I too saw it in a theater when it came out and I recall thinking "who the fuck orders a tab? Have a Diet Coke" and that it was a pretty awkward way to make the gag.
We knew about the 1950s from "Happy Days" which, in retrospect was analogous to "Freaks and Geeks" for my generation. The difference was that the media was obsessed with the baby boomers in a way that they never were about Gen X. The baby boomer history and progress was in our face all the time and I couldn't wait to be old and have them mostly be dead so I could stop getting media progress reports on them.
I think the modern media goes back to the early 1970s. Some movies and some music from then seems pretty current still. Earlier than that things seem increasingly weird and foreign.
>The baby boomer history and progress was in our face all the time and I couldn't wait to be old and have them mostly be dead so I could stop getting media progress reports on them.
This how I feel about millennials. Unfortunately, since I am one of them, I can't just wait for them to go away.
There are several more examples of "Happy Days"s, including That 70s Show, That 80s Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and Wonder Years. They all seem to happen about 20-30 years after the fact too, or roughly the length of a generation.
Extra notable to the discussion is that both "That 80s Show" and "Freaks and Geeks" failed to catch on. I never saw any of either, so they might have just been bad (though at the very least Freaks and Geeks seems to have been looked upon positively), but I wonder if it wasn't representative of the fact that we still feel that the 80s are more or less the modern era, in a way that wasn't the case prior to that, and so there's less to have nostalgia about.
Of course it could also just be that there were crappy examples of that kind of show throughout TV history that we just don't remember.
Freaks and Geeks was amazing. That 80s show was dumb but featured a super hot girl who sported an extremely punk spike hair-do which challenged the viewer to recognize her hotness. It was two levels of difficulty above the thick frame glasses previous shows have used
"I think the modern media goes back to the early 1970s. Some movies and some music from then seems pretty current still. Earlier than that things seem increasingly weird and foreign."
That is purely a result of your experience. You were probably a teenager in the early 80s, so you began paying attention to popular culture when the 70s music was still frequently played on pop stations.
There was a fundamental change in Hollywood in the late 60 early 70s, when a new generation of filmmakers came up through indie cinema and the studios. Those filmmakers changed the technique, style, and values of the studio system pretty dramatically. Many of those changes persist until today.
Also in the mid 70s, you had the rise of the modern high-concept blockbuster, with films such as JAWS and STAR WARS. Not to mention the advent of the modern superhero movie with SUPERMAN. Those changes have definitely held on until today, and shape not just the content, but also the form of much of modern movies.
There really was a qualitative change in movies around 1970, so it's not unusual if someone can relate more to movies from that point onward.
I saw a study online that showed music hadn't changed much since then. I suppose the test would be to ask the same question of a group of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s,50s, 60s etc.
In contrast BTW, I think television from back then seems bizarre and old.
But you go back to the 70s and with a few exceptions, e.g. MAS*H, they start to look considerably different and less watchable by a modern audience except as cultural artifacts.
It's strange to say, but TV has gotten a lot better decade by decade. There was simply nothing remotely like "Breaking Bad" in the 60's or 70's. I recently watched an episode of "Charlies Angels" and was surprised at how insipid and simply awful it was, and it was a hit show in its days.
The proliferation of options for people to watch has forced an upgrade in the quality of the writing.
I think something like Alfred Hitchcock Presents is very watchable today and I often do. You get a little mystery and murder and all within an hour. There were other watchable programs, like Perry Mason or something. It depends on your taste.
There's an incredible amount of bad programming on today, in my opinion of course. See any Kardashian-esque reality TV program.
I can't watch very popular programs like Big Bang Theory. I find the laugh tracks and lousy one liners unbearable. If something is funny I'll know it and laugh. I don't need a cue.
The crap today is crap in different ways from older television but I'd argue what's good is very, very good. And frankly, if you can give me a handful of hours of quality television a week, I'm happy. Give me much more than that and I'm not going to watch it anyway. If there's a greater percentage of poor TV today, it's probably because there are more time slots that need to be filled cheaply but whether it's 99% crap or 99.9% crap doesn't really affect me.
I never got into Big Bang Theory and have pretty much lost my taste for sitcoms generally in any case. I'm not sure I'd even get into Seinfeld today although it was pretty much a cultural touchstone at the time.
> I think something like Alfred Hitchcock Presents is very watchable today and I often do. You get a little mystery and murder and all within an hour. There were other watchable programs, like Perry Mason or something.
Those tend to be pretty good, I agree. I watch them on Me TV sometimes. (Digital subchannels are what UHF and cable were Back In The Day: Cheap timeslots filled with whatever someone has to hand.) However, they're good writing one episode at a time. These days, you get good writing a season at a time; it allows more characterization, more complex plots, and more flavor. Breaking Bad is a novel-length plot, something TV only did in soap opera form back then. And soap operas have never been accused of having good writing.
Breaking Bad is a high bar and Charlies Angels was always pretty low-brow fluff but I agree with your basic point. There were some good shows (Twilight Zone for example). But the list of shows from that era that are truly enjoyable today is pretty thin in a way that isn't true for movies. While a show like Breaking Bad isn't to everyone's taste--and arguably doesn't work without time shifting and even maybe the Internet--anyone who tries to argue that there's nothing good on TV any longer basically doesn't know what they're talking about.
Twilight Zone is an interesting case, because while it's still quite watchable today, it's very obviously a different style than anything on modern television. Watching Twilight Zone episodes feels like watching a video tape of a stage production. The acting is much broader, the sets are more suggestive than realistic. It's clear that they had good writers and performers, but they were still finding their feet in a totally new medium.
Sure, BB isn't for everyone. But there's Suits, and House of Cards and Sons of Anarchy, it goes on. The good stuff today far, far exceeds the best of the 70's.
Of course, there's plenty of crap on TV today, but I'm talking about the good stuff from each era. Yes, Twilight Zone was good. I think it was quite an anomaly.
In my experience, this is fairly recent. I'd give Lost as a starting point. Maybe not Lost per se but the period. Movies were a little boring, people started to go big on TV Shows and a lot of ambitious ones suddenly popped. Now you have BB, HoC, GoT. Before that it was the same recipes sitcom/soap/police/scifi used from the 70s to the early 2Ks.
We knew about the 1950s from "Happy Days" which, in retrospect was analogous to "Freaks and Geeks" for my generation. The difference was that the media was obsessed with the baby boomers in a way that they never were about Gen X. The baby boomer history and progress was in our face all the time and I couldn't wait to be old and have them mostly be dead so I could stop getting media progress reports on them.
I think the modern media goes back to the early 1970s. Some movies and some music from then seems pretty current still. Earlier than that things seem increasingly weird and foreign.