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"You're in Tennesee, if you have cable TV or Verizon FIOS, you might find RTV on your system. Alternately you can get it over the air as a subchannel using a digital TV or digital box on a TV. I have a 1982 Zenith so I go the FIOS or rabbit ears and box method. I get two RTV's here in Pittsburgh, I also get the Steubenville Ohio station as well as the Pittsburgh one. Their site is www.myretrotv.com where you can find the station(s) in your area. I only have FIOS on the 1982 Zenith and Mom hogs that so I use rabbit ears for the other sets. I'm down with some sort of flu or cold or something so when I lay in my room, between RTV and "ThisTV" (they show old movies), at least I have some more choices, HDTV is not a bad idea, really."

"I remember "Archie Bunker's Place," especially when Edith passed away, it was very sad to see Archie in their bedroom all alone and talking to Edith while holding her slipper."

Haven't seen that ep in awhile, it's still heartbreaking. My grandfather, a Scottish immigrant (a generation older than Archie, fought in WW1), adored the character of Archie, he only got to see the first 5 seasons or so of the show before he died. I don't think he could've handled watching that episode, because he buried 2 wives when they were still young (30s for his first wife, 47 for my grandmother), and Edith was very similarly named to my grandmother, Edna. I could've pictured that scene with my grandfather packing away their belongings.

"Yeah, Cosby was a classic. I miss Alf too. Family Ties as well. I liked the discussion between Alex P. Keaton and his parents. I also remember "Quantum Leap" too, during the LA Riots in 1992, there was debate whether to show the week's episode or not, it is where Sam leaped into a young Black medical student who got caught in the 1965 Watt's Riots."

Funny that Michael J. Fox wasn't a Republican but a Canadian Liberal. He might've been a mild influence (his character, at least) in making me a Republican. I liked "The Golden Girls", too, and that had its series finale only about a week after Cosby did, I remember seeing it in Amarillo, Texas en route home from our California trip (we were in San Diego, spending the day in Tijuana when they read the verdict in the trial - had they read it the following day instead, we'd have been (no joke) driving through South Central L.A. at that time of day. We had to give L.A. a wide berth and went to Las Vegas, instead. They were rioting there, too, which we didn't know until we got there).

"Yeah, it seems like comedies today and for the last 15 years or so have appealed to the lowest common denominator. Some of them degrade into sex humor, I'm not a prude, there is a time and place for it, plus it gets trite real fast. "South Park" is fun though."

I'll tell you where it really started, and that's when Fox was launched in 1986, specifically "Married With Children." People don't remember now how much of an uproar there was when that show premiered, threats of boycotts and the like. I was starting junior high school and my mother did not want me watching that show. One of the shows producers, Michael Moye, had previously done a favorite show of mine on NBC which sadly only lasted a season, the Jason Bateman vehicle "It's Your Move" (after Bateman was forced off another favorite show of mine at the time, "Silver Spoons", because he outshone Ricky Schroeder and was clearly endowed with an exceptional comedic gift). MWC was SO different than all the other sitcoms up to that point, which almost always had some sort of moral to them, this show was just vulgar and had no interest in having any redeeming quality. It was funny to a degree, but these weren't the kind of people you'd ever want as neighbors, let alone as friends (they were pretty rotten people).

The second show to lower the bar was the one that was essentially launched as the anti-Cosby, that being "Roseanne." The argument for that one was that it was a more "realistic" portrayal of the White working class, messy house, unattractive looking parents, pain-in-the-ass (or weird) kids (albeit not as over the top as "Married..."). My former fiancee and her family loved that show, they felt more like they could relate to it as working class (and also from Illinois), but me personally, I didn't really know many people like that (I was sort of in that vague area, below the level of the Cosbys but above the Conners). The main problem I had with the show, as with "Married..." was that both featured families that reveled in their low-class status (I don't mean in income, because you can be rich and have no or low class) and mocked those such as Cosby's Huxtable's who were trying to portray an ideal family, one whose children were taught to go out and achieve, to get an education, to make themselves better people, and to be decent human beings. Cosby was trying to accomplish something positive here, and he was mocked for doing it, and I thought that ultimately was a real shame. The culture at large would certainly be better for trying to emulate the Huxtables rather than the Conners or the execrable Bundys.

Notice, too, that once a lot of the '80s NBC shows were cancelled one by one, they started to replace family-style shows with more urban, younger singles-themed, until there were, IIRC, no family-hour/family-style shows left on. Once it was "Friends" and that other dreadful show, "Will & Grace" (which seemed less an exercise in comedy, but a pure-PC show which made it a rite of passage for umpteen high-end actors to make a guest appearance to show they "approved" of the agenda of the show, which was my main problem with it - the same exact thing that happened to "Ellen" on ABC, which started out as a "Friends"-style ensemble, and when the lead decided to go public with her orientation, turned it into an unfunny PC "ram-the-gay-agenda-down-our-throats" exercise). Also equally offensive were actors, tv execs and other talking heads telling the public they MUST watch these shows and be tolerant/accepting of their agenda. Since when did we expect unfunny sex-laden PC shows to be mandatory viewing for the public ? Whatever happened to entertainment ? Or uplifting the public ? More lowering of the bar to pure filth and garbage, for which got awards for their "courage." I watched an ep of "Will & Grace", and I never laughed once, the people on the show were horrible, just shrill caricatures of human beings, people you wouldn't want to know in real life.

"Mom loves the CSI/NCIS shows and they are OK, but there are SO MANY OF THEM! They spawn out like a family or rabbits it seems. I mean they are high tech versions of the old board game, Clue, when you think about it. I mean there are only so many ways you can say, "OK, Colonial Mustard did it in the dining room with the alien laser pistol." B-)"

Yeah, I know, absolutely ridiculous. CBS should be renamed the CSI channel (just like NBC be renamed the Leno/L&O channel).

"Jay Leno, NBC is rolling the dice on this one and I don't think it will work. Will a show geared for the 11:30 PM timeslot work at 10:00 PM. I don't know, my gut tells me no."

We'll find out soon enough. I don't really watch those late night shows anymore. When I was finally allowed to stay up, I watched the last years of Johnny Carson, followed by Letterman (before he transmogrified into the despicable, vicious old Commie sex pervert), and Bob Costas. I knew when Carson went off the air (also in '92, like so many of those quality '80s shows), that was going to be the end of an era, and the start of a really crap newer one. I never really warmed up to Leno, I mean, he was OK when he filled in for Carson from time to time, but I just thought he was missing something. I stuck with Letterman when he went to CBS and appreciated his bringing back Tom Snyder, who did a real class-act show following Letterman's (and Snyder really improved with age, I was too young to watch his "Tomorrow" show when he preceded Letterman in the '70s, but caught clips of it, and he could really be hard to take, and abrasive and in-your-face). Tried to watch the guy that took over from Snyder, but lost interest over time. Watched Conan a bit, but I could take it or leave it.

I was thinking, too, you know the real problem with these shows over time went far beyond the host, it was the guests themselves. In the old days (well, pre '90s), you had people you wanted to see and wanted to hear tell stories, wanted to hear perform & sing. Today, it's wall to wall garbage. The guests suck, the music sucks worse. Vacuous twits that aren't interesting and have nothing much to say. Pretty faces and empty souls. When the old timers passed away, there just were fewer people I cared to see interviewed. It seems like the last old-timer left is Don Rickles. Rickles is a national treasure, and I hope he lives to 200. When he dies, we're really going to lose something special. The last non-PC comedian who could get away with anything, yet he has not an ounce of personal vindictiveness in his schtick, all for laughs (contrast that with Letterman's passive-aggressive hatefulness, he's not only a nasty, vicious old bastard, he believes everything he says, and probably is even darker than that. I made the comment that after he had his heart surgery, they merely removed it, because he certainly lacks for one now).

"Yeah, I have to remember, it was a different time and place. The late 1970's and 1980's. You still had the big three networks, lots of indie UHF stations and for the last half of the 1980's, a fledgling FOX network. You have a good point, even if I had ten Brandon Tartikoffs, or a army of them, you might not still be able to catch that lightning in the bottle again. At that time, if your cable system had 15 or 25 channels, that was a lot then, we have hundreds now."

Exactly.

"One of my hobbies is collecting old radio programs. I have a collection of old NBC Monitor Beacon clips from 1955 to 1975 and there was an interview with John Chancellor in 1975 on how diverse radio has become at that time. He said back in the day where radio united the nation more and more people listened to most of the same things but starting in the 1960's, you had divisions starting where you had easy listening stations, news, talk (what there was with the then "fairness doctrine"), rock, pop, have metal, soul, urban, Black and so on and Chancellor noticed how divided we have started to become whereas we used to be more united as Americans, not a person from Pittsburgh, Chicago or Nashville, but Americans. I'd like to pull that clip from my other computer and trasfer it to my new "$300 Wal*Mart Special" but this flu is making me achy and I don't want to go through it right now. B-)"

It was an excellent observation. Although, absent choice, if we're all listening to the same thing or narrow band of options, we're more like a Communist country. So there are upsides and downsides to choice and an expansive number of options. I don't think we could go back to it, either. I can't imagine where we had just one time to catch a show and if you missed it, you were crap out of luck. I like to be able to watch a show in my own time if I can't do so when it first airs.

"Getting back to TV, there was the same thing up until around 1990 or so although we saw cracks much earlier. Ed Sullivan's show is a good exhibit where he always had something for everybody, Topo Gigo for the kids, The Rolling Stones for the teens, stand up comedy for the grown-up's and opera for the high-brows out there. I don't think Ed Sullivan would do well in today's world."

Worse, Sullivan was unattractive (resembled an uglier Dick Nixon) and he had a weird speaking voice (couldn't say "show", always said "shoe"). A face for radio, as they used to say. You'd have people kill today for the ratings he got, even on his worst show.

"I do long for those days, I really miss the early to mid 1980's a lot and when I dream I'm back then, when I wake up, it is a bummer. It does nt seem too long ago for me, yet seeing what is going on now, it is a different era and it does seem long ago. It's funny how we went from Reagan to Obama in 20 years. If you told me that in 1984 or 1988, I would have laughed you all the way to the Moon."

Yeah, I don't know what happened. It's like the country was like the equivalent of a frog being slowly boiled alive. You can't toss 'em right into the boiling water. You put them in cold and slowly turn the heat up until its too late for the fella. I feel like I woke up in "The Twilight Zone", it's that bad. Clinton's election in '92 was a bad sign, I was 18 and that was my first election, and I was absolutely convinced he was going to destroy the culture, so much was ending that year from the good ole '80s. It was seriously depressing for me. Even winning the Congress in '94 wasn't really enough to stop the cultural slide as I had personally hoped. Flash forward 15 years and I can say with a straight face, this isn't the country I grew up in anymore. Something just died, and I don't know how we can ever get it back again. Not to say the '80s was Nirvana, it had downsides, and I had my own problems then, I just couldn't have imagined it would be this far gone by now. :-(

I checked for RTV, and although there lists an affiliate for Nashville (with the call letters WKRP, I kid you not), I went through all the channels on my Comcast system, but they don't carry it. There's so many channels now, it's hard to keep up, though. I did just find "ThisTV", however.

If you have an HDTV set or a box that converts it down to a regular TV, you might try to receive it over a set of rabbit ears. I can receive two RTV's via my rabbit ears. I have an old Rembrandt set my parents got as a gift in 1959 when they got married. It is the best rabbit ears I have. B-)

Haven't seen that ep in awhile, it's still heartbreaking. My grandfather, a Scottish immigrant (a generation older than Archie, fought in WW1), adored the character of Archie, he only got to see the first 5 seasons or so of the show before he died. I don't think he could've handled watching that episode, because he buried 2 wives when they were still young (30s for his first wife, 47 for my grandmother), and Edith was very similarly named to my grandmother, Edna. I could've pictured that scene with my grandfather packing away their belongings.

Yeah, it was very emotional and tear provoking. Even 20, almost 30 years, geez, 1981 doesn't seem so long ago, it still hits me to watch it.

Funny that Michael J. Fox wasn't a Republican but a Canadian Liberal. He might've been a mild influence (his character, at least) in making me a Republican. I liked "The Golden Girls", too, and that had its series finale only about a week after Cosby did, I remember seeing it in Amarillo, Texas en route home from our California trip (we were in San Diego, spending the day in Tijuana when they read the verdict in the trial - had they read it the following day instead, we'd have been (no joke) driving through South Central L.A. at that time of day. We had to give L.A. a wide berth and went to Las Vegas, instead. They were rioting there, too, which we didn't know until we got there).

Didn't hear about the Las Vegas rioting. Thank God we didn't have any here in Pittsburgh. We did have one when Martin Luther King was assassinated but it was small. I think Alex P. Keaton and his sister Mallory assured us that we were not alone in being conservative and it was a help. Damn, I miss those days. I know Michael J. Fox is liberal though. He came out for stem cell research, I have no problem with that although using them from aborted babies is wrong, but adult stem cells are OK.

I'll tell you where it really started, and that's when Fox was launched in 1986, specifically "Married With Children." People don't remember now how much of an uproar there was when that show premiered, threats of boycotts and the like. I was starting junior high school and my mother did not want me watching that show. One of the shows producers, Michael Moye, had previously done a favorite show of mine on NBC which sadly only lasted a season, the Jason Bateman vehicle "It's Your Move" (after Bateman was forced off another favorite show of mine at the time, "Silver Spoons", because he outshone Ricky Schroeder and was clearly endowed with an exceptional comedic gift). MWC was SO different than all the other sitcoms up to that point, which almost always had some sort of moral to them, this show was just vulgar and had no interest in having any redeeming quality. It was funny to a degree, but these weren't the kind of people you'd ever want as neighbors, let alone as friends (they were pretty rotten people).

Hmmmm..... I remember having a similar dicussion about MWC with a fellow Christian co-worker back in 1994 or so. He made the same point as you where they showed Al Bundy to be a man who's all thumbs and a bumbling fool. Even "The Simpsons" do it as well with Homer. He thinks it was a plan to make men look bad, they did their job, but they also made most women look like skanks. Ricky Schroeder was cool as well and he is a well known conservative today. One time I saw Schroeder "riding shotgun" with Charleton Heston on Bill Maher's show. He did a good job.

Another show I liked was "Wonder Years," when that show ended, I was bummed when Kevin said that his father passed away "two years later in 1975." (the show ended in 1973). My parents divorced when I was 10 in 1976 so it hit home since I didn't have much of a father figure when I was young.

The second show to lower the bar was the one that was essentially launched as the anti-Cosby, that being "Roseanne." The argument for that one was that it was a more "realistic" portrayal of the White working class, messy house, unattractive looking parents, pain-in-the-ass (or weird) kids (albeit not as over the top as "Married..."). My former fiancee and her family loved that show, they felt more like they could relate to it as working class (and also from Illinois), but me personally, I didn't really know many people like that (I was sort of in that vague area, below the level of the Cosbys but above the Conners). The main problem I had with the show, as with "Married..." was that both featured families that reveled in their low-class status (I don't mean in income, because you can be rich and have no or low class) and mocked those such as Cosby's Huxtable's who were trying to portray an ideal family, one whose children were taught to go out and achieve, to get an education, to make themselves better people, and to be decent human beings. Cosby was trying to accomplish something positive here, and he was mocked for doing it, and I thought that ultimately was a real shame. The culture at large would certainly be better for trying to emulate the Huxtables rather than the Conners or the execrable Bundys.

The Huxtables were upper middle class, maybe lower upper class, but still they told their kids to get out there and learn something, make something of yourself, at least don't be a burden on society. Maybe they are/were seen as the 1980's version of the Cleavers from "Leave It To Beaver," but still it was a standard to aspire to. You might not make it 100%, but even if you make it 70, 80 or 90 percent of the time, you're doing good. Still I do see the Huxtables as realistic.

I'm sure there are Conner families out there, but "Roseanne" is like the lowest common denominator, certainly not someone to emulate. You can have the income of the Conners but still you should have your pride and sense of shame to guide to to a better standard.

Notice, too, that once a lot of the '80s NBC shows were cancelled one by one, they started to replace family-style shows with more urban, younger singles-themed, until there were, IIRC, no family-hour/family-style shows left on. Once it was "Friends" and that other dreadful show, "Will & Grace" (which seemed less an exercise in comedy, but a pure-PC show which made it a rite of passage for umpteen high-end actors to make a guest appearance to show they "approved" of the agenda of the show, which was my main problem with it - the same exact thing that happened to "Ellen" on ABC, which started out as a "Friends"-style ensemble, and when the lead decided to go public with her orientation, turned it into an unfunny PC "ram-the-gay-agenda-down-our-throats" exercise). Also equally offensive were actors, tv execs and other talking heads telling the public they MUST watch these shows and be tolerant/accepting of their agenda. Since when did we expect unfunny sex-laden PC shows to be mandatory viewing for the public ? Whatever happened to entertainment ? Or uplifting the public ? More lowering of the bar to pure filth and garbage, for which got awards for their "courage." I watched an ep of "Will & Grace", and I never laughed once, the people on the show were horrible, just shrill caricatures of human beings, people you wouldn't want to know in real life.

Yeah, it seems like a lot of shows have PC agendas or just want to be crude with sexual references or be political. Crap, when I watch TV, I'd like to escape from that for a while. It's like when I catch a Cosby re-run, it was nice to think how great the 1980's were and the fun times I had and I would give my left hand to relive them again. I have nothing against Ellen DeGeneres, in fact, I thought she would make a good hostess for "The Price is Right," but please, don't shove the homosexual, or any other, agenda down our throats.

Yeah, I know, absolutely ridiculous. CBS should be renamed the CSI channel (just like NBC be renamed the Leno/L&O channel).

Yeah, I know B-) You have like 3 or 4 CSI's and now two NCIS'es Mom loves those shows, they're OK, but it is like if you eat a five gallon bucket of chocolate ice cream, even if that is your favorite, you're going to hate it for a while. NBC is putting all their eggs in the Leno basket.

I was thinking, too, you know the real problem with these shows over time went far beyond the host, it was the guests themselves. In the old days (well, pre '90s), you had people you wanted to see and wanted to hear tell stories, wanted to hear perform & sing. Today, it's wall to wall garbage. The guests suck, the music sucks worse. Vacuous twits that aren't interesting and have nothing much to say. Pretty faces and empty souls. When the old timers passed away, there just were fewer people I cared to see interviewed. It seems like the last old-timer left is Don Rickles. Rickles is a national treasure, and I hope he lives to 200. When he dies, we're really going to lose something special. The last non-PC comedian who could get away with anything, yet he has not an ounce of personal vindictiveness in his schtick, all for laughs (contrast that with Letterman's passive-aggressive hatefulness, he's not only a nasty, vicious old bastard, he believes everything he says, and probably is even darker than that. I made the comment that after he had his heart surgery, they merely removed it, because he certainly lacks for one now).

Rickles is a class act. Others I can think up offhand are Jonathan Winters and Jackie Mason. Mort Sahl is a good one too. He started off as a comedian at the Jewish resorts in the Catskills. One time in 1967, subbing for a talkshow host on WNBC Radio, he made the point on how the Democrats botches up the wars and added "I know my history too, the question is, how long do we have left to write any?" I feel that was with The Bamster (Obama). Letterman, you hit the nail on the head. He was funny once but now very crass. Leno is OK, but Carson was one of a kind.

It was an excellent observation. Although, absent choice, if we're all listening to the same thing or narrow band of options, we're more like a Communist country. So there are upsides and downsides to choice and an expansive number of options. I don't think we could go back to it, either. I can't imagine where we had just one time to catch a show and if you missed it, you were crap out of luck. I like to be able to watch a show in my own time if I can't do so when it first airs.

Yeah, it does have both good and bad things. I don't think, barring some huge event, we will see a return to the old days so to speak, nor should it be forced on us. I do like the VCR as a too, sometimes I work weird hours, it is good to know I can tape something unless I can watch it On Demand or over the computer.

Worse, Sullivan was unattractive (resembled an uglier Dick Nixon) and he had a weird speaking voice (couldn't say "show", always said "shoe"). A face for radio, as they used to say. You'd have people kill today for the ratings he got, even on his worst show.

Yeah, he was like more of the host/ringmaster of the show who had the talent to look for good talent and/or had the ability to hire people under him to do so. Mom always said, "he had a big head." B-) Still he had his show from 1947 to 1971, a good, long run.

Yeah, I don't know what happened. It's like the country was like the equivalent of a frog being slowly boiled alive. You can't toss 'em right into the boiling water. You put them in cold and slowly turn the heat up until its too late for the fella. I feel like I woke up in "The Twilight Zone", it's that bad. Clinton's election in '92 was a bad sign, I was 18 and that was my first election, and I was absolutely convinced he was going to destroy the culture, so much was ending that year from the good ole '80s. It was seriously depressing for me. Even winning the Congress in '94 wasn't really enough to stop the cultural slide as I had personally hoped. Flash forward 15 years and I can say with a straight face, this isn't the country I grew up in anymore. Something just died, and I don't know how we can ever get it back again. Not to say the '80s was Nirvana, it had downsides, and I had my own problems then, I just couldn't have imagined it would be this far gone by now. :-(

Yeah, they say 1972 was the year the 1960's really ended. To me, like you, 1992 was the year the 1980's ended for me. When Clinton was elected, you would have seen a grown man cry at my house, me. Same with 2008 with The Bamster. If I could have froze myself in suspended animation, I would have done so in the 1990's. Except for a few things, like South Park, Final Fantasy on the Playstation and the cartoon, "The Tick," the 1990's was kind of a humdrum time where our standards have fallen. I thought with 9-11 and so on, we would have learned from that but it has gotten worse, we got the Bamster last year. I feel like somewhere I have landed in the Twilight Zone or some weird, parallel world I slipped into without knowing.

Yeah, the 1980's had problems, every era does. I had my downtimes too, but overall, it was a good time for me.

I often joke where I keep on hoping that this is one BIG BAD DREAM and I will wake up and it will be 1983/84. B-D B-P If that was the case, man, I will have lots to write about. Three things though, how would I stop 9-11, the election of Bill Clinton and the election of Obama?

Had you come to me in 1984 and told me that we will have Barack Obama as President, after explaining who he is, I would laugh you all the way to the Moon.