Those 70s Shows

Nostalgia has figured prominently in my life of late. Apparently I am old enough to have nostalgia, which is in itself alarming, but on the other hand, it’s provided some great entertainment. Ter and I have done some serious bonding over the music we loved in our formative years, i.e., before we met, and at Coffee on the Wall last week, the conversation somehow found its way into the same decade: the 1970s. And here’s where I learned something that I’ve always known about my wee sister:

She loved police shows. Boy Sister gave us a list of the cop/detective series that were hip in the 70s (more than I’d imagined), and wee sis said she watched most of them. More than I did, for sure. I recall watching reruns of Emergency! with her after school, so perhaps it’s not so strange that her significant other happens to be a paramedic. Funnily enough, when BS asked us what our favourite 70s show was, without hesitation, we both said “Starsky & Hutch!”

“Do you want to borrow the DVDs?” I asked her. “I have the first two seasons.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I dunno, they’ll be pretty cheesy nowadays.”

She’s right, of course. Cheesy doesn’t begin to describe the hokey plots and ham acting that seemed so hip back in the day … though Starsky’s Torino is still pretty darned cool.

The sitcoms of the time seem less dated. Maybe humour is timeless? Sure, the costumes and sets are hideously pea green and polyester, and we get as much laughter out of the hair and makeup as we do the dialogue, but it’s less painful to sit through an episode of M*A*S*H  or Mary Tyler Moore as it is an episode of, well, any of the dramatic fare. Granted, some of the humour then was as blatantly stupid as much of the humour now, but laughter is truly ageless.

Rolling further back in time, the local TV station runs back-to-back episodes of Star Trek on Tuesday nights. Talk about cheeseball, but it’s the original series with the original crew, and that makes it mandatory viewing on “Trek Tuesday”. I look forward to it for the humour as much William Shatner’s wiggle—and I don’t necessarily mean the humour in the script. In the right mood, Ter and I can crack ourselves up during the show, turning a TV classic from drama to comedy with a single well-crafted quip.

We do the same thing with modern-day shows as well, though truth be told, we’re hard-pressed to find much worth watching. Give me the good old days—ironically, the days when folks in their mid-fifties lamented the lack of anything worth watching, deeming it all too crude or controversial.

Time really does move in circles.