I feel the same way. Ironically, I think it's the more MOR stuff that has performed better overall in reruns, even though very little of it holds up today.
I was born in '79, but I consider myself a Gen-X'er or Xennial, because I absorbed a lot of television in the '80's and '90's. (Not to brag or anything, but I still recall watching "Happy Days" and "Three's Company" as a child - not as reruns on some local station, but on ABC). And I definitely felt the same way as you about WKRP: that it was "modern" for late '80's or early '90's, even though CBS cancelled it when I was about two. That might be why the show performed much better in syndication than it ever did on the network. (Well, that, and because, people actually could find it for once, lol).
For me, when it comes to half-hour comedies, there's Before "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and After. Before MTM, I watched a lot of great television - "Cheers," "Cosby," "Roseanne," GG, DW, "Murphy Brown," etc. - and I watched a lot of bad. But MTM was the half-hour show - which I started watching by accident one Sunday morning on a local station, because it was early and I always woke up early on Saturdays and Sundays for some reason - that rearranged how I saw the genre. I realized that you didn't have to place characters in "wacky" situations that stretched credibility in order to tell jokes and make people laugh. Sometimes, all you had to do was just exploit the characters' very real, very common foibles; and in fact, the laughs will be deeper, because the characters and their predicaments will be more relatable. (By the way, the episode I watched was the one where Mary attempted to help her former cellmate, played by Barbara Colby, find a new line of work after spending years on the streets as a prostitute).
I often compare that experience of watching MTM for the first time with how John Cusack described seeing "Apocalypse Now" for the first time: it was as if someone had blown off the back of my head with a shotgun. I knew afterward that my life as a TV viewer would not be the same, and it wasn't.
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Khan ·
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