Fifteen Television Shows That Made An Impact On Me

Building on the list of children’s shows that made an impact on me growing up ( https://tombrevoort.com/2025/02/17/twenty-childrens-shows-that-made-an-impact-on-me/), the question arose: what about shows that were ostensibly aimed at an adult audience? And there were a bunch of them, most of which I saw in syndicated reruns on one of the few channels we had back then, and some of which I watched as new programs week by week.

1. THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW: It went off the air in syndication in my area in the early 1970s, and so it took me years to even rediscover just what the program was called later on. But I remember it and I connected to it from the start, in particular the idea of Dick’s character Rob Petrie working as a television writer. THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW was clever and witty and ahead of its time, and it’s still my all-time favorite sitcom. And there’s a strong slice of my personality that was influenced by Morry Amsterdam’s portrayal of Buddy Sorrel.

2) THE TWILIGHT ZONE: This was another show whose reruns disappeared early on in my life, but which had already made such an impact upon me that I’d remember certain moments and episodes for years to come, even though I couldn’t have told you the name of the program. In particular, the episode “Mirror Image” that dealt with evil doppelgangers freaked me the heck out as a kid, and so it’s still my favorite installment. Creator Rod Serling used the conceit of writing science fiction and fantasy as a way to get his commentary on social issues past the network censors and onto the air, resulting in shows that packed both a message and a punch. Despite being so old, and its twist endings having passed into common parlance as cliches, THE TWILIGHT ZONE continues to retail its power and its relevance.

3) THE ODD COUPLE: As opposed to our first two entries, THE ODD COUPLE ran in syndication in the New York market forever, as it was a heavily Manhattan-based show. It’s also terrifically funny, with both Jack Klugman and Tony Randall fully embodying their roles as slovenly sports reporter Oscar Madison and prissy, uptight photographer Felix Unger, who are forced to cohabitate after they are both thrown out by their wives. The show also, astonishingly, had a final episode that resolved its set-up–which didn’t keep people from doing a lackluster reunion movie many years later. Aristophanes!

4) GET SMART: This series was just so wonderfully daffy. And yet, like BATMAN, as a young viewer I took it all pretty seriously. Some of that was down to just how good leading man Don Adams was as CONTROL secret agent 86 Maxwell Smart. As a send-up of the spy genre, it wound up becoming somewhat more influential than the films and shows that it was spoofing. And it ran for a long while throughout the 1970s, at least in my area. The show inarguably went on maybe a season too long, but when it was at its height, it was super-sharp, very funny and eminently watchable. This is KAOS–we don’t shush here!

5) HAPPY DAYS: I didn’t have any particular nostalgia for the 1950s, obviously, although my mother certainly did. But this show was such a phenomenon that every kid in my grade school was following it avidly. I didn’t come to it for a short while, not until after the producers had realized that Henry Winkler’s Fonzie character was a breakout star, and I didn’t watch it all the way to the end, where just about everybody in the cast had rotated away. It probably helped that the Fonz was treated almost like a super hero in this show, with special powers and weaknesses–his love for the Lone Ranger was also a connection point. I also wound up watching most of the spin-offs such as LAVERNE AND SHIRLEY and MORK AND MINDY over the years.

6) THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN: For years, this show was IT when it came to seeing super heroes in a live action context. It’s still pretty remarkable that the series sells the concept of its bionic leading man Steve Austin running super-fast by slowing the footage down–amazing! Like HAPPY DAYS, this was a show that all the kids in my grade school were crazy about, and the same was true for its eventual spin-off, THE BIONIC WOMAN. I can especially remember being disquieted by the Fembots, killer robots disguised as ordinary people, any one of whom was a match for Steve Austin or Jamie Sommers and who battled them both in a crossover event between the two shows.

7) CONCENTRATION: Any time that school was out or I was home for a sick day, I’d watch a steady diet of game shows during the late morning. There were a bunch that I liked, but the top spot is held by CONCENTRATION, a matching game that also had a decoding aspect to it–contestants would match squares on a giant board to reveal pieces of a rebus image. The winner was whoever was able to decipher the rebus. I can remember making my own home games to play with my relatives, using a deck of playing cards and some paper.

8) WONDER WOMAN: Maybe the most comics-accurate super hero outing of the 1970s, particularly its first season which drew heavily from the WWII-era comics. Lynda Carter pretty much carried this series on her back, despite some lame plots and dodgy special effects. But she made the character so appealing, and despite its flaws, this was the best super hero adventure series of the era. I can specifically recall watching reruns of the pilot episodes with a copy of my WONDER WOMAN #1 Treasury Edition and following along to see how close it came to the source material. Answer: pretty close.

9) BOSOM BUDDIES: I was so clueless as a kid that I didn’t get the joke of the title for several years. All I knew is that Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari made for an incredibly funny and incredibly likable duo. Arguably, the show gets better in its second year when they throw out the original premise of Hanks and Scolari dressing up as women to live in an All-Women Hotel and simply put them into the advertising business. But all the way through the show’s short run, there wasn’t another series that I laughed at quite so much. The “trapped in a remote cabin” episode almost killed me from laughing too hard. Albino snake!

10) DOCTOR WHO: It had virtually no budget but was just rife with interesting ideas and concepts, and in Tom Baker, the show had the most magnetic and watchable lead character ever. I didn’t really get to see the show until after my family had relocated to Delaware at the start of the 1980s, but it quickly became appointment viewing for me every week. Rather amazing to see how established and mainstream it’s become since that time. My memory of fandom in this period was that DOCTOR WHO fans were at the very bottom of the barrel–even STAR TREK geeks made fun of DOCTOR WHO fans. That, though, has become a thing of the past.

11) I SPY: This one hurts. I came to I SPY in reruns airing in Delaware and completely fell in love with it. It was a somewhat more realistic spy series for the period, with its two leads Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott working for Naval Intelligence. But it was the interplay between Robert Culp and Bill Cosby that made the show so engaging, a common tongue that became known as “blendship”. Sadly, though, ever since the truth about Cosby’s crimes came out, I’ve been unable to stomach watching the show apart from a few seconds here or there. It’s a terrific series, but I have no desire to spend an hour in Cosby’s company. And Alexander Scott certainly would have kicked his ass for what he’d done.

12) BLAKE’S 7: Possibly the most ultimately nihilistic series ever to air, BLAKE’S 7 came to the United States through PBS channels that had found a cash cow in DOCTOR WHO and were looking for more similar programming. I think of it as being the anti-Star Trek: in the far future, the Federation is a corrupt empire with a boot to the neck of people throughout he galaxy. Disgraced rebel leader Blake gets a second chance when he and a crew of fellow convicts come across a discarded alien spaceship whose technology is centuries ahead of anybody else’s. This lets them wage a guerilla war against the oppressors. Ultimately, though, that was is futile, as the entire cast of characters is brutally gunned down in the show’s final episode. Unforgettable, despite carrying a budget that made DOCTOR WHO’s seem extravagant.

13) MY SECRET IDENTITY: This show wound up being something of an unexpected revelation when I discovered it airing in the syndicated time slot directly after the lamentable SUPERBOY series. And while it became less interesting to me the longer it went on, especially as it began to distance itself from its super hero-loving origins, I still swear by the first year. MY SECRET IDENTITY was about a comic book loving kid who accidentally gets super-powers when he stumbles into one of his scientist neighbor’s experiments. A young Jerry O’Connell plays Andrew Clements, the would-be Ultraman, with an appealing likability, and the rest of the cast, particularly Derek McGrath as Dr. Benjamin “Doctor J” Jeffcoate, are also quite good.

14) SCTV: I was introduced to this Canadian import by my good buddy Steve Cicala, who had seen it when it briefly aired directly after SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, but I wouldn’t get to see much of it until it too came to syndication. I was just a hair too young to have experienced SNL in its heyday seasons, so for me this show was the crown jewel of television satire of the era. Everybody on it went on to have pretty stellar careers, and I still bits of business from it in conversation today (much to the bewilderment of most.)

15) RED DWARF: Like BLAKE’S 7, this series came to my area as part of a hunger for more British science fiction on PBS. I’d never heard of the series before when my local station ran a marathon of the 12 existing episodes which comprised the first two seasons, but I swiftly became a fan. It stars Craig Charles as Dave Lister, a slovenly junior grade technician who winds up through a fluke becoming the last human being alive on board the deep space mining vessel Red Dwarf. Lister’s only companions are Chris Barre as Arnold Rimmer, his self-loathing prat of a bunkmate now resurrected as a hologram, Danny John-Jules as a creature that evolved from Lister’s pet Cat, Norman Lovett as the ship’s broken down computer system Holly, and eventually Robert LLewellyn as service mechanoid Kryten. The show’s a comedy, though it’s steered deeper into action-adventure over the years. Remarkably, it’s also a series that refuses to die, and as of this writing a new three-part special series is in production featuring the same cast.