Thursday, January 18, 2007

The Definitive Top 20 TV Shows From The 80s (With Videos)

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VIDEOS: The Definitive Top 20 TV Shows From The 80s (With Videos). � Cool Videos at Brohans Video Blog: "The 80s were a great time for sitcoms and television in general. Don't believe me? Ask Matt. Don't believe him? Ask me (Henry).

So . . . what am I looking at here?

This is the unarguable list of top 20 80s TV shows.

Hey guys, how can you claim that this list is absolute?

We grew up in the 80s (and consequently, continued growing up throughout the 90s and through the present). We watched TV all the friggin time. The TV was like an uncle to us. The greatest uncle in the world.

Why only 20? Why not 80?

Because there were exactly 20 good shows in the 80s. We're certain of it.

Without further ado%u2026here are:
'The Greatest Definitive Sure-Fire Top Greatest TV Shows From The 80s.'"

11 comments:

Gerald So said...

I wouldn't have included M*A*S*H, which was more of a 70s show that dealt with the 50s.

Same goes for "The Wonder Years", set in the 60s so it didn't typify the 80s, and "Star Trek:NG". which owed as much to the 60s original series as to its 24th century setting.

"Diff'rent Strokes" should have made the list.

Anonymous said...

Well, THE WONDER YEARS is one of relatively few decent shows on the list, but that was clearly by intention. FWIW, STAR TREK TNG improved enormously after Roddenberry's passing, sadly, when it was free from awkwardly regurgitating the the earlier series. The best series of the 1980s included ST. ELSEWHERE and SCTV NETWORK 90 (along with efforts that most folks have forgotten, such as TRYING TIMES, or imports beyond the SCTV co-production such as YES, MINISTER and SEEING THINGS), but these probably didn't appeal as much to these bloggers as the tots they presumably were at the time. MAGNUM PI had some decent episodes, and hired a few of my highschool-mates for bit roles...hell, THE ROCKFORD FILES scraped into the 1980s.

Unknown said...

It's obviously an idiosyncratic list, but kind of fun. I've been watching re-runs of Magnum, and it wasn't bad.

Anonymous said...

Well, like most Bellisario productions, MAGNUM was at the start a good enough show, at least...letting Selleck throw his weight around in later seasons, as with most such actor-meddling, worsened it notably.

Unknown said...

It's still early days in the re-runs here, and I probably won't stick with it long enough to get to the later shows.

Anonymous said...

The list is filled with lousy choices. They might as well have picked "The Smurfs" and "GI Joe"

Anonymous said...

I didn't like any of those shows and hardly ever watched any of them. Where are Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere, real ground-breakers?

Anonymous said...

Well, Karin, I don't think these folks were watching HILL STREET at the time (I suspect they were pretty young at the time, given their choices), and so don't feel comfortable making nostalgic yet snotty comments about those MTM productions.

Gerard, I'm surprised they didn't plump for THE DUKES OF HAZZARD, a show I could tolerate only ever so slightly more than THREE'S COMPANY or WHAT'S HAPPENING?...at it was intolerably longer...

Anonymous said...

MAGNUM PI's time-travel dream episode, in the second season or so, was a highlight. By the end of the series, despite the fact that Magnum is a personal friend of Robin, the millionaire writer who owns the Oahu estate in which Magnum resides, Magnum for no particular reason has decided that fellow employee-friend Higgins is actually writing Robin's novels. As an example of how it went off the tracks.

Cap'n Bob said...

Obviously these twerps were born in the seventies and have no perspective. I found five shows to be good and two passable. The rest were crap. Dukes of Hazzard, for Ghu's sake!

Anonymous said...

I see I was unwilling to process that they had selected DUKES...