Yes, 2 episodes, 11:00 ET.

It plays over-the-air on Cozi TV, a couple episodes every night.

The dating-a-duplicate thing goes back at least to Perfect Strangers about four years earlier, where the Balki and Mary Anne characters break up and then show up with doubles of each other.

Yes, Drescher had a rare playfulness in the role that was a throwback to screwball comedies. The rest of the cast were good foils, as well, especially extending out into Fran's family.

The show also displayed a high regard for older sitcoms.

Evelyn Harper, 2 1/2 Men, is up there.

Seinfeld, Newsradio, Simpsons, Frasier, Father Ted

Some of the workplace shows of the 70s featured a relatively stable character as the center of a wacky ensemble. Notable among them were Hal Linden (Barney Miller), Judd Hirsch (Taxi), Mary Tyler Moore, and Gary Sandy (WKRP in Cincinnati).

Newhart has a lot of style in common with Jack Benny, and "Newhart" was somewhat inspired by the Benny film George Washington Slept Here. What Newhart and Benny both demonstrated was that a good straight man has to be capable of going off himself at intervals.

Tim Reid's dramedy Frank's Place had a very affecting two-parter about how drug use and trade form a wall separating people from their loved ones.

Both episodes:

https://youtu.be/D2c_Nyf4IbM?list=PLQQ4DpKtNIp8QYQ7q2IsKfy9hcY4jdUiJ

https://youtu.be/fpM1IlpEoFo?list=PLQQ4DpKtNIp8QYQ7q2IsKfy9hcY4jdUiJ

Not with the reddit audience.

How could anyone not like him? He's a wonderful, wonderful boy. Everybody likes him. It's impossible not to like him. Impossible!

I doubt Jen's hearing from a full cross-section of the generation.

Kirk from Newhart was defined by his lying. The character was written out after two seasons and is generally reviled now, but his two seasons were the only two seasons the show was nominated for the best comedy Emmy.

There have only been eight episodes aired in this decade.

The first three seasons or so of My Three Sons are silly. The kids are cynical, and there's a lot of slapstick. It slows down over time. Andy Griffith has an unusually strong break after Season 5 which is not just Don Knotts leaving and not just switching to color. The comedy brakes are clearly on.

The whole raft of fantasy shows were driven by outsized characters and slapstick. The rural shows were just last of those to go. Mr. Ed, Gilligan, early Bewitched, the Munsters were replaced by family stuff like Here's Lucy, Julia, Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Doris Day. They just weren't giving any priority to comedy.

>Also, there was fewer competition, only a few networks, so people gave them time and patience because they didn't have 25 different choices.

One problem is dispersal of talent. it's always been that popular shows lost their creative people, but now there's fifty outlets throwing money at writers. it's tough to keep a team together.

The genre really can lose its sense of humor. if you look at the late 60s, the funny sitcom almost died out, to be replaced by pleasant, unoffensive, but dull family fare. Even existing shows that had been funny early on, like My Three Sons and the Andy Griffith Show, just stopped trying to go for funniest. Then like a bolt from the blue, shows emerged again with broad characters who went for it - Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, The Odd Couple, Sanford and Son, MASH - it was an avalanche.

if you go into a sub for many shows, even older ones, it seems like at least the Reddit portion of the audience is quite humor impaired. Many posts express disapproval of acts, and even characters, as if the shows were somehow presented as exemplars of proper conduct. Comedy can't just run free if the writer has to keep that sort of audience in mind.

>You have to get a FCC license, get a building and tower, get the equipment and stuff.

The buildings and towers mostly already exist.

Edit: to expand on this, public TV where I am used to be two channels that broadcast from one tower. Today that tower transmits a public channel and six subchannels. They sold the second channel, so it's now a commercial channel with seven subchannels, and those all broadcast from the same tower. And then low power channel was licensed, and it goes from the same tower with six subchannels. So, two signals to twenty, using the same infrastructure.

Over the air is such an alternative.

Watching TV on your phone isn't optimum. If you have a real TV, you might as well use it as a receiver.

I watch quite a bit over-the-air. I consider TV to be entertainment and a diversion, not some sort of assignment where I'm trying to optimize my outcome. The great majority of the classics from pre-1990 have played on the subchannels, along with a lot of 1990s programming and into this century. I cut the cable years ago, but I do stream some shows.

I will say this about streaming: my basic rule for many years has been that I try a new show when several people I know tell me I should watch it. It just doesn't seem to happen with streaming options. The viewing market's so fragmented that outside of venues like this there doesn't seem to be a general buzz about any show, such as formed around Cheers or Seinfeld.

Just to follow up, it appears the resolution episode the next season had 90 million viewers in the US. On a Friday night.

I don't know why anyone would downvote this. Obviously, the concept of cliffhangers predates Dallas, but if you're looking at a continuous practice in US primetime, serialization is anchored right here. They had "Who Shot JR?", Dynasty followed with several cliffhanger endings, and serialized programming became more and more common in both drama and comedy throughout the 1980s.

You're probably talking about Reiner, and then Persky and Denoff who succeeded him as "Story Consultants." They would be the rewrite guys who would punch up a script and make sure the tone was consistent with the show in general. Persky and Denoff got bit roles in the last filmed episode, "The Gunslinger." Garry Marshall was also in the episode, along with at least one other.

"There's a great interview with one of the writers on the Dick Van Dyke Show— of which there were three."

They used a plethora of writers. Reiner himself wrote about a third. Bill Persky and Sam Denoff wrote a lot, and became the script consultants (finishers). Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson wrote a lot, and then the rest were spread out among others. Bill Idelson, who played Herman Glimpsher, wrote a few scripts.