Shows That Are Difficult to Watch Now

[Retro4Life]

I'm looking here for shows that you once enjoyed but find hard to watch now; not necessarily because you think they aren't good anymore, but because of circumstances that happened in real life relating to the show.

For instance, one of mine is ALF. I used to mildly enjoy it, but after reading how painful the experience of filming it was (and basically, how happy most of the cast was to have it end), it's hard to find laughs there now.

I'm assuming the same could be said of The Cosby Show, though I never really watched that anyway.

I think Diff'rent Strokes might be creeping toward that category, too. All of the kids suffered terribly afterward; just hard to see it the same way anymore.

[Heenan Fan]

Definitely The Cosby Show. The reason is not only that Cosby is a pitiful rapist, but more so because of all the people that knew about it (including the U.S. government) and decided to cover it up. Pathetic!

[TMC]

7th Heaven - It's extremely uncomfortable seeing Stephen Collins portray this pious father figure when in real life, he by his own admission, inappropriately touched children in a previous life. TV Tropes has a whole list of this sort of stuff in a category called "Harsher in Hindsight". There's also a slight variant of this trope called "Funny Aneurysm Moment".

[Dextroque]

First comes to mind Sex and The City....have I really been that superficial back then?!

[Mace Dolex]

ALF - yeah back when The HUB was airing it I couldn't find anything funny about it, jokes are dull and ALF is just plain obnoxious.

Blossom - since it aired in the same block as Fresh Prince I would just leave it on as background noise but it just seamed too preachy and angsty, I didn't like my days in high school so I guess that's why I didn't like the show much.

[TMC]

Originally Posted by Mace Dolex

ALF - yeah back when The HUB was airing it I couldn't find anything funny about it, jokes are dull and ALF is just plain obnoxious.

Blossom - since it aired in the same block as Fresh Prince I would just leave it on as background noise but it just seamed too preachy and angsty, I didn't like my days in high school so I guess that's why I didn't like the show much.

I think ALF doesn't hold up much anymore because the novelty wears thin pretty quickly. When ALF came on the air, it was essentially ET: The Sitcom, if ET was a furry, smart-aleck with an appetite for cats. If anything, it really was a title character centric show, where everybody else quite literally had to react to what ALF had to say and his shenanigans for the week. It kind of got redundant after a while. It wasn't like it had anything much to say from a satirical point of view like say another puppetry sitcom around the same time period, Dinosaurs.

With Blossom, I think that particular show doesn't really hold up anymore (besides feeling way too much like a product of the '90s but the charm of say a Saved by the Bell or a Boy Meets World to get a way with it) because was the type of show that seemed to more than often deftly tip-toeing around dealing with the characters' problems. To put things into proper perspective, while the series dealt with serious issues, it missed the opportunity to really go above the teenage courtship hazards it relied too heavily on. For example, it's emphasized that Blossom's older brother Tony is a former addict, but this was very rarely used in the series to actually handle the issue of drinking or doing drugs. There was also too much flavor of the week type stuff, which led into poor character development. This was mainly because the cast size was so small. So in order the get the biggest impact, the writers would shove an issue on the shoulders of one character without any previous hints of the issue in question (and expected the audience to just fly with it). This in turn made the writing itself a bit sloppy. Ultimately, the dark subject matter presented this lightly creates a show that is tonally jarring and rarely funny. And even show's trademark fantasy sequences may have further detached most people from the emotions of the characters.

[TMC]

Originally Posted by Heenan Fan

Definitely The Cosby Show. The reason is not only that Cosby is a pitiful rapist, but more so because of all the people that knew about it (including the U.S. government) and decided to cover it up. Pathetic!

Outside of Bill Cosby's off-camera indiscretions, in its time, The Cosby Show was a good show. At the time, The Cosby Show was doing things other sitcoms hadn't done a lot of. It showed positive family relationships and parents who took their jobs seriously and weren't dimwits like a lot of sitcom dads and moms. I think the intention was to show America that not all interesting black people lived in the projects (a la Good Times or Sanford & Son), that they could be educated and articulate and well situated.

[TMC]

Originally Posted by Alan Brady's Hair

Patty Duke Show a little, because we've found that Patty Duke was often very unhappy. I thought that Roseanne Barr was very funny when she started doing standup, but had stopped watching her long before her sitcom started because it was obvious that she was basically out of her mind. Mork and Mindy's a bit like that, too, with Robin Williams's look-at-me schtick coming off as relentlessly needy.

Mork and Mindy was a show that despite its rather thin premise and bland supporting cast, was really buoyed by Robin Williams' soaring star power. I think that's why it in a way, lasted much longer (at some point in Season 2 it started wearing out its welcome and just got worse and worse until it was finally put out of its misery in Season 4) than it really deserved.