My Show of Shows

What TV shows did you watch as a kid?

I read a lot of books as a kid. And played outside and rode my bike. But it seems I still had a great deals of time to watch TV.

I enjoyed Saturday morning cartoons for a long time. I’d watch the previews on Friday night before the new ones started in the fall, and then pick and choose what I wanted to watch. The only time in my life I ever did get up early was Saturday mornings to check out the offerings. Eventually, though, Saturday morning shows got weirder and less interesting—dinosaurs who shoot lasers from their horns??

As for prime time, I want to mention several shows that stuck with me, but not always in a good way.

First and least was My Mother The Car. It did not last long and had a horrible premise: a man’s mother is reincarnated as an antique car. I watched and thought, even as an 8 year old, that this show sucked. (I would have the same reaction in the first five minutes of Cop Rock many years later. For a mess, look that open up.

Also on the too-cheesy-for-me side was Lost in Space. I watched every episode, and even had the battery-operated robot that explored our lineoleum floors. But the show looked and felt like amateur theatrics—again, to an 8 year old. Maybe those negative examples helped develop my theatrical aesthetic later on.

Over the years I tried to explain the difference between cheesy and campy, and things overdone unintentionally and deliberately. I also watched Batman regularly, and the cheese factor was high, but Holy frommage, Batman, they knew what they were doing. It was supposed to be like that, unlike Lost in Space, which took itself too seriously. I occcasionally catch clips on Instagram and still find myself amused.

Of course the one show that really stuck with me was Star Trek (yes, TOS, the Original Series). I wanted to live in that world. I saw a promise for the future, and would still like that to come to fruition. The shows were well written, for the most part (although the one with the Native Americans was the worst for me), the show touched on hot issues of the day (but metaphorically, in the frame of science fiction, which is a staple of my teaching in Playwrighting), and depicted an era of diversity and equality, long before I would begin advocating for those issues.

Kudos to Gene Roddenberry. As for My Mother the Car and Lost in Space, I can only echo Dr. Smith from the latter: “Oh, the pain, the pain.”