Robo-James' Time Machine: Nostalgia for the Young People!

Robo-James’ Time Machine has been indulging in my nostalgia all this week, but the delightful thing about America is that nostalgia is no longer merely for the old. In July, Nickelodeon began running a block of ’90s kids’ shows in late night, for not-that-alter-kockers (call them alternakockers?) who want to remember the hits of their recent childhood, including Doug, Kenan & Kel and Clarissa Explains It All.

Even as someone who was an adult in the ’90s, I have to admit that that was a motherlode of classic Nick, though my own memories run more to Ren & Stimpy, Catdog and The Adventures of Pete and Pete. But I understand that Tuned Inland includes readers of less-advanced ages, so I ask you: what do you miss about these shows? Was it a more innocent time? Were you more innocent? And what I’m most curious about: how old were you when you first found yourself feeling seriously nostalgic for your childhood?

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Robo-James' Time Machine: Is This the Worst Sitcom of All Time?

God bless our friends at the Shout! Factory company, the TV archivists who have been bringing back some of TV’s most obscure creations of the past on DVD. This week, they’ve put on the market—and thus, presumably, subjected some of their employees to watching—season one of what may be the single most unintentionally creepy sitcom [...]

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Robo-James' Time Machine: When Bad Titles Happen to Not-Quite-So-Bad Shows

A reader on Twitter last week tweeted me with a suggestion: would it be a good idea for Cougar Town (which has been struggling in the ratings, though picked up for a second season) to change its stupid name in order to attract more viewers? My gut reaction is that Cougar Town needs to change [...]

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Robo-James' Time Machine: When TV Shows Change Their Theme Songs; or, Betrayal!

When I heard the new theme song for Big Love this season, it was like a punch in the gut. In general, I’m not much of a fan of repurposing already-written songs as themes (with exceptions; it worked for The Wire). But I cannot possibly see what Earthly good one can expect it to do [...]

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Robo-James' Time Machine: Championship Titles

I am writing this post at a point in the past, at which I do not yet know if I managed to write a review of HBO’s new How to Make It in America before I went on vacation. If I did, however, I might have noted that this was another HBO series that makes [...]

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Robo-James' Time Machine: The Trouble With Remakes

What’s the next generation of network TV dramas? At least some executives think that it’s the last generation of TV dramas, or the one before that. Among the pilots ordered up lately at the broadcast networks have been remakes of Prime Suspect, Hawaii 5-0 and, at NBC, one of that network’s classics, The Rockford Files. [...]

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Vacation Robo-Post: The Day the World Didn't End

Happy New Year! And welcome to the Tens, or the Teens, or the Teenies, or whatever the hell we’re going to call them! More important, congratulations on making it through the last decade, which some newsmagazine termed The Decade from Hell. As you’ll recall, the previous decade began with the dire prediction that a computer [...]

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Who Cares About a Melrose Place Remake?

As the New York Times told us yesterday, only the olds use Twitter. Readers of Tuned In are uniformly young and beautiful, and so you have no idea that, over on Twitter, some of us elderly TV critics—breathing the stench of the grave with every tweet—have been debating how the new CW remake stands up [...]

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He Had a First Name. It Was O-S-C-A-R.

Oscar Mayer, the purveyor of meats who shared a name with the company he chaired, died Monday at age 95. It’s a little odd to feel nostalgia for the passing of a man who, I would guess, most of us did not know except for the name attached to his products. But Mayer’s company, and [...]