Where are they now?

More often than not these days when I flip the channel on my TV, I begin to wonder what happened to all the good Tv shows? While there is some interesting programming on Tv nowadays thanks to the age of reality tv, Youtube on your pc and all things portable, I find these choices hard pressed to compete with some of the shows of past and recent past. Think about it, what talk show has been as interesting and entertaining as the Arsenio Hall Show? What show has made you laugh until you’re about to piss in your pants since the Chappelle Show or In Living Color? What show besides Law&Order has been a must see since NY Undercover? Exactly. None. While some people may or may not remember these shows, me and my peers grew up on these shows they were all absolute MUST SEE TV, and if you missed it, you felt like you missed out on winning lottery ticket, because all of your friends would be talking about it and you would in obscurity until the rerun aired. No DVR , no HULU, nothing. You just had to be there to see it. Lately Tv just hasn’t impressed me with the exception of a few shows and the last two I did find interesting are no longer airing(SouthLand- NBC & Life on Mars-ABC).  While I know cable Tv has its multiple options and such, I often hear gripes from people who do have cable similar to this, “Why am I paying for this garbage, there’s almost never anything on I want to see!”.  Even the cartoons nowadays are completely wack. Remember getting up early as hell before your parents woke up on Saturday morning to watch cartoons such as, Voltron, Transformers, He Man, school house rock, Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Looney Tunes,the Snorks, the Monchchichi’s, and what about on those afternoons you’d rush home to watch Tom & Jerry, the Rescue Rangers, HeathCliffe, Dennis the Menace, the Original TMNT and for slightly younger heads, Ducktales ,Tailspin, Animaniacs and the Tiny Toon Adventures.  Now we’re subjected to all kinds of craziness on Tv, cartoons almost never come on in the afternoon anymore and we wonder why our kids nowadays are so damn grown! We took their childhood away thats why! In this day and age you can always walk down memory lane if you’re feeling nostalgic and go to either Youtube and watch clips of your old shows or maybe if your taste is not too exclusive you can get the show’s seasons on DVD.  I also wonder what were they thinking when they took some of these shows off the air, ratings is always the scapegoat, but more often than not, the true reason is often greed and the common “creative differences” excuse us as viewers are left with. Look at the Chappelle show, that was a funny ass show! Hands down there was no competitor to that show’s humor and creativity. However, it is a widely shared speculation that the show was yanked off of the air because they wanted to interfere with Dave’s concepts and the writing of the scripts. Dave was not having that as that show was mostly his and Neal Brennan’s idea. Also from what I’ve heard the people from the network also never really went after the 50$million they gave Dave, because they were for one still able to recoup from merchandising and DVD sales and also, the possibility of a counter suit against them for what would’ve been racial discrimination. This type of ordeal happens often in Tv land and in Hollywood and is truly unfair. I don’t know if I’ll ever see Tv as good as it was before, but when I think back on memory lane, about all of the good shows I’ve seen over the years, I always ask while flipping the channels back and forth, “Where are they now?”.