Let’s Binge the 80’s

Television has come a long way from what we call “box TV’s” to flat screens, from black and white to color TV’s. We all love watching television but these past two weeks I have been learning a lot I did not know about television and its background. Last we covered the sixties and seventies this week covered more on the eighties. Still not knowing much about television from this era I can compare it to certain experiences I have had which shows and movies I have see now

Dallas is a show that first aired in 1978 a soap opera that had everyone tuned in to the next episode because of their cliff hangers. “Who shot J.R” was the most famous and impactful cliffhanger of all of them. Who shot J.R had everyone at the edge of their seats trying to “solve” the crime. Which reminds me a lot of the cliffhanger when Avengers Infinity War first came out and the villain of the movie won and beat the heroes and had to wait a full year to figure out how the heroes were gonna fix everything and get their revenge. Dallas was a gateway to all the other shows that came after when people really got even more into television and its TV series.

Hill street blues was a cop show from 1981 in a big city that had a great mix of drama and comedy. Though when it first aired numbers weren’t amazing it still inspired shows like The Sopranos. The Cosby Show was also a big thing in the eighties, sitcoms were not a new thing to television around this time it was one of the pioneer shows for a predominantly black cast for a television show, alongside with “A Different World”. 

Television series were not the only thing that was popular at the time sports had a very big thing going on with the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics. Playing each other three times in the NBA Finals throughout the years 1983-1987, Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics won one of the three match ups while Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers bested them the other two times they faced each other. This feud between both teams grew to something unimaginable. The hatred these both teams had for each other was something that you could feel through the screen. The eighties were also the rise of Mike Tyson by the end of 1986 he had won a total of thirteen fights and eleven of them were won by knockout.

MTV made a huge appearance in the eighties being a television channel where you could just sit and watch music videos all day long. Which really shows how times have changed since then. You used to be able to turn on MTV and listen and watch artists like Madonna and Guns N’ Roses. Nowadays you turn on MTV and it’s close to impossible to try and find any music video of sorts. Which brings me to my question in which time period of television would have rather grown up in the eighties or whichever era you group up watching as a kid and a teenager?