Updates thanks to a comment on an older post from B18.
My kids heard the term "Jumping The Shark" the other day and were asking me about it. I am at the age where I watched Happy Days live and remember that episode well. I also remember being a kid and thinking it was awesome, not realizing just how corny it actually was. If you don't know what I am talking about, just Google it. On a side note, the actual jumping the shark episode was itself not what the definition came to mean, as Happy Days went on to be a popular hit for years to come after that show.
This got me thinking about things my kids will probably never really understand and I have jotted down a few.
The Bottle Episode. This is a show that was used to save money, where only the main cast was featured, no extras, and used only existing sets. More famous and newer examples are the "Fly" from Breaking Bad and "The One Where No One's Ready" from Friends.
To Be Continued. Now streaming shows today have episodes that lead into the next episode, but, nothing is as heartbreaking to a kid as watching a show and realizing there is not time to wrap it up in 23 minutes. You get right up to the end, and boom, "To Be Continued" pops up. You have to wait an entire week to get to see what happens.
The Travel Episodes. This is where the stations wanted a cheap way to make their cast and crew happy. They would take the whole show on the road, usually to Hawaii. Some of the most famous of these were Happy Days or The Brady Bunch.
The Flashback Episode. I hated these. Once again, to save money, shows would give the writers and extras a break and just have the main characters remember things from past episodes and then show clips from those episodes. Nothing is like the realization to a kid as discovering you were in the middle of one these.
Commercials. My kids took a lot of adjusting to watching TV at my parents house when commercials started popping up.
Planning To Watch A Show/ Watch Parties. Since you couldn't choose when to watch, you had to be ready to watch when the show came on. If you had to skip something or eat in front of the TV to be ready, you had to do it. I only remember one time my dad allowing us to not eat dinner at the kitchen table, and it was to watch a "To Be Continued" Happy Days episode that came on one day when he got home from work late. It was glorious.
Reruns. All summer, there was nothing to watch, all the new episodes had run, and they just replayed them in the same time slot.
28 Show Seasons. None of this ten episode junk. You got a full run for over half the year.
Holiday Episodes. This was usually a money saver in the long run, as many shows we would rerun previous holiday episodes instead of making new ones each year.
This Episode Recorded In Front Of A Live Audience. This message let people know that the show they're watching is essentially being performed like a play. The laughter and applause they hear was a genuine (sort of, read the next enrty) response from the audience recorded at the time. I think they may also want people to attend a filming of an episode.
Canned Laughter. You can read about this yourself as there is a long and interesting history of this, if you want to Google it. Basically, it was fake laughter at the jokes, so it was not dependent on the live audience.
Two Staircases. This last one was just an issue for me, I think. Houses in old sit-coms often had two staircases. This would be so actors could enter scenes easily either in a living room or kitchen. It always bothered me, though, as these were just regular sized houses that had two sets of stairs almost right next to each other on each side of a wall.
Test Patterns. Once the last showed played, usually around midnight, TV just stopped. In the US, they would play the Star Spangled Banner, and then a test pattern would come on, and just nothing until 6:00AM the next morning.
Black and White. In the 70's and 80's there was not enough new TV to fill out the days, so a lot of the time, you would get old black and white reruns in the morning and afternoons.
Let me know if you have any others you remember.
