One of my friends owns a giant pile of crappy 80's television on DVD for reasons that are, at best, inexplicable. I was at his house last New Year's Eve/Day, and we realized:

1) TV technology has quietly improved quite a bit. Forget about special effects, like Airwolf re-re-re-using the same 5 "helicopter flying past" scenes in every chase, or the stuff on the A-Team that explodes before being hit. Just the sound and the picture quality looks like stuff you or I could do with a digital camcorder now. It's like when you pass by ESPN Classic, and they're performing the oh-so-valuable community service of re-running regular season Clippers games from 1982, and it looks bootlegged. You didn't notice it then, but it doesn't age well.

1B) The above goes triple for any music featured in said TV shows. The less said there, the better.

2) Modern TV seems to have bifurcated towards little/no writing ('reality' shows, coin-flip game shows, etc.) or decent writing. Not so back then. Any given episode of MacGyver has plot holes that B.A. Baracus (*) could drive a semi through. You could set your watch so it beeped five seconds before Michael Knight pushed Turbo Boost. Voltron was less predictable than this stuff. You could tell the writers were exclusively people who couldn't get a job in movies, and that their competition was a Very Special Episode where Punky Brewster horks after eating too many Zagnut bars.

Nowadays, TV shows seem to have learned from getting their butts kicked by HBO in the reviews, and there's at least a sector of the market that writes good stuff.

2B) Whoever cancelled Deadwood, Carnivale, and Rome apparently so that HBO would have more room for Lucky Louie should be locked in a closet full of badgers.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

(*): Mr. T: Great actor, or the greatest actor? If you don't live somewhere where you're spammed with the Comcast commercial where Mr. T. crashes through some guy's bathroom wall like the Kool-Aid Man because he's singing "Born to Be Wild" with all the lyrics wrong ("Lookin' for a mon-kay...."), you need to move. See also the Conan O'Brien sketch where Conan and Mr. T. go apple picking in Vermont.