A Two-Fer Quiz

Yesterday, Ace posted a link to a YouTube montage of the intros of new television shows of 1983.

22 in all. I thought I’d treat it as a quiz, though, and put the ones I remember in bold and include links to those I’ve referred to on this blog which is at least three. I’m going report on this in real time, posted after I watch the whole video, because it’s like 25 minutes long and I only have time to watch it once.

The shows are:

• It’s Not Easy
• We Got It Made–although I was sure I referred to it somewhere, I cannot find it, but for a while, I misremembered Bill Maher as the straight man male lead.
• Oh Madeline–although as I mentioned when I referred to the show last month, I remembered it was on, but I never watched it.
• AfterMASH
• Jennifer Slept Here–really, I haven’t brought that up? It didn’t run very long, but I can still remember the theme song. Also, with this and the short run Eric Idle vehicle Nearly Departed makes me wonder why we don’t have reboots of ghosts-live-here sitcoms these days–but both of these were very short runs indeed, which perhaps answers my question.
• Just Our Luck
• Webster referred to in the book report for Alex Karras’s Tuesday Night Football.
• Mr. Smith
• Manimal, although I think it came on on at nine p.m., so I only saw the intro before I had to go to bed.
• Hardcastle and McCormick; okay, I’m cheating, I referred to it on another blog.
• The Scarecrow and Mrs. King
• Whiz Kids
• Boone
• The Rousters
• The Yellow Rose
• Cutter to Houston
• Trauma Center
• Bay City Blues
• For Love and Honor
• Emerald Point N.A.S.
• Lottery
• Hotel

To be honest, I thought I was going to clean up on this show because I knew so many early; however, it looks like they stacked sitcoms early in the list, and I was most familiar with those programs.

I also thought I’d referred to a couple more shows than I thought I did, but I’m almost half-convinced it’s because my quick searching failed. Did I now go on about how pretty Ann Jillian was at some point?

At any rate, it was an interesting bit of nostalgia (the whole point of the montages, I know). I saw a bunch of that guys whom I saw in other programs. And I saw numerous actors and actresses who lucked out that these shows were short lived, as that meant they were available for other projects that really worked out for them. For example, Susan Dey and Richard Dean Anderson were in Emerald Point N.A.S.; if that show had been even a trifling hit, who would have been MacGyver? And if Bay City Blues had worked for a bit, would Sharon Stone have become a movie star? Would Dennis Franz have become a bankable cop in Hill Street Blues, Beverly Hills Buntz, or NYPD Blue?

I don’t like to spend thirty minutes watching YouTube as a rule, gentle reader. And my television (or streaming) habits are not such that I’m well poised to even bother with quizzes like this in 2050 (not that there will be enough shared nostalgia to warrant them anyway–the prevalence of cable in the 1990s pretty much splintered us starting even then).

However, I do have the urge to try something similar with 24 New Shows of Fall 1987–by then, my viewing habits had changed and I was no longer roaming the housing projects at night (the street lights come on later in Milwaukee) and was instead in a trailer in the soft southern lands, so I might do even better. Although perhaps not with the references.