25 Beloved TV Shows That Haven't Aged Well

The Internet's helped to create a culture of nostalgia. There are myriad ways that we express our love of the bygone television shows of our youth. We like them on Facebook, we change our banner or our avatar to our favorite picture of Tommy Pickles or Cory Matthews, and of course, we make lists about them. The sad truth is that when you finally hop into your Netflix time machine and look at those old shows with fresh eyes, you realize that many were never that good to begin with. Plots that once felt fresh feel hackneyed. Characters that used to resonate feel broadly drawn and poorly motivated. Jokes that had our 13-year-old selves in stitches fill the room with nothing more than disappointed silence.

We took a look at many of the shows that we used to love to see if they stood the test of time; these are the programs that fell flat. Here are 25 Beloved TV Shows That Haven't Aged Well.

Written by Brenden Gallagher (@muddycreekU)

Network: NBC
Air dates: 1991-1995
Stars: Mayim Bialik, Joey Lawrence, Micahel Stoyanov, Jenna von Oy

After spending the afternoon watching Family Matters and Full House, Blossom felt different and vibrant. There's a lot of potential in a comedy that begins with a mother walking out on a family, an opportunity to establish a unique tone, but Blossom shies away from the chance, deftly tip-toeing around dealing with the characters' problems. Even episodes with edgy plot points like Anthony's (Michael Stoyanov) alcoholism or Joey's (Joey Lawrence) soliciting a prostitute, are handled as superficially as Full House handles narratives about characters being homesick on Christmas.

Dark subject matter presented this lightly creates a show that is tonally jarring and rarely funny. The show's trademark fantasy sequences further detach us from the emotions of the characters, creating a show so light that it never touches us at all.

Network: ABC
Air dates: 1985-1992
Stars: Richard Dean Anderson, Dana Elcar

MacGyver is remembered for the main character's (Richard Dean Anderson) ingenuity, his ability to solve any problem with available materials. Actually watching these episodes (instead of, you know, using the title as a joking allusion), reveals that there was little creativity left for plotting and character development.

This is a painfully mundane action procedural, complete with reliance on hastily written voice over, hackneyed villains, and heavy doses of superficial sexual tension between MacGyver and his female cohorts. There were many pulpy action films of this era that hold up today despite the cliches of genre, movies that managed character development and slick storytelling while delivering thrills (see much of the Paul Verhoeven catalogue). It seems that action television of the era couldn't marshal the resources to produce quality story along with the expected stunts and martial arts sequences required of a show like MacGyver.

Network: Syndication (Season 1), CBS
Air dates: 1961-1966
Stars: Alan Young, Connie Hines, Allan "Rocky" Lane, Bamboo Harvester

"When I'm not on a diet, I eat like a horse. Not like OUR HORSE." *LAUGH TRACK*

If anyone tells you that they don't make television like they used to, we would encourage a side-by-side comparison of Mr. Ed and Breaking Bad, and a moment of thanks that this is the case. Sure, animal based comedy is still hot today, but no one mistakes Air Bud or Animal Practice for classics in the same way we have with Mr. Ed and Lassie. Mr. Ed lacks the spark of the actual comedy gems of the period, resorting to broad bickering between the romantic leads and easy punning from the equine star for laughs.

Thankfully, we were spared a Mr. Ed reboot in 2004, when Fox declined to pick up a Mr. Ed pilot starring Sherman Hemsley.

Network: CBS
Air dates: 1993-2001
Stars: Chuck Norris, Clarency Gilyard, Sheree J. Wilson, Noble Willingham

The Chuck Norris love has become so deeply ingrained in our culture, it's easy to forget where the hero worship came from. The hyper-masculine memeing of Chuck Norris had its genesis in the ridiculous events of Walker, Texas Ranger. Between the comically broad patriotic overtones, the cheaply executed fight scenes, and the crudely drawn villains, the only way to appreciate Walker, Texas Ranger today is with extreme irony, and even that's a stretch.

The directorial approach for the villains in Walker seems to have been "Can you make your voice more gravelly?" The writers attempts to pepper in needless exposition to further build the legend of Walker's toughness feel like the stuff of a middle school screenwriting class. For example, in a meeting, an old war buddy feels the need to mention that Walker had "a bullet wound that would have killed anyone less stubborn."

Some shows can pull off camp in an enjoyable way that cultivates a dedicated, if narrow, fan base. Despite all of the memeifcation of the Texas Ranger, this is not one of those shows.

Network: Nickelodeon
Air dates: 1989-1991
Stars: Christine Taylor, David Brisbin, Kelly Brown, Geoffrey Coy, Jonathan Galkin

We remember Hey, Dude as being far better than it was because we associate the series with the stronger pieces of Nickelodeon's 1990s live-action slate. Unique, charming shows like The Adventures of Pete and Pete and Clarissa Explains it All still hold their rightful place in our hearts. Rather than utilizing fun narrative devices and quirky characters like these shows did, Hey, Dude is just another sitcom with good looking high schoolers in barely funny situations. The show handles "after school special" content particularly poorly; in episodes like the alcoholism-focused "Melody's Brother" (Season 3, Episode 11), the earnest, saccharine approach leaves us wishing they would get back to the cheesy gags of run-of-the-mill episodes.

We should be thankful for Hey, Dude though. The show gave Graham Yost his start in the business, twenty years before he would go on to create Justified.

Network: ABC, The WB
Air dates: 1994-1999
Stars: Tia Mowry, Tamera Mowry, Tim Reid, Jackée Harry

There are few more boring premises for a television show than separated at birth twins being reunited, and Sister, Sister is no exception. At least the film version of this tired trope, The Parent Trap, had some forward momentum: the twins wanted to hook up their parents. The parents in Sister, Sister don't hook up until they date briefly in season four, and even then, whether or not Lisa (Jackée Harry) and Ray (Time Reid) get together doesn't really matter. It's not that we need parental hookups to buy into a show like this, we just need some engine for potential conflict. Things are generally fine for the sisters—where are the obstacles at?

Once the novelty that they're twins wears off (this takes roughly five minutes), there isn't much left to enjoy on Sister, Sister.

Network: CBS
Air dates: 1964-1967
Stars: Bob Denver, Alan Hale, Jr., Jim Backus, Natalie Schafer

Gilligan's Island has been honored on top-episode lists and retrospectives for years, but we don't get it. It lacks the madcap absurdity and zaniness that has marked great comedies from the Marx Brothers to Police Squad, yet is also without the rich characters and world building that allows more grounded comedies like Cheers and Taxi to endure. The result is a show that's simultaneously not zany enough and not grounded enough.

Gilligan's Island trafficked in some wild flourishes, allowing guest stars to wash up onto the island and creating ridiculously complex props out of bamboo, but used these wild devices to pedestrian, mundane ends. The show had an opportunity to develop rich relationships between the characters who are trapped together, but instead leaves them as broadly drawn caricatures who aren't much deeper than than their one line descriptions in the theme song.

In trying to have it both ways, Gilligan's Island remains perhaps the dullest series that has been generally accepted into the TV comedy pantheon.

Network: CBS
Air dates: 1993-1999
Stars: Fran Drescher, Charles Shaughnessy, Daniel Davis, Luaren Lane, Nicholle Tom, Medline Zima

We're not sure what cruel masochist kept Fran Drescher's voice on network television for six seasons, but the leading lady's voice isn't the only terrible thing about this show. The Nanny is some of the worst of 1990s schticky laugh-track comedy. It's hard to believe that this show held its own in the ratings in an era that brought us Seinfeld, NewsRadio, and Roseanne. While these shows offered well drawn, grounded characters, The Nanny got by with the broadest vaudevillian stock characters television had seen in twenty years. If you want to see stuffy Brits, there are tons of shows from across the pond that are actually funny, and if you can't resist comic stylings of Fran Drescher...then we can't help you.

Network: USA, Spike TV
Air dates: 1993-Present
Stars: WWE Superstars

Adult wrestling fans take a lot of flack. The stereotype is that they're childish man-children who think the sport is real. We know that's not the case, and we're actually jealous of adult wrestling fans. We wish we could gets as excited about professional wrestling as we did in our youth. What we wouldn't give to be able to feel the same joy in watching John Cena and CM Punk that we used to experience when Hulk Hogan, The Rock, and the Undertaker would enter the squared circle. The testosterone laden soap opera, with its table-breaking theatrics and figure-four leg locking finishing moves, was a highlight of our childhood. Then, suddenly, there came a point that the bravado felt hollow, that we just couldn't believe any more. We bet if we polled the young men of America, they would put the day they realized that wrestling was a sham up their with finding out Santa Claus isn't real in terms of traumatic events. We'll always treasure the days that Troy Aikman, Michael Jordan, and Hulk Hogan all felt like to same sort of hero to us.

Network: Nickelodeon
Air dates: 1991-1999
Stars: Billy West, Tom McHugh, Fred Newman, Chris Phillips, Constance Shulman, Becca Lish

'90s Nickelodeon cartoons are beloved for their irreverent sensibilities. Shows like Rugrats, Ren and Stimpy and Ahh! Real Monsters still feel fresh today, and clearly had a strong influence on kids and teen programming that came later. Doug tends to get a pass by association. While most of Nickelodeon's cartoons created vivid, magical worlds, Doug takes place in a world just as boring as our own. The show often used Doug's fantasy life to spice up the plot, much like Mr. Funnie himself, but Doug's dream world is pretty dull, too. His fantasies also rarely move the plot forward, resulting in episodes that have far less story than even the average serialized cartoon. It's hard to imagine that Doug would have been remembered as a childhood favorite if it hadn't landed in the hallowed SNICK line-up.

Network: NBC
Air dates: 1982-1986
Stars: David Hasselhoff, Edward Mulhare, Patricia McPherson, Rebecca Holden

Knight Rider spawned two made-for-TV movies, two television series reboots, and a feature film, so it must be good, right? No. Because, get this, a talking robotic car does not make for a terribly dynamic co-star. Even in the first season, the show resorted to plots that stretched the limits of the already absurd premise. One episode we reviewed, (Season 1, Episode 12, "A Plush Ride") involved a character convincing Michael Knight (Hasselhoff) to hit the road without his trusty car, which is similar to convincing Bruce Wayne to fight crime sans Batman gear.

Of course, we feel for the writing staff, who were saddled with the tough task of keeping this pretty narrow premise feeling fresh. As you can imagine, the creative team was done no favors by the cast anchored by the swaggering bravado of Mr. Hasselhoff. Unfortunately, in reviewing shows we can't really give points for degree of difficulty.

Network: ABC
Air dates: 1991-1999
Stars: Tim Allen, Patricia Richardson, Earl Hindman, Jonathan Taylor Thomas

It's hard being a man, right, men? Tim Taylor's (Allen) non-stop chauvinism is jarring, to put it mildly, in Home Improvement. In ten minutes of one episode (Season 1, Episode 20), Tim mocks his wife's suggestion that they go the opera, dismisses his wife's attempts to help him build a bird house, claims the women shouldn't be working on cars because men don't work on washing machines, and mocks a woman's weight. Sure, once an episode, Tim gets some kind of comeuppance for his failure to "understand women," but he uses a steady stream of crass, sexist humor to get there.

Allen's latest series, Last Man Standing, continues in uncomfortable defense of what he perceives to be male culture. A look back at Home Improvement reminds us that Tim admits he's wrong about ten percent of the time he should, and he isn't half as sorry as he should be for his behavior.

Network: Nickelodeon
Air dates: 1994-2005
Stars: Amanda Bynes, Lori Beth Denberg, Nick Cannon, Kenan Thompson, Kel Mitchell

Creating a successful sketch comedy show is difficult for anyone. Even the best written shows eventually contend with the down years of Saturday Night Live or the burnout of Chapelle's Show, and that's with a writers' room stocked with America's best comedic minds. Creating a sketch show that appeals to kids is a doubly daunting challenge, as you aren't just writing funny, you're writing to what you found funny as a child. Considering the difficulty of the task it took on, it's amazing that the first few years of All That accomplished exactly what the show set out to do: create a program that is to the cafeteria what Saturday Night is to the water cooler. Unfortunately, the broad, easy gags don't translate to an adult comedy audience that rejected Mad TV and Blue Collar TV for similar sins of simplicity.

Sketch comedy can only succeed by zeroing in on its audience: If you're returning to All That as an adult, you are not the target audience. Great musical performances, though.

Network: The WB
Air dates: 1998-2003
Stars: James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams, Joshua Jackson

Dawson's Creek isn't a bad show, it's just that there are some teen dramas that transcend their target demographic and this isn't one of them. We can imagine ourselves looking back and enjoying Friday Night Lights and The Gilmore Girls when we're decades removed from our teenage years, but barely ten years after the end of this series, it's clear that Dawson's Creek was a show for a certain time and place.

The experience of revisiting Dawson's Creek is similar to listening to bands whose CDs you wore out in high school or re-reading those angsty teen novels: You can appreciate how you felt the first time you encountered them, but with the fires of youth extinguished, these works feel insubstantial and irrelevant.

Network: NBC
Air dates: 1983-1987
Stars: George Peppard, Dirk Benedict, Dwight Schultz, Mr. T

We're glad that the A-Team existed, if only to cement Mr. T's place in pop culture history, but the show doesn't offer much else of note. Ultimately, The A-Team suffers from many of the same issues as most other action series from the past: the quality of action sequences that you can see on television now trump The A-Team's offerings, and since plot and character weren't major focuses of the show, there isn't much else to offer viewers of today. The cartoonish violence and resourceful, MacGyver-style resolutions of The A-Team seem ridiculous now, lacking even the realism provided by today's most heightened dramas, or the proper flare and flash to cover it up.

Network: NBC
Air dates: 1965-1970
Stars: Barbara Eden, Larry Hagman, Bill Daily, Hayden Rorke

A female lead who calls her co-star "master" and lives to prepare food and fetch shoes doesn't exactly earn I Dream of Jeannie a place next to The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the pantheon of early feminist comedy. There may be room to see past the troubling gender roles if the series offered original story and fresh jokes (I Love Lucy doesn't always present ideal female role models either), but I Dream of Jeannie is conventional and derivative both in form and content.

Even when the show got around to addressing its gender problem, as they did in season one's "Americanization of Jeannie," the series stopped short of challenging the conventions of the times in the slightest. The chops of Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman, who have done great work in Harper Valley PTA and Dallas respectively, couldn't save this show from its conventional world view and its weak joke delivery.

Network: Syndication
Air dates: 1982-1988
Stars: Adrian Paul, Alexandria Vandernoot, Stan Kirsch, Amanda Wyss

Though Highlander: The Series won awards in its day, watching it now makes us realize how difficult it used to be to adapt films to television. Today, the forms can be traversed with little aesthetic loss; prior to the rise of prestige drama, there was always something missing once a story made the trip from the big screen to the small screen.

The acting in Highlander: The Series is slightly off. The special effects aren't that special. The sense of scope required for a story that spans continents and millenniums is absent. Now we have shows like Friday Night Lights that can expand upon and sometimes top their cinematic inspirations; until recently, the best a television adaptation of a film could aspire to was a fair approximation.

Network: CBS
Air dates: 1979-1985
Stars: Tom Wopat, John Schneider, Cathering Bach, Denver Pyle, Rick Hurst

When a show's most enduring aspect is a pair of short shorts, you know we're not talking about a modern classic. The next most enduring aspect of The Dukes of Hazzard, behind Daisy's legendary pair of dukes, is the car chases: The Duke boys' vehicle of choice, the General Lee, is probably better known than any of the show's characters.

With all the concern over short shorts and car chases, it appears that the creative team wasn't left much time to consider plot, as character and story details are inconsistent from episode to episode. Since the Dukes ran wild through Hazzard, films like the Fast and the Furious franchise have come around to satisfy our vehicular action and T&A needs in ways that shows like The Dukes of Hazzard never could. Now that there are faster cars and more scantily clad women at every turn, what few pleasures The Dukes of Hazzard once provided don't provide much of a thrill.

Network: ABC
Air dates: 1969-1974
Stars: Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, Ann B. Davis, Barry Williams, Maureen Mccormick

Often, when we revisit classic comedies, we're struck by how fresh and vibrant the shows feel despite their age. With The Brady Bunch, the only thing that's striking is the show's incredible dullness.

Despite the rapid-fire dialogue, the scenes feel lethargic, with few jokes and fewer laughs. TV junkies have seen so many family comedies since The Brady Bunch's heyday that have felt so much fresher and offered so many more funny moments. Episodes of The Brady Bunch are at their worst in the their latter halves, when the writers shelve what few jokes they've been telling and resort to "parents know best" moralizing. You quickly find out that the only thing worse than a show trying too hard to force laughs is a comedy that doesn't try for laughs at all.

The common argument is that The Brady Bunch is well remembered due to it's influence on future shows. After revisiting a handful of episodes, it's difficult to see much that's influential beyond the premise. It's even harder to believe that family comedies wouldn't have developed just fine without The Brady Bunch.

Network: ABC
Air dates: 1989-1997
Stars: Jaeleel White, Reginald VelJohnson, Kellie Williams, Telma Hopkins, Jo Marie Payton, Rosetta LeNoire, Darius McCrary

When a show gets hijacked by a minor character, there are consequences. Steve Urkel (Jaleel White) was created as a bit player to punctuate the sitcom trials and tribulations of the Winslow family. After the Winslow family failed to captivate audiences and Urkel mesmerized them, White's nerdy character became the centerpiece of the show. And then, all bets awere off.

Though we remember Urkel fondly for his catchphrases and fashion sense, as a character, the suspender-wearing bespectacled one is only tolerable in small doses. Steve, with his nasal voice and paper-thin characterization. quickly begins to grate on you once you sit back down with Family Matters.

Family Matters is like high school: We remember the great moments fondly and we forget pretty quickly how difficult it was to get through.

Network: Syndication
Air dates: 1995-2001
Stars: Lucy Lawless, Renee O'Connor, Ted Raimi, Kevin Smith

Fantasy television had to come an awful long way to get us to Game of Thrones. Throughout the '90s, the genre's fans had to get their mythological fix from the syndicated sister shows Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journey. Though there was great potential behind these shows, both created by the legendary Robert Tappert (one of the brains behind the original Evil Dead), the television form wasn't yet robust enough to support shows as ambitious as these.

Whereas Game of Thrones has the budgets to film all over the world and cover necessary exposition with ample sex and violence, Xena episodes are front-loaded with weighty exposition and filled out with lackluster special effects and less than impressive battle scenes. Every step of the way you see the compromises they had to make to tell the story, and they aren't pretty.

Back in the day, Xena felt fresh enough that you could forgive seeing the seams. Newer shows have brought fantasy far more convincingly to the small screen, and, as a result, it's difficult to appreciate this dated show today.

Network: Fox
Air dates: 1993-1995
Stars: Austin St. John, Thuy Trang, Walter Emanuel Jones, Amy Jo Johnson

Most superhero shows offer something that helps them age, whether it's the stylized world of Batman: the Animated Series, the charming goofiness of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or the heavy dosage of adult humor in The Tick. Mighty Morphin'Power Rangers is decidedly a child's show, offering no humor or flourishes of style for the viewer looking back from the other side of puberty. It's nothing more than a bland combination of after-school special morality, cheesy gags, and low-budget special effects.

Over the years, the mightiness has certainly worn off.

Network: NBC (Season 1), Syndication
Air dates: 1989-2001
Stars: David Hasselhoff, Pamela Anderson, Parker Stevenson, Shawn Weatherly, Billy Warlock

Given Baywatch's immense international popularity, you'd think that the show has more to offer than T&A. You would be wrong.

Now that we live in more enlightened times, we've learned that you can have your chiseled bodies and well-crafted plots in the same show. Game of Thrones and True Blood make Baywatch look like Sesame Street when it comes to showing skin, but in terms of complexity, Big Bird and company may have the edge on the lifeguard drama. This show lasted more than a decade buoyed by the appeal of form-fitting red bathing suits and plots the were heavily focused on getting the ladies showering, swimming, or running in slow motion.

The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue might actually offer more complex storytelling, and they have that feature where the girls' bathing suits are painted on and you can see their nipples.

Network: NBC
Air dates: 1989-1993
Stars: Mark-Paul Gosselear, Mario Lopez, Dustin Diamond, Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, Elizabeth Berkley, Lark Voorhies

The characters and plotting in Saved by the Bell are about as broad and stale as high school comedies get. You've got the rakish, charming leading man-child, the jock, the nerd, the cheerleader, and the brainy hot chick, and rarely do the actors assigned to these roles depart from the stereotypes.

High school shows are at their best when the beautiful people have real problems (as in Friday Night Lights) that make us realize that being popular isn't all it's cracked up to be. It also works when we see high school from the perspective of the have-nots, as we do in Freaks and Geeks and Awkward. Saved By Bell, on the other hand, is a show that follows beautiful people—played by actors who aren't terribly gifted when it comes to showing range beyond simple comedy—through stock comic scenarios even the writers on Happy Days would have felt were stale.

Network: ABC
Air dates: 1987-1995
Stars: John Stamos, Bob Saget, Dave Coulier, Candace Cameron, Jodie Sweetin, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen

This saccharine-sweet broad comedy enchanted an entire generation of children. Looking back on Full House, it's clear that a generation of parents were humoring their children by watching with them. Today, even the most family friendly sitcoms like Modern Family have snarky edges to them, some level of pathos beneath the chipper veneer. Full House delivers unrelenting doses of straight-up earnestness along with tired character gags (Uncle Jessie loves Elvis, Uncle Joey loves irrelevant impressions, the kids love shitty catchphrases).

We all have that hip friend who periodically brags about settling in for a Full House marathon on social media. If they aren't stretching the truth, we're impressed that they were able to bear more than a couple episodes in a row without watching Taxi Driver to even them out.