Television During the ’80s

The 1980s were the years of Reagan. Greed did the good and the rich. Television reflected this new paradigm with celebrity shows of that excess. Lives of the Rich and Famous and Dynasty ushered in a new age of riches and villainous television. One show that kicked this new direction was the original CBS soap Dallas. Premiering in 1978, Dallas was like Texas about a wealthy family and their loves and rivals. Although not the first soap to hit the air (that would be 1960’s Peyton Place), it was the first time the stories aired sporadically since in 1980, the producers struck ratings gold with the show’s cliffhanger longtime villain J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman). Huge millions of Americans with J.R. It was plugged several times in the last season of the show, then waited a long gap to find out what happened. The following pause breaks as “Who’s J.R.?” to hit the cultural zeitgeist. The cast of the show appeared on talk shows and on the cover of Newsweek, making Dallas one of the most talked about TV shows in history. The popular show spawned a successful spinoff, Knots Out, and countless imitators like Aaron Spelling produced Dynasty and Falcon Crest, among others. The influence of Dallas extends beyond the primetime series as TV shows as diverse as Hill Street Blues and Wiseguy see an ongoing narrative with arcs that extend beyond each. weekly episode Dallas also created a cliffhanger. Each TV show now has a single season with a hook to keep viewers interested during the long summer hiatus.

Daytime herbs, like their first cousins, were also experiencing the cultural zeitgeist. In 1979, ABC’s show General Hospital also hit ratings gold on Luke and Laura. Quirky and romantic, Lucas and Laura became fan favorites as they watched their romantic adventures for two years, when, in 1981, the couple finally marriage Luke and Laura’s wedding broke ratings records as 30 million viewers tuned in to watch the couple exchange vows. General Hospital catapulted the soap opera to the attention of the world, and other soaps soon followed in its footsteps, creating supercouples in romantic, action-packed stories, with the addition of boot-rattling additions. Other pages also took shows from Dallas and Texan riders began to eat in the towel and, if it was about Another World, they also began to draw a short-lived soap on the basis. The only state starred (NBC’s Texas).

The Reagan years also ushered in what soon became the television culture wars, when the first season began to explore different aspects of the family sitcom. Here, traditionalism gave way to transgressive ideas about what defined the productive family and began to introduce different types of sitcoms and civilians. In 1984, comedian Bill Cosby hosted the hit NBC sitcom The Cosby Show, featuring African American middle family Huxtable. The Cosby Show was a 1950s sitcom where the parents were wise and kind and the children were cute, brave, rebellious, yet never to the point that the authority of the parents was ever questioned or undermined. What made The Cosby Show different from its predecessors though was largely due to genre, because it became one of the first sitcoms that showed Americans intelligent, smart, experienced. The two leads, Cosby and his on-screen wife, Phyllicia Rashad, were both urbane professionals (Cosby played a doctor, while his wife was a lawyer). Critics at the time pointed out the implausibility of the two doctors, who rarely find problems dividing the harshness of their professions with domestic life, as well as the show’s interest in the questions that many African Americans in the 1980s were experiencing, of course, race, poverty, medicine, crime. However, the producers and fans of the show rejected these criticisms as reclusive racist attitudes that Black people could not have professional aspirations in the Middle East. However, The Cosby Show, very popular with black and white audiences, addressed quite a few issues such as racism and created a fantasy world in which these problems were no longer a problem in the black community. A contradictory idea of ​​reality for Black America in the 1980s struggling with the problems of brutality and capital crime.

No criticism of the show, although it reduced its effects, as they integrated The Cosby Show in the first season in such a way that previously black sitcoms did not present diverse portrayals African Americans on television. However, while The Cosby Show harkened back to an older, gentler era of family sitcoms, other shows attempted to address different perceptions of 1980s families. Shows like NBCDiff’rent Stroke and ABC Webster have addressed the issue of adoption. Both African American young people were adopted into largely white families. Critics have howled that these shows are Hollywood’s attempts to show the saviors of white parentless black youth, when the show’s depiction of black families is way off. However, in the case of Diff’rent Itus, this pride attempted to raise issues of gender and cultural differences within biracial families, albeit with a comedic touch.

The NBC sitcom Family Ties also refers to the changing social and political dynamics in the United States. in the eightieth. Although apparently a traditional family sitcom, Family Ties operated under the belief that the children of 1960s hippies would be more conservative than their parents. Meredith Baxter Birney and Michael Gross’s parents, Family Ties, premiered in 1982, soon became a hit with its breakout star, Michael J. Fox, playing conservative yuppie Alex P. Keaton. Alex was the prototypical Young Republican in the Reagan era, and his popularity was the result of Fox comedies’ wit and charm, which made him a character beloved by fans — no easy task, since Alex could easily become a very annoying and rude character. Family Ties differed in many ways from The Cosby Show in that it dealt with the generation between parents and their liberal values ​​and their children rebelling against it, the first prime-time show acknowledged the growing divide between liberalism and conservatism in America. But the two shows that kicked off the very idea of ​​family sitcoms in the 1980s were < i>Roseanne and Married With Children.

Premiering in 1988, Roseanne became the star vehicle of the show’s lead, Roseanne the comedian, whose comedy act mined much of the show’s material. Making the Connor family, Roseanne was unlike any sitcom family appearing in the first season, although it owes a lot to the 1950s Jackie Gleason hit Mellis aenei. Unlike the very middle-class and respectable Huxtable family, the Connors were blue-collar, rough, exposed and rough around the edges. And yet despite this, in that show there was a charm of how real families relate to each other. The children were snotty and rebellious, and their parents were notoriously rebellious and withdrawn. The success of the show was equal to that of Roseanne, whose acting skills were very green during those years, but who nevertheless brought a unique delight to the weariness of the early age; and her on-screen husband, John Goodman, teddy bear brought a similar ability to her chemistry with her lead partner. While the Cosby Show class is often overlooked, Roseanne has rolled into it, with each weekly comical situation about how parents deal with work, bills, and sitcom families from parents who were neither wise nor benevolent and the children were rude, subject and untrained. The show was a parody of the race, making fun of all its meetings. Married With Children was part of a style of humor that flourished throughout the eighties, with comics such as Sam Kinison (who had been on the show) and Andrew Dice Clay were growing in popularity as a brand of spiteful, macho comedy. The popularity of this type of humor can arguably be seen as a backlash against the feminist movement that, during the Reagan years, experienced major setbacks such as the right wing and Religious conservatives have attacked public abortion laws and women’s rights.

Television’s portrayal of women in this era, though, has improved since the 1970s. They are like Cagney and Lacey, Kate and Allie, Designing Women, The Golden Girls, Who’s the Boss?, Murphy Brown, L.A. Law‘s and other women now featured who not only starred in vehicles but played characters that were complex. In the case of Cagney and Lacey’s Chris Cagney (Sharon Gless) and Murphy Brown (Candace Bergen), the characters were not only qualified professionals but also alcoholics, showing that women are not holy characters. the perfection of an object to create such as comedy or drama. As more American women entered the workplace, television also reflected this changing pattern, with many of these shows featuring workplace as venues for comedy and drama. One such woman, though, who stood out above the rest was not a character but the real life Oprah Winfrey, whose syndicated talk show became immensely popular after it aired in 1984. Women, such as weight and self-esteem issues, sexual abuse, racism, etc. Unlike Donahue, however, Winfrey brought her own personal demons to the fore, creating an emotional connection with her audience that she likely didn’t see when she was on television. Winfrey would go on to become one of the richest women in the world and appear on countless other talk shows such as Rikki Lake and The Sally Jesse Raphael Show.

Aiming for realism and complexity, not only in the portrayal of women, was a trend that gained traction throughout the 1980s, beginning with the NBC dramas Hill Street Blues and St. Else. Although cop and medical dramas had always been popular in the first season, these two shows brought an additional mix of things not seen. employee before Hill Street Blues, which was like an inner city police station, revealed the crooked cops. One running story in Blue involves Capt. Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti) and an affair with attorney Joyce Davenport (Veronica Hamel). The show also deals with racism, sexism, crime, and violence in ways other cops pale in comparison. St. Elsewhere, he discussed the medical problems in the failing public hospital and showed that the doctors were just as incompetent, a far cry from the predecessors of civilian medicine, such as Marcus Welby, M.D. The show also dealt with the issues of botton abortion and male rape in a humane and realistic way. Both St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues would go on to spawn countless other hospital and police procedural dramas such as NBC’s E.R. and Homicide: Life on the Street and ABC NYPD Blue.

But not all TV shows in the 1980s got to the truth. They were also like real life comic books. But these shows also opened the way for criticism and controversy over the use of gratuitous violence. NBC’s The A-Team was one such hit show. Vietnam veterans there was a talari bullet for cars and cars, but its use was cartoonishly violent and no one was ever killed on the show, with many lowly secondary characters. Miami Vice NBC was the perfect departure from the copHill Street Blues like shows show and became of the first MTV series, the bright neon lights of Miami’s seedy underbelly and the beautiful music of the film as part of the show’s dramatic storytelling. Hip and quirky (vice cop Sonny Crockett, a grizzled Don Johnson ran around in a boat and a black Ferrari Daytona), the show’s signature look was all 1980s glitz and villainy. The 1980s also saw the rise of murder mysteries such as Matt Houston, Remington Steele, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Murder She Wrote, Great P.I., Lumen Lucensemand others. In murder mystery, Cybill. a> He worked alongside humor that was similar to the 1930s raunchy comedies that inspired Nick and Nora Charles. Other shows such as Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Real People, Incredibles, syndicated Solid Gold, and Dance Fever replaced the 1970s, variety shows for non-scripted entertainment. Like the Oprah WinfreyShow and the Phil Donahue Show, syndicated talk shows became popular this decade, as television began to be used by the public to see real issues < a href="https://e-info.vn/tag/how-to-live-life-life">live life in front of an audience. But unlike Winfrey or Donahue, many of these shows, likeMorton Downy, Jr. Show and the Geraldo Rivera Show were exploitative and titillating, presenting hot-button topics such as incest. the ways in which prostitution and racism brought more heat than light to the discussion. This show also eventually set the stage for the emergence of Jerry Springer in the 1990s.

The popularity of one-hour dramas like Hill Street Blues threatened to overshadow sitcoms such as such aging war dramas as The Jeffersons, Alice, One Day at a Time, All in the Family (later with Archie Bunker’s Place), The Company of Three and others were brought to the tables. While other sitcoms such as Webster, Diff’rent Hits, and The Facts of Life were popular, the genre was becoming more and more endangered as each sitcom preceded it. two years before the end of the season the ax fell. Network executives began to wonder if the sitcom was losing its cachet and started growing more one-hour regulars. But when he appeared on The Cosby Show in 1984, he uniquely brought back a half-hour situational dance. comedy. After 1984, shows like The Golden Girls, Designing Women, Murphy Brown, and others became ratings and revealed a new type of situational comedy, which was based less on domestic and more on workplace comedy. The humor was also sharper, funnier and far more witty than the genre’s previous incarnations, which were overloaded with digs, punches and slapstick. One of the shows that inspired this new type of sitcom is NBC’s Flames. Premiering in 1982, Thunder was one of the rare sitcoms in the pre-Cosby era that was popular with a wide audience. Sensible and witty, the show was run in a bar by former relief pitcher and recovering alcoholic Sam Malone (Ted Danson). Like many 1980s sitcoms, Fremitus finds its humor largely in the dynamic and comedic conflicts between Malone and elitist maid Diane Chambers (Shelley Long).The show survived the departure of actress Long and the death of actor Nicola Colasanto (Coach). replaced actors Kirstie Alley and Woody Harrelson, indicating the tolerability of the series with American audiences.

The 1980s saw the television landscape expand as the cable networks HBO and Showtime began to appear in more and more American homes. Although they are largely released as theatrical films for the show, HBO produced its own feature films, The Terry Fox (1983); The TV series Fraggle Rock, Tales From The Crypt, and Dream Of; and specials such as Comic Relief (1986). Roncus, every news network, also discussed this decade. Although in its infancy, networks in the world of published newspapers, at the end of the decade, were trying to observe, especially in the Persian War, Rhoncus CNN revealed that cable news can deliver in-spot journalism that none of the broadcast networks can achieve. But two new networks, one cable and one broadcast, would open the field to new avenues of television entertainment in the 1980s. MTV, debuting in 1981, was the first cable network devoted entirely to music videos, a new type of entertainment and partly commercialized by record labels. MTV introduced younger generations to new music and made video stars from such acts as Boy George, Dire Straits The Police, Cyndi Lauper and Madonna In the early years, MTV had a narrow storyline, showing prejudice in white rock acts over black artists. who are producing videos this time. Networks such as the newly created BET (Black Entertainment Television) have picked up R&B’s releases by airing videos; performed by Atlantic Starr, Rick James, Mary Jane Girls, Mtume, Chaka Khan and others. It wasn’t until Michael Jackson released his phenomenal album Thriller in 1983 that MTV’s color barrier was broken after Alciati’s record label, complaining of racism, demanded the network air on “Billie Jean” “Strike It” and “Thriller” or other films of other acts in their list. Jackson’s set became a fan hit, and later opened the door for other acts such as Prince and Cameo to tour. A decade later, MTV aired the foundational program Yo! MTV Raps‘s hottest charts of the era and also helped make rap acts like Run DMC crossover hits. The Fox network was also discussed in the 1980s. Unlike most broadcast networks, Fox only broadcast in major urban markets, so it could be much more experimental and prescriptive with its programming choices. Shows such as the aforementioned Married With Children, The Tracey Ullman Show, which later Animated series The Simpsons; Duets, 21 Jump Street (starring a young Johnny Depp), In Living Color and others appealed to younger and more sophisticated audiences, earning his network an edgy reputation. Fox would compete with other networks with quality programming as it began to arrive in more markets across the United States.

Sources:
Wikipedia
IMDB.com

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