Everyone looks at the past through their own rose-colored glasses, especially when it comes to media that meant a lot to us when we were younger. It’s hard to set aside one’s personal feelings of nostalgia for a beloved TV show you grew up with, even though the internet and online streaming services make it easier to revisit your old favorites anytime.
Just because something meant a lot to you back in the day unfortunately doesn’t mean it’s just as good today. Instead of giving into the nostalgia culture that seems to drive most of the internet, let’s remove our rose-colored glasses and look at a few TV shows that have not stood the test of time.
Friends
For a show about living in Manhattan, Friends was always surprisingly white bread, starring six attractive white twenty-somethings who never really seemed to struggle for cash and spent most of their free time sipping coffee or dating other attractive white twenty-somethings. Today, the most dated part of Friends is unquestionably its archaic approach to gender and sexuality.
Watching Season Three once more — often considered one of the show’s prime years — there are several plot lines that conform to weird gender norms that would inspire a thousand thinkpieces today. First, there’s the strong smart actress who (correctly) believes Joey is too dumb — until she finds out he’s a good kisser. There’s the billionaire (Jon Favreau) who relentlessly pursues Monica using lavish displays of wealth, flying her to Rome for their first date and later offering her a job as head chef of his new restaurant after she’s refused his advances multiple times. He keeps insisting Monica might care for him if she just tried, while Monica thinks less of herself for not immediately swooning over this rich creep — until they kiss, and Monica finally falls for her stalker.
It doesn’t help matters that one of the show’s most ubiquitous sources of humor was implying its male characters might be gay — hilarious, right?
The Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch was a hit in the early ‘70s for many of the same reasons it’s so dull today — it’s safe, it’s straightforward, it’s unapologetically escapist. During the show’s original run, audiences were content to watch the dull conflicts of the Brady clan, laughing along with the studio audience and just waiting for each episode to deliver a generic overly moralizing theme.
The show is even surprisingly light on jokes, and even those that do make it in are reliant on puns and cutesy kid antics instead of the actual characters that seem far more pandering than funny through a modern lens.
Full House
Full House was sort of like the ‘90s version of The Brady Bunch. The family setup was more unconventional, but the humor was just as safe and bland, and all the episodes still ended with a force-fed message about being polite or valuing your education, usually delivered by patriarch Danny Tanner (Bob Saget), who is the human embodiment of the show’s inoffensive blandness.
Costars John Stamos and Dave Coulier play respective outdated stereotypes of the vain hunky guy and the goofy comedian (who seems clinically insane rather than funny half the time), but the show really builds itself around the character of Michelle Tanner (played by both Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen in infancy), the baby of the family who exists only to be cute and say sassy things a child normally wouldn’t say. The gimmick is painfully transparent today, but apparently enough people still enjoy Full House to warrant a Netflix reboot, titled Fuller House, of the old sitcom staple.
Saved by the Bell
You can’t even sit through the theme song for Saved by the Bell without seeing how poorly the show has aged. This popular sitcom depiction of high school life was one of ABC’s greatest TGIF successes, but it’s focused entirely around teenage stereotypes that become more tired with each passing year.
You have a jock, a cheerleader, a smart girl, a surprisingly unlikable leading man and one of the most aggressively unrealistic “kooky” nerds ever put on the small screen: Screech, a character with a shrill voice and personality who becomes an alien that can play the radio through his mouth in one episode — just one of many outlandish plots the show favored instead of anything actually realistic to the high school experience.
For a truly hilarious snapshot of the show’s worst acting and fashions, try sitting through the episode “Jessie’s Song,” now famous for a crazed meltdown that involves both caffeine pills and the one hit wonder “I’m So Excited.”
Will & Grace
When it first began airing in 1998, Will & Grace was admirable for being one of television’s first series to star several openly gay characters and educating the American public on LGBT issues they otherwise might not have been exposed to. But as forward-thinking as it was for the time, Will and Grace was still a safe traditional sitcom that didn’t leave much room for complexity in its depiction of gay characters.
To make him safer for heterosexual viewers, Will’s homosexuality was always downplayed by his lack of luck in finding sexual partners, while his friend Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes) is the very embodiment of the sassy gay friend stereotype that’s only become more tired since Will & Grace came to a close in 2006. For all the positive impact it might have made — though it’s hard to measure anything like that with any certainty — the show still feels like an outsider view of the gay community, and one that accidentally pioneered some of mainstream media’s biggest problems in depicting LGBT characters.
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