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80s Television Shows That Still Hold…

Damn, are the 1980s some easy pickings for all that is terrible and great with American popular culture or what? However, not all the shows were terrible and cliché ridden. (Although to be fair, most of my personal favorites were, there is a reason why I own The A-Team on DVD but not a single frame of the shows below). As is always the case with my lame Top-5 lists, there are going to be a few rules… Actually, this list only has one rule, but it is a dozy… Each and every show on the list can only have existed in the 1980s… No running from the 70s and running into the 90s… This, I admit, is a harsh rule as it automatically wipes out MASH, Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Cosby Show…

Nevertheless, I let no pop culture challenge dissuade me… On with the list!

Honorable Mention – Um, crap… It was hard enough to generate the 5. As such, um, no Honorable Mention…

5 – The Real Ghostbusters – Yes, I know it seems strange to include a Saturday morning cartoon on the list. Not even an original one at that, well, at least is wasn’t created as a 30-minute commercial to sell toys. (Although a toy line was generated from the television series). I felt I needed to include this show because it did have some dark and more adult targeted episodes. With the inclusion of the Cthulhu Mythos, a Celtic god of death, and childhood trauma, The Real Ghostbusters can still be enjoyed by both adults and kids. Then there are the writers. Many a modern scriptwriting savant cut their teeth on The Real Ghostbusters… The two most notable being Joss Whedon and Michael J. Straczynski. Finally, for good or bad, The Real Ghostbusters played a bigger inspiration on Ghostbusters 2 then an actual script. If you get a chance, you really should revisit this ground breaking Saturday morning cartoon…

4 – The Greatest American Hero - I wonder what it says about me that I enjoy this show more as an “adult” then I did as a spandex hero worshipping wee Geek? (Okay, I can think of a myriad of things that it says, however, that question was rhetorical and I’ll have no comments from the peanut gallery). The Greatest American Hero was one of the first shows to try and genuinely combine drama with comedy and it had the stones to do so within the confines of the superhero genre. I’m shocked it lasted the 3 years that it did. You just couldn’t help but like the Buster Keaton like sensibilities of the main character, Ralph Hinkley. He was the everyman that did his best when fate dropped superpowers in his lap. Looking back, I wonder if the writers were trying to make a statement by giving an underpowered, underappreciated public school teacher the power to save the world… Shown during a time when comic book companies didn’t fully understand the future of their own books, DC sued the show producers and ABC claiming the titular hero was too similar to Superman… The case was dismissed before ever going to court… (Although I think he has more akin to Green Lantern, but that is for another time).

3 – Hill Street Blues – Viewers that love the ensemble cast programming can look toward the golden typewriter of Steven Bochco and thank him for Hill Street Blues. Hill Street Blues was the first honest attempt at writing realistic and gritty police drama. Most cop shows from the pre-Hill Street Blues era had some gimmick… lone female cop, special troops within a police force, hardboiled detectives, satirical cops... William Shatner. Hill Street Blues was also the first show to use, primarily, hand-held cameras to give it a more documentary look and feel. While that style has become commonplace within modern television, it was not done in the 1980s. While the writing may not seem as crisp as modern cop shows like The Shield or Law and Order, the visuals help to maintain the show’s timeless nature. I just remember waking up one night as a wee Geek and walking into the living room only see a cop take a shiv right in the gut… Damn, that messed me up!

2 – St. Elsewhere – Like Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere was one of the first realistic and gritty dramas. However, like its predecessor, MASH, St. Elsewhere had its fair share of black humor. The stories within St. Elsewhere really could be dropped into the floundering ER and no one would notice the difference. However, the primary reason for ranking so high on the list can be summed up in two words… Tommy Westphall. If you don’t understand what that means… Then you can’t consider yourself a student of American television…

1 – Max Headroom – Please leave all your Coke ads at the door. Max Headroom, as a series, was the very definition of “show before its time”… Look, I adore Arrested Development, Action, and all the other shows to get the axe because the audience and suits didn’t “get it”. However, in terms of sheer insight to the future of the cultural zeitgeist, none of them can hold a candle to Max Headroom. Period. End of story. Taken from a series of British shorts entitled “20 minutes into the future”, Max Headroom told the story of a future dominated by a small number of media conglomerates and a society that couldn’t turn its head without receiving a sound bite from a cathode ray tube… While technically on for 2 seasons, Max Headroom barely produced enough episodes to cover the traditional 26-episode run of a season. The show is simply genius. Sure, some of the effects are dated and it is hard to not think of those Coca Cola commercials. However, the strength of writing and insight into today’s media saturated world cannot be denied… Here is a short list of “predictions” made by the writers of Max Headroom: Rapid Fire Editing – a technique of quickly cutting from one image to another to maintain interest while shortening the attention span of the viewer. Virtual Talk Show Hosts – Sure, we think of it as an obvious idea now… but in 1987? Blipverts – a subliminal image within a commercial composed of only light to have a psychological effect on the viewer. Anyone remember the seizures caused by such images in Japanese cartoons in the late 1990s? On Demand Media – They predicted the decline of movies when “on demand media” became prevalent. The 500 Channel Television – Remember when we used to joke having to pick between 32 channels and HBO? TV Surveillance Socitey – Max Headroom writers would comment that they couldn’t’ remember a time when cameras were not part of everyone’s lives… Can you? Computer Bomb – Linking all programs at once to make the system crash, today, we call it a denial-of-service-attack. Who says Sci-Fi is just for kids and Geeks… Pay attention, Sci-Fi predicts better than any stuffy Middle Ages occultist does…