…I hate to admit it, but I wasn’t very excited about this topic yesterday. but this morning, I started a list, and it got me remembering…fun times as a child*. when we pored over the tv guide (from the newspaper, never the magazine you could buy separately) each week to see what would be on and we knew “friday night is the brady bunch” and (a few years later) “saturday night is love boat and fantasy island”. don’t get me wrong, I LOVE my dvr and all my cable channels. but tv was so much simpler then, wasn’t it?!

Perry Mason – photo credit

1. Perry Mason. it came on at lunchtime during the summers of my early teen years. I’m sure I had a huge crush on raymond burr. and I also remember making egg salad sandwiches (for one!) to eat while I watched.

2. General Hospital. (sorry mother!). the luke and laura story line was hot my last year of high school. fortunately, school got out in time for us to watch it at 3pm. [and since this whole list is a guilty pleasure, I’ll even admit that I got hooked again the spring of 1987, when I was home with a newborn…I’d plan our day to be home from one til four so I could watch the whole ABC soap lineup. whew, I’m glad I got that off my chest!]

3. M*A*S*H. this one was a favorite with my whole family. marc and I still like to watch, but katie & sara never really caught on.

4. Love Boat and Fanstasy Island. two shows forever linked in my mind because they were the saturday night lineup when I was in high school. I watched when I baby sat. and we watched if it was friends hanging out.

5. The Brady Bunch. I remember it came on at 7pm on friday night (just before The Partridge Family) and I really wanted to watch the whole hour. But my parents liked Sanford and Son (and another show I can’t remember), so I rarely got to see it real-time. I enjoyed the re-runs just as much.

6. It Takes a Thief. (oh my, did this really only air for two and a half seasons??!) I remember this from re-runs. I adored robert wagner (didn’t we all?) and I also loved hart to hart (but that started when I was in college!)

…and now we move to the sixties and seventies chick flick sitcoms. I hope these shows made a lot of our lists!

7. That Girl. sadly, as katie can attest, life as a single girl in manhattan really isn’t that fun!

8. Bewitched .maybe this explains why I’m completely enamored with the all souls series?

9. The Flying Nun.

10. I Dream of Jeannie.

…funny, as I type this I see that three of those last four are about girls with “super” powers. I haven’t seen any episodes of those shows in years. I wonder what I’d think about them – or really, about any on this list! – now.

carole, this was a great topic. thank you!

click here to join the ten on tuesday fun!

*which I’m very loosely interpreting to be through high school. I don’t have many memories of tv before the age of 8 or 9, so I figure giving myself an 8 or 9 year window is probably good!