the lead writer on "bad blood", though he didn't direct - the director's chair on that one was filled by cliff bole, who'd been directing tv episodes since 1976 - "the best of both worlds" from star trek: the next generation is maybe the other best-known episode he helmed.

bad blood is great because it's something i'd call a prestige _episode_. we have a term for "very special episodes" but a lot of tv shows will do these things where they'll do an episode that is Serious Television. not every episode of "homicide: life on the street" was prestige television but getting robin williams on to play a bereaved father grieving for his child in "bop gun"... i mean people liked it. i mean i'm not going to say anything bad about robin williams at _this_ point, but i wasn't impressed. it's not the kind of "prestige television" i like. "bad blood", though, that x-files episode i like. i don't know, what would the word be, an auteurist episode?

anyway, back to your point, there being a lot of different modes of tv direction. i know this is a bit of a niche comparison point, and i also know you'll at least know what i'm talking about. i love douglas camfield. i've _never_ heard of anyone who's _not_ a big fan of old "doctor who" say that. good tv direction often gets taken for granted, and the results of bad tv direction often get blamed on someone other than the director. i can't say that's unfair - if directors don't get credit, why should they get blame? i'd contrast spielberg, as a director, with someone like paul joyce, who i now learn is apparently a notable photographer of Welsh landscapes and has published two books based on his conversations with david hockney. he deserves to be taken seriously as an artist. he's a photographer and a director and well the one thing he directed for television was the doctor who episode "warriors' gate". i _love_ "warriors' gate". i think it's a fascinating story, particularly because of the direction. and it was such a disaster that paul joyce never had the opportunity to direct anything again!

well, joyce i think is a Serious Artist and he was hampered by working with Tom Baker at his most, uh, _irascible_ and THE MAN WANTED TO DO AN OPENING TRACKING SHOT THAT REPLICATED THE OPENING TRACKING SHOT OF TOUCH OF EVIL. In 1980 DOCTOR FUCKING WHO. i'm not sure he'd _ever directed a tv episode_ before this, either.

well just because there's this one show that i'm absurdly nerdy about doesn't mean that other tv shows don't go deal with those same kinds of issues, whether it's, i don't know, "one day at a time" or "juliet bravo" or whatever, though obviously there are going to be differences in production based on the environment. i just am not as familiar with the names involved when we start talking about american long-running prime-time network scripted television shows.

people weren't _wrong_ to be skeptical of spielberg early on. some 26 year old kid wants to start putting fucking dutch angles in an episode of a new-ish detective series starring peter falk (who might not ever have been _quite_ as irascible as tom baker on the set of "warriors' gate" but has _probably gotten close_) and look if you're smart and/or lucky you haven't _seen_ battlefield earth but OH MY GOD THE DUTCH ANGLES IN THAT. and roger christian, not the "small circle of friends" roger christian, i think, he wasn't 26 when he directed battlefield earth. he had a pretty good pedigree actually. he did some good work with, ha, george lucas, actually, on "star wars", as a set decorator yeah but he was also doing second-unit stuff. he directed "black angel" in 1980. "black angel" is good, i like that one. he starts working with the church of scientology, though, and all of a sudden he goes crazier with dutch angles than lucas did with screenwipes in the prequel trilogy.

so with "murder by the book", with anything he made through 1975, spielberg _did_ have to overcome the oft-justified skepticism of more experienced hands. which he did pretty well! though not without collateral damage - "ace eli and rodger of the skies", for instance, _would_ have been spielberg's first film - i think he knew claudia salter when she wrote the script - and the story i heard was that spielberg actually did some filming on it (tho wikipedia doesn't back this up and i don't have any other sources to hand, so i could be misremembering!). one of the studio heads heard it was supposedly going to be directed by this 26-year-old kid and said "we just put out a movie directed by a 30-year-old, it was an unmitigated disaster, get somebody who knows what the hell he's doing". the picture he was talking about? myra breckenridge, directed by michael sarne. like, it's easy to roast decca for passing on the beatles until you listen to their decca audition tape and realize that it's not terribly good! though it's better than _myra breckenridge_. most things are better than _myra breckenridge_.

Very informative posts, esp. Kate and sic---here's a Spiel list; I def thought of Duel first, and think it was written by the often remarkable Richard Matheson, whose works are far better known than his name---also "Eyes" was one I thought of during this discussion, set during the First(?) Great NYC Blackout:

oh yeah, the one in, what was it, 65? nobody's hardly even talked about it since '77, though people were definitely talking about it _in_ '77. i'll grant that i gave short shrift to "eyes" in my last post - it really is good!

the main issue with "something evil" and "savage" is that he'd already kind of moved on at that point - he got a three-TV movie deal after, i think, "murder by the book", but he'd already moved on after "duel". his priorities were elsewhere. i mean if you ask me spielberg _couldn't_ have been a director like Douglas Camfield or, uh, who are the ones you name, sic, James Burrows, Pamela Fryman. Never. He could never have done that.

So I do love the idea of the long-running TV show. Because it can encompass things like "Homicide: Life on the Street", which was one of many had _ambitions_ to be a prestige TV show but which, I'd argue, didn't _quite_ make it. And we wouldn't have had "The Wire" without it. You have "My Three Sons" which was just this shambling behemoth of a show that's almost impossible to explain these days. Murder She Wrote, Matlock, the fucking Beverly Hillbillies, long-running shows beloved primarily by twentysomething incest shippers, and eight-season Sherlock Holmes-based medical soaps that lost half their audience but still, at least according to my friends of mine who were part of the other half of the audience, managed to stick the landing, and Bob's Burgers and...

These shows aren't the BEST of television, by and large, they're mostly not _prestige_ television, but nearly everything scripted television has been is, in one way or another, contained in these shows, even if a lot of shows that are very important to television aren't on the list. Most of the shows on this list are worth talking about. Even the fucking Dick Wolf shows, apparently! No, I'm not actually down on Dick Wolf. For one thing he's named "Dick Wolf". For another thing he does have this thing he's doing. I don't know. Maybe Dick Wolf is to television what Spielberg is to the cinema. It's just the rapesploitation. Dick Wolf really pissed me off with that fucking rapesploitation show.

...

Ahem. Let me recenter myself.

Lassie question: I’m a big Camper Van Beethoven fan. Was there an episode where Lassie went to the moon?

― Cow_Art, Saturday, August 1, 2026 12:45 PM (four hours ago)

No. Dick Tracy, however, went to the moon in the late '60s. "Lassie" as a show was, actually, more grounded and realistic than that. The "Lassie" we think of - Timmy fell down the well, etc. - is possibly the _least_ grounded version of "Lassie". Citing my sources, my primary source for info on "Lassie" is the Pop Arena video. Pop Arena does some very great work and deserves a lot more credit than they get. I mean there are probably _worse_ ways to make a living than Youtube video essays but damn Youtube is shitty to its creators.

For the first four seasons, "Lassie" had much more of a social conscience. This was when he was living with Jeff, not Timmy. In both cases it was about a collie (I don't remember how many collies there were, but yeah there were a LOT of different collies who played Lassie), and I'm not saying that the Lassie syndicated as "Jeff's Collie" was a radical anticapitalist show or anything like that, but they would say things like, you know, "racism is bad", in ways that were superior to the "very special episodes" of the 1980s. Pop Arena liked the episodes they saw, and you know what, I like those early seasons too, even though the Timmy episodes, which I grew up with on Nick at Nite, are by and large intolerably glurgey to me.

The thing is that Jeff was, like Timmy, a kid, and he started growing old. So they introduced this new cute kid "Timmy" in a surprisingly hard-hitting episode at the start of season 4 and yeah that lasted for all of five minutes. The most interesting thing about this era of the show is that it went on WAY longer than it should have. But what could they do? It was a fucking hit. And they started doing these long story arcs because there are only so many times Timmy can fall down a fucking well. They start doing more episodes ... well, in season nine there's a five episode story arc, in color, where Timmy and Lassie are stranded in the wilderness. Then in season ten, there's a sort of test run of the new format - kind of like "The Invasion" in Doctor Who season 6 - where Lassie spends five episodes accompanying an adult park ranger.

Then in season eleven, well, Timmy and his family were packed off to Australia. This is kind of an interesting side note - the "Scarred for Life" trilogy of books, talking about terrifying British children's media of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, talks about the utterly terrifying British anti-rabies scare films. If it was just traumatizing a generation of kids for life, that would be one thing, but the fear of rabies was used as a pretext to be real, real shitty to a lot of animals. It wasn't right.

Anyway so Lassie spent the next six seasons accompanying a forest ranger. Different forest rangers, because the original forest ranger grew too old for...

No, no, I'm kidding, I think the original forest ranger just got bored or something and so they set his character on fire or something. Anyway, two more years of that, and at season 17, well, they didn't really know what to do with it, and turned it into kind of a Littlest-Hobo style show. For those of you who don't know "The Littlest Hobo", it's a Canadian anthology show about a dog. Like "Route 66" but with a dog instead of George Maharis. Which was all well and good but at this point the show, which was on CBS, ran smack into Fred Silverman's "rural purge". This was a controversial idea and while Fred Silverman had many, many bad ideas, I think the Rural Purge was a great one. Basically he decided that network TV should not just be a bunch of shows about white people in the country and/or their dogs.

So that was it for Lassie, except that like a lot of the shows hit by the Rural Purge, it was still popular, so it did another two seasons in syndication, this time set in an orphanage. Lassie in syndication was kind of terrible. The shows cancelled in the "rural purge" were replaced by a fresh, diverse, vibrant group of shows, many of which are now considered stone fucking classics. The people who were mad about Lassie being cancelled didn't want to see that stuff. They wanted to see rural white moralism. Then I guess those folks started switching over to The Waltons, which was a better show (at this point pretty much everything but "The Trouble with Tracy" was a better show than Lassie), and "Lassie" finally got canned for good.

Hell of a show, though. Hell of a show. Way more interesting than you'd think it would be.

I watched the first season of Supernatural recently and it was all low-budget versions of popular movies. Final destination, I know what you did last summer, etc. I learned the term SuperWhoLock recently and man is that one ever the odd one out.

that's pretty funny, since the peak of "classic" (read: "1970s") doctor who was them doing low-budget versions of hammer horror films! i could see it working. as far as "superwholock" as far as i can tell that was mostly about memes. i would try to talk, sometimes, to "superwholock" fans and none of them seemed to have seen the actual shows in question. they would just say things like "fezzes are cool". i'm not saying that to, like, put them down or anything. i don't think you have to watch a show to be a fan of it. it just frustrated me because i wanted to talk about the actual show lol.

shows I have no knowledge of: the Chicago series, blue bloods, my three sons, the danny thomas show (who?)

― adamt (abanana), Saturday, August 1, 2026 6:43 PM (fifteen minutes ago)

oh god my family growing up fucking LOVED Danny Thomas. the danny thomas show is also known as "make room for daddy". the thing about danny thomas is that back in the day you had 'ethnic' sitcoms. people will talk about the original 1950s version of the goldbergs and how it was groundbreaking because it was a television representation of jewish life. well, i mean, danny thomas was catholic. it turns out he wasn't actually irish catholic! his parents were maronite catholic immigrants from somewhere that's now lebanon. i had no idea. my family, though... i mean my family came to newark, ohio from ireland and danny thomas grew up in toledo and was baptised by Bishop Stritch and oh my God if you say the name "Bishop Stritch" to them they'll have all kinds of fond reminiscences, i've heard _so much_ about Bishop Stritch. he founded St. Jude's Hospital, which i think y'all WILL know, right? Do you? It kind of... like I think St. Jude's was what they talked about before Make-A-Wish.

he was also the dad of Marlo Thomas, who was famous for not wearing a bra on "That Girl". i theoretically support her in that but in practical terms i just can't get away with that anymore. she also did "free to be you and me", which was fucking great and which was a childhood empowerment touchstone for people who were older gen-x than me. it was a little before my time, personally.

anyway there was, like... anti-catholicism was _much more of a presence_ prior to november 1963. so danny thomas being a catholic with a TV show was a big deal to my grandparents, particularly since he had an irish-coded name.

"my three sons" was... you know how you'll see this sitcom and the cute kid gets older so they add a new cute kid? this show ran long enough to do that AT LEAST TWICE. they'd keep writing out characters and replacing them and then pretending the old characters never existed. like if stalinism was a sitcom it'd probably be "my three sons". originally it was kind of a "two and a half men" thing but eventually fred macmurray's character married beverly garland and you know what i'm not going to argue with anything that gets beverly garland more airtime. beverly garland is great.

other people have talked about the Chicago shows and Blue Bloods!

anyway fred macmurray was the original inventor of flubber.

in the movie, i mean, in the original "absent-minded professor". not in real life. i'm not sure who invented flubber in real life.

tbfttp, Roberts had been a professional TV writer for a decade before “good old JK”

I've been watching Leave it to Beaver on the Roku channel and it's a model for why shows with aging child actors should never exceed three seasons, max. It also kinda becomes The Wally Show at some point?

The kids and I were recently talking about Janet Jackson which led to talking about Good Times and the sitcom phenomenon of bringing in an annoying kid when things start getting stale. Although Janet’s Penny character was okay and sort of fit with the show.

Has Norman Lear come up yet? His shows injected a lot of liberal ideas into homes. Good Times and All In The Family were a big part of my youth.

I was taken aback when I realized “boy” IS a white racist word and that Michael was usually right about things.

MEGA-informative posts now,thanks yall? Kate, don't you mean Breaking Bad when you say Bad Blood? I remembered Jeff's Collie came before Lassie-and-Timmy, but didn't know how different it was, thanks.
Ethnic humor, yeah 50s pop culture could get very cuet with that---well didn't start with the 50s of course, like there was this olde comedy single, "Cohen on the Telephone---but in the 50s, we got for inst Rosemary Clooney rocking "Mambo Italiano," which was a take-off on the Latin trend that didn't really wait for Desi Arnaz, and was a two-for-one zing: "Mama Mia, at's-a spicy meatball!" Loved it, my childhood being much about food, also loved her name and sound. But back to TV:

In the sitcom, Danny's wife (the first one, I think, the one that got killed off), said, "Now listen,you,you---Lebanese lamebrain." Big audience laff, and it was v. early example of Dad is a fule sometimes but he Learns and passes on some nice thoughts by end of ep (next week, he has to start all over again). irl a comedian with a clean act, for those who brought their families to Vegas, like Louie Prima x Keely Smith feat. Sam Butera and the Witnesses---but also he was buddies with the Rat Pack, and was nicely exchanging zings with Joey Bishop on stage, ending by trying to keep it really nice, kinda "Aw getoutta here you scamp" and very lightly touched Joey, who responded, "You saw it, folks, an Arab hit a Jew." Brought the house down. Think it might be on YouTube.

On talk shows later, couldn't really take any kind of kidding, like "HEY I started St. Jude." Which is def still around, I gave them ten dollars ten years ago and still getting the gift-packed follow-up mailings every week...

Re Rural Purge and white moralism: Not Green Acres! That show was a trip!

Oh yeah, and whenever Danny was like, "My my, what else can possibly happen?", his Uncle Tounoose would burst in for an unexpected visit, bellowing, "TOUNOOOSE," as played by Hans Conreid, who, I'm guessing, was not Lebanese, but awesome anyway.

Speaking of childhood favorites:

Angela Margaret Cartwright (born 9 September 1952) is an English actress. As a young performer, she played Linda Williams, the stepdaughter of Danny Williams (played by Danny Thomas) in the long-running TV series The Danny Thomas Show, and Penny Robinson in the 1960s television series Lost in Space. She is also known for her role as Brigitta von Trapp in the 1965 film The Sound of Music. Her older sister is actress Veronica Cartwright.[citation needed]

It blew my mind when I found out the Lost In Space Kid was half of Barnes and Barnes.