Sparked by Dayton's thread about Gilligan Island. Star Trek has endured in no small part because many of its stories have timeless themes. Obsession. Revenge. What it means to be human. Sexy female robots. But at the same time, it's very '60s. There are women in power occasionally, yes, but still an undercurrent of sexism. There's the hippies episode. And of course the visual aspect: bright colors to take advantage of color TV, and a ridiculously small budget for what seem to us to be very basic special effects. I don't know if it's the lighting or tape vs. film or what, but I tend to be able to spot an '80s TV show. Oh, the lettering and logo, all that kind of thing, that tends to help too I guess. Night Court -- the judge just oozes with fluffy feel-good be-nice-and-understanding-of-each-other everybody-hug feelings. That's gotta be an '80s thing, right? Just like a very obvious synthesizer in a pop song means it's probably from the '80s. If you can't tell, this is an open-ended question. We can talk about specific shows (or movies, or characters, or comics, or music, or books, or whatever) or about an era generally. What will contemporary eras be known for? Are we moving into any new eras in any genres?
Weirdly enough, I only ever notice the time of production the other way around. Take BECKER for example. That (good) sitcom was produced around the turn of the century. However, the only concessions they made to the modern times is a huge brick of a cell phone the good doctors pulls out sometimes and talk of a big screen TV. Other than that it could be set at any time between the 60s and the 2010s. When I watched it first I had to look up the production years because I simply couldn't tell. I think good shows and/or movies don't take too much from the time they have been produced in but try to recreate the time they are set in as faithfully as possible. The year 2525 with classic big hair will always look like a talentless hack in the 80s tried to emulate the future.
I can almost always tell when a television series was shot because of the production values. Usually lighting, which looked pretty good in the 60s, terrible in the 70s and 80s, and gradually got better through the 90s. Also, whether it's first-run or rerun, I can almost always tell on which American network a television series first ran. Since I was a kid, I noticed that the final output from each of the networks looked slightly different. NBC always looks a little "cool", CBS looks a little "warm", and ABC is more neutral (as is FOX).
I keep wondering what details we're going to look back on, and think "oh, that's so 10's". Probably I-phones. By the 2020's , you know they'll be something else. Whether it's Google-glass, or watches, or what. Chicks with that bun-in-the-front hair. Obsession with zombies. Obsession with ghosts. Hell, TV itself may die out, and look quaint. I mean, we'll still have the screen, but everything's going to streaming, on-demand, crowd-funded. By the mid to late 2020's, I think networks and cable companies will probably go the way of Blockbuster.
It always seemed to me that 1970s hour long drams and sitcoms all seemed to have a somewhat dirty, "lived in" look overall. For both in the 1980s, everything seemed neat tidy and cleaned up. Looking at shows like Starsky & Hutch or The Rockford Files in the 70s for example. Or MASH and All In The Family.
TOS actually had a very large budget for its time. And it often went overbudget, leading to some cheaper bottle shows. saying it was low-budget is incorrect.
Well, fair enough. It could always have used larger money and time budgets, how's that? I wonder if some decades from now, The Avengers will be looked back on as a symbol of a time when we were obsessed with figuring out and improving energy sources.
IIRC, one problem with Star Trek: OS was that their budget was cut as the show went on. Especially during the 3rd season which gave the unfairly maligned Fred Freiberger (yeah, got his name wrong) all kinds of problems as producer. Note, Roddenberry had a reputation for running things over budget which did not endear him to the studio. Also, Paramount took over Desilu after Treks 2nd season and they were a lot stricter on the bottom line.
Care to elaborate about B5? BSG I get - post 9/11 paranoia. TNG I get, too, with that everybody loves anyone attitude and Troi's hair. But B5? Give it fresh new CGI and that's a timeless show.
You could make a new and better B5 today, but what we got was very clearly marked by bein in the midst of the shift from episodic to arc storytelling, and quite mediocre expectations for SF acting.
