JoeDoakes
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I was reading a review of the Third Season set of Medical Center and, in it, is this great take on the appeal of vintage television:
Besides...that's one of the strongest appeals of vintage TV: seeing how things used to be in TVland. You may call it ridiculous that not one episode here mentions a patient's bill or their ability or inability to pay it, or that even the most dire medical situation is 8 out of 10 times resolved, but I don't--that's just a mile marker for the "Big Three's" numero uno Commandment at that time: thou shalt not bum any viewer out. Of course, CBS's sitcom ground-breaker, All in the Family, was almost single-handedly abolishing that decades-long edict at the very moment Medical Center was glossily enforcing it, a fact that only makes something like Medical Center so endearing to watch today. It may have aimed to be "edgy" and "realistically modern" when it first aired (as it indeed it was compared to those earlier shows it followed), but it still had that early "Big Three" network patina of reassuring, illusory positiveness to it that marked so much of pre-70s television...the television history, not so coincidentally, that continues to have the most fervent, sustained fandom (a lesson today's networks have utterly failed to re-learn, to their continued smaller fraction of the audience pie: too much self-involved, self-satisfied bumming out, and not enough true entertainment).
http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/61408/medical-center-the-complete-third-season-warner-archive-collection/
Besides...that's one of the strongest appeals of vintage TV: seeing how things used to be in TVland. You may call it ridiculous that not one episode here mentions a patient's bill or their ability or inability to pay it, or that even the most dire medical situation is 8 out of 10 times resolved, but I don't--that's just a mile marker for the "Big Three's" numero uno Commandment at that time: thou shalt not bum any viewer out. Of course, CBS's sitcom ground-breaker, All in the Family, was almost single-handedly abolishing that decades-long edict at the very moment Medical Center was glossily enforcing it, a fact that only makes something like Medical Center so endearing to watch today. It may have aimed to be "edgy" and "realistically modern" when it first aired (as it indeed it was compared to those earlier shows it followed), but it still had that early "Big Three" network patina of reassuring, illusory positiveness to it that marked so much of pre-70s television...the television history, not so coincidentally, that continues to have the most fervent, sustained fandom (a lesson today's networks have utterly failed to re-learn, to their continued smaller fraction of the audience pie: too much self-involved, self-satisfied bumming out, and not enough true entertainment).
http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/61408/medical-center-the-complete-third-season-warner-archive-collection/