Den of the Cyphered Wolf

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Lost Shows

So I more or less skipped Halloween. It wasn't like I meant to do it but I'm generally not a people person so parties just don't do it for me. Whenever I do decide to get off my butt and get in the spirit it's normally in the form of marathoning some sort of horror themed media.

It occured to me I couldn't watch the show I was jonesing for not legally anyway.

So I might as well.

Here is my list of TV shows that have been lost to the sands of time. I'm going to be loosey goosey here. It's not so much that these shows aren't available but rather I think they've been left out of the nostalgia-fest that is modern pop culture and deserve some love. I'm going to try to keep this from being a giant list of me reliving my childhood and try to restrict it to things I'm not just nostalgic for but do think hold up. That being said.

Muppets Tonight

So the Muppets revival got a mixed reception. They turned the Muppets into the Office. ...

They turned The Muppets into The Office.

Maybe what the audience was hoping for was a nostalgic return to form. Maybe like updating one of the best incarnations the franchise for a new era.  Hmmm...


Yeah, they already did that. Muppets Tonight was basically nothing more than straight a 90's update to The Muppet Show and  in light of the reaction to the ABC show, I get the feeling that people maybe just wanted that. If you did it exists.

Living Single

You know there is this joke going around that Friends is for white people. SCREW THAT NOISE. Living Single made it to air first. And for my money is the better show. Why isn't it streaming on Netflix?  Yeah, whenever I want to start griping about racism in media marketing this is the scab I'm scratching.

They're almost the same show except for you know the obvious.

The Torkelsons

Hi. Redstate folks. I've said some not so nice things about you over this election cycle. Let me throw you a bone. I, as a black guy, know it can be tiresome to have to put up the majority of mainstream culture treating you, your friends and family and your general way of life as some sort of alien thing to be ignored, ridiculed or feared.

Which is to say, "Stop treating us like idiots." is one of the few grievances of this election cycle I think actually has some credence. Not everybody born past the Mason-Dixon line is a slack-jawed racist idiot. And it can be tiresome to have half the country assuming that about the other half.

So uh I like Reba.

And the Torkelsons is Reba 1.0.

And it was also one of the late Britanny Murphy's earliest gigs and I always liked her. I'm not going to act like I knew her but she had a lot of talent and brought a lot of stuff into this world that I liked.

Speaking of actors who left this world too soon.


I've said it before and I'll say it again.  If a story involves a dude with a sword I'm game. And hey look Heath Ledger as a dude with a sword. Okay then,

Okay, that being said what makes Roar interesting is it came out just slightly before what I'll just call the narrative revolution of TV. So while there is ongoing plot and continuity stuff  on its also in the background which makes it's structure something other than hey let's kill the monster of the week and sprawling epic as it's kind of both and neither. It's not a story you had to wait 20 hours in to actually start to understand what was going on.


On the other end of that spectrum is Spellbinder which actually does play like a sprawling fantasy epic. I find that interesting because back then not many television shows let alone children's television shows had the guts to do that sort of thing.

Also worth checking out is The Tribe. But it's got its own youtube channel so it's not exactly lost to the ages.


Growing up I was kind of an anime snob, but looking back the 90's were a golden age for satiric and surrealist animation.  And out of all of that, I think Downtown is the most underrated. I've seen a million videos proclaiming the brilliance of Clone High, and they aren't wrong, but Clone High is out there. If you want to get at it, you can. Downtown has kind of been erased which sad because it's a very good show and is representative for a lot of the humor Adult Swim would make it's bread and butter a decade later.

Early Edition

I could take easy pot shots at the spat of qusirelegious "god is watching" shows of the 90's. And a lot of them were not good. But one of them actually was with a great high concept idea.

What if god told you all the bad stuff  that was going to happen 24 hours in advance and tasked you to fix it.  Thus is the premise of Early Edition. Which played like a cross between Quantum Leap and Touched by an Angel.  I really like Quantum Leap.

Judging Amy

While I'll go on record as saying we are living in a golden age of television most of that is because we've finally figured out how to do genre shows right, balancing the conventions the audience expects with character and plot. We've discovered that within those conventions there is space to do a lot of interesting stuff.  But it still annoys me that there are so few down to earth dramas apart cop shows.

I spent a lot of time rewatching old episodes of Gilmore Girls over the past few years because it's hard to find realistic relatable stuff that's not a sitcom nor a police procedural. Technically Judging Amy is a courtroom procedural but since it deals with family court and is more concerned with Judge Amy Gray's personal life it has a different feel from all the Law and Order knock offs.  It's not about catching bad guys or anything like that. It's about the daily grind of life and trying to do right by people.

Boston Public

Hey, look a school procedural. It's one of the closest things I've seen in fiction to realistic schools that have to stretch their resources beyond their capability.  Or to put it another way. It's rare to on television or even movies to pull back the curtain and show school with all of the institutional clockwork.

That's just not how most people think of education Here is the thing most people only experience it as parents or students. Parents generally want to believe the sanitized apple on the desk version and former students may want to believe that version but a lot also never had much love for school in the first place

The truth lies somewhere in the middle and that's where Boston Public lies. It treats education as a public institution with many flawed players who are trying to do the best they can with what they have.

So it's The Wire of school.

And that's a view of school I don't see often in the media.

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