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graycardinalNow, then:
As one might expect, my markup of the list runs strongly to genre SF and fantasy - but it pretty much skips straight from very old material forward to the Buffyverse and its sisters & cousins & aunts, with not a lot of material in between.
There are, more or less, three major reasons for this. First, the vast majority of the shows I was watching as a teenager just aren't on the list, being largely short-run series that didn't last long enough to find an audience - Bill Bixby's Magician, one-season wonders a la The Fantastic Journey or Cliffhangers!, or outright weirdness on the order of Automan and Manimal. Second, I was a very hard sell for pretty much any sort of situation comedy that didn't have a genre hook; far too many of them, then and now, relied on humiliation-driven "jokes", and I'd been the target of too many of those in real life to enjoy seeing them on TV.
Third, and perhaps most significantly, my brother and I grew up in the TV generation where syndicated reruns ruled the airwaves on most afternoons, especially where local non-network stations were concerned. And our local independent had three series in particular that allowed it to dominate the daytime ratings for decades on end - Perry Mason, the original Star Trek, and Batman. They knew their audience, and quickly got on board when they were offered Babylon 5 and the revived Star Trek shows, and did very well in that corner of the market.
Even today, I gravitate away from the high end of the TV ratings curve. I'm still a hard sell for sitcoms. I'm still drawn to relatively lighter fare as opposed to prime-time soaps, violent police dramas, or grimdark shows where capital-E Evil consistently has the upper hand. And my taste in game shows runs to the smarter ones - Jeopardy or The Chase and even $100,000 Pyramid over "reality" TV in the mode of Survivor. (Do not even get me started on The Bachelor and its uncles and its brothers and its sons. Gahhh!, say I.)
And that's why my annotations look the way they do - the greater proportion of what I've liked well enough to be fannish about (and, nowadays, to write for), simply isn't represented on the list as it's come down to me.
As one might expect, my markup of the list runs strongly to genre SF and fantasy - but it pretty much skips straight from very old material forward to the Buffyverse and its sisters & cousins & aunts, with not a lot of material in between.
There are, more or less, three major reasons for this. First, the vast majority of the shows I was watching as a teenager just aren't on the list, being largely short-run series that didn't last long enough to find an audience - Bill Bixby's Magician, one-season wonders a la The Fantastic Journey or Cliffhangers!, or outright weirdness on the order of Automan and Manimal. Second, I was a very hard sell for pretty much any sort of situation comedy that didn't have a genre hook; far too many of them, then and now, relied on humiliation-driven "jokes", and I'd been the target of too many of those in real life to enjoy seeing them on TV.
Third, and perhaps most significantly, my brother and I grew up in the TV generation where syndicated reruns ruled the airwaves on most afternoons, especially where local non-network stations were concerned. And our local independent had three series in particular that allowed it to dominate the daytime ratings for decades on end - Perry Mason, the original Star Trek, and Batman. They knew their audience, and quickly got on board when they were offered Babylon 5 and the revived Star Trek shows, and did very well in that corner of the market.
Even today, I gravitate away from the high end of the TV ratings curve. I'm still a hard sell for sitcoms. I'm still drawn to relatively lighter fare as opposed to prime-time soaps, violent police dramas, or grimdark shows where capital-E Evil consistently has the upper hand. And my taste in game shows runs to the smarter ones - Jeopardy or The Chase and even $100,000 Pyramid over "reality" TV in the mode of Survivor. (Do not even get me started on The Bachelor and its uncles and its brothers and its sons. Gahhh!, say I.)
And that's why my annotations look the way they do - the greater proportion of what I've liked well enough to be fannish about (and, nowadays, to write for), simply isn't represented on the list as it's come down to me.
