Remember back when we all had cable and there was no such thing as binge watching a show unless you had the DVD's and / or VCR tapes? You couldn't stream a damn thing unless some station decided to have a marathon weekend or something and those didn't happen all that often.
There were a few shows that I went out of my way to watch at home but for the most part I just ended up watching whatever was on. After all, we did still have around 100 channels so it wasn't like there was ever going to be nothing on the tube.
One show that I really looked forward to for whatever reason was a show called Quantum Leap. In my young eyes this seemed like a wonderful power to have and most of the episodes had some sort of hidden ethical message in them too, which I guess was a good thing. I was not around when the episodes were being made, but one channel I watched would play them in order, not that it was really necessary to do that because they were kind of their own self-contained story rather than an ongoing drama like other shows.
src
Maybe it was just because I was a little kid with some interest in science fiction and also very low expectations of visual displays but I absolutely loved this show. There was only 5 seasons and the show as far as I know was reasonably popular and was considered a success.
The adventures of Dr. Sam, Al, and their robotic AI pal "Ziggy" were pretty exciting to me and I have spent all of my adult life with very fond memories of how unpredictable the show was. Sam would end up in various bodies as he traveled through time and in many instances he would actually be in the body of a woman or someone that was a different race or culture than he himself is.
src
The episodes were exciting and you never really knew what you were going to get. The situation could end up being historically meaningful, emotional, or action packed. I remember enjoying all of them as a child.
Well the other day I was at a loss as to what to watch so I decided to download an entire season and revisit my roots and I got about 1.5 episodes through before I realized I had made a mistake. I found the show cheap, boring, and difficult to watch. I don't know if it me or the entire world that has changed but the show didn't even manage to capture my attention even when I was on an episode that I had never seen or didn't remember.
It was at that point where I came to the conclusion that maybe it is better if I don't revisit the shows that I really liked as a kid because my own standards and probably the attention span of most people on the planet has changed a lot since the 90's.
I turned it off mid-way through the 2nd episode and I really don't think I will bother to turn it back on again. I think this is tragic because I had a plan to go down memory lane with some other shows but because of this experience I think I will instead opt to just leave the memories as exactly that: Something that is just in my mind.
This experience opened my eyes to the fact that I should probably just leave a lot of my great remembrances in my head instead of trying to revisit the glory that it was to me when it was going on the first time. I can't even imagine how unbearable this show would be today if they had commercials in it as well, which was something that all of us endured back in those times because we didn't have any other choice.