I was talking to by buddy, NFAH, and she mentioned Moonlighting as the first adult show she was allowed to watch despite the sexual innuendo. Then I mentioned that I would sneak into my parents bedroom and try to watch 21 Jump Street on my parents old black and white TV with rabbit ears. Yes, I knew it was wrong to do, but 21 Jump Street was an awesome show, can you really blame me?
Then I got to thinking about my family and our TV watching habits. When I was growing up, cable TV was just coming into it's own. No longer were we restricted to just the big three TV stations. We now had Fox (which wasn't cable), MTV, Nickelodeon, HBO and around 80 other new networks. It was a TV explosion.
When I used to arrive home from school, I would do my homework as my mom would watch Oprah. I would sit at the dining room table and watch the TV from across the back of the sofa that defined the partition between the living room and dining room in our condo; often getting told to get a move on with my homework. My dad would arrive home shortly after 5 and we would have dinner as a family, around the dining room table. After dinner, we would all watch the local and National News together. Always NBC with Dan Rather. At 7:30 we watched Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon as a family, then it was time for bed. Now, I knew I HAD to be asleep by the time I heard the theme song to Roseanne through my bedroom wall (the tell tale harmonica riff was like my mental clock), which was attached to the living room. If I heard the theme song to China Beach, I knew I had better not come out of my bedroom with a lame excuse. That was my Mom's favorite show and she really didn't like to be interrupted. Plus it was on crazy late, like 10pm. If the Tonight Show was on, well, I just better pretend I was sleep walking.
It is weird what you remember from your childhood. What do you remember about TV shows and how they related to your family from when you were a kid?
