The co-option of other people's nostalgias through television

Having fallen into an inexplicable future-contemplating malaise in which figuring out what to do next year has become impossible, I spent all day today in bed watching reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show on Hulu. I watched the Mary Tyler Moore Show more regularly during the pre-internet period of my childhood, when most of the media I consumed was channeled through either the local oldies station or Nick-at-Nite, and if anyone had asked me what year it was, I likely would've replied 1972.

Because my parents both worked in the evenings and I terrorized all my babysitters so thoroughly that they refused to return after a few months with me, I finally won the privilege of staying at home alone by the time I was nine or so. I liked to pretend that this was a great assertion of my maturity and independence, but in fact, like probably most children who watch horror movies and the 9 o'clock news, I was terrified of being home alone, and even came up with the brilliant strategy of hiding in the washing machine should burglars or the Chucky doll attack. (Unlike other brilliant plans of that time, like mistaking Shake 'n Bake for a kind of meat-flavored pixie stick powder and mistaking my lawn for a different kind of 'grass,' I consider the washing machine ploy a clever strategy to this day.)

However, I discovered that an effective way to overcome home alone fear was by drowning it out with television. Starting at about 7 pm, I would turn on the TV, and it would command my attention until my mother came home, or I was too sleepy to be afraid any longer. Since I watched and therefore trusted Nickelodeon during the day, I, with my firm small child brand loyalty, assumed it would not fail me in the evenings. I'm not sure I even realized there was anything different about Nick-at-Nite except that the shows were from a time when the world had no color, but that time was in most crucial respects, no different from the present. (My parents' photos of the '60s and '70s were also black and white, so I concluded that this was in fact the state of reality at the time rather than merely a limitation of technology. It seemed sad that, only 30 years ago, people lived in a gray world, but who was I to question the magic of scientific progress?)

In 1994, Nick-at-Nite's programming began with Rocky and Bullwinkle, which was a cartoon, and so obviously intended for children, right? That was, like, one of the immutable laws of television. The Cold War satire was so far over my head that it didn't occur to me that Boris Badanov and Natasha Nogoodnik were anything but completely reasonable Russian names, and I was pleased that the show featured my people. I wondered in passing every week why the plot never seemed to move forward, but assumed I was just missing the crucial broadcasts at other times that would've made the story intelligible.

By means of this cunning ploy, I was eased into all the other exciting programming intended for people who wanted to relive their sock hop memories, and so now these are my memories, sans actual sock hops. (Though Happy Days is, in hindsight, a particularly meta example of this kind; having been intended to deliver 1950s nostalgia to the 1970s, I instead encountered it without any context in the 1990s. I assumed it was pretty realistic, like everything else on the teevee.)

Anyway, long story short(ened, relatively), now that I am a more historicized person, the Mary Tyler Moore Show appears to be both absurdly corny and based on two completely outdated premises:
1. Mary leaves a guy whom she dated for two years because he didn't propose to her. Everyone on the show agrees that two years is practically an eternity to date without getting married.
2. When Mary wants to leave the above guy and "start a new life" as a single career woman, she moves to Minneapolis.

Times change quickly. (Even more so when one considers that color was only introduced into the world around 1978.)