why I'm crap at 60s sitcom trivia

Although I'll watch just about anything that's on TV, I'll admit that there are some things that show up fairly infrequently on my viewing list. Apart from a brief mid-90s obsession with Days of Our Lives, I don't really watch soaps. I like shows about food but I'm not generally riveted by actual cooking shows. Unless, of course, it's a show about a cooking show. (It seems, however, that not everyone agrees with me: good lord.) But when there's so much television to watch, eventually you have to make sacrifices, and I can't say I'm sorry that Rachael Ray is one of them.

Some shows, on the other hand, don't factor into my absurdly complicated weekly viewing schedule because, regardless of effort, I just can't get into them. I mean, I've tried to like Lost, really I have. I slogged my way through the premiere on two separate occasions, but it was all menacing foliage and shrapnel and Naveen Andrews, who didn't accomplish anything other than reminding me once more how much I fucking hate Juliette Binoche for ruining everything she touches, and can J.J. Abrams please remember that he has this other show that used to be awesome? Please? Remind him? Anybody? Anywhere?

Anyway, there's another class of show that I tend to avoid for reasons that have nothing to do with personal preference - specifically, anything that was created before 1985. It's not that I won't watch it. It's more that I can't watch it. Now, I'd like to think that MacGyver was just so unbearably awesome that my young, impressionable mind could never go back to a world without Richard Dean, but the truth is a bit more complicated.

(By the way, is this seriously MacGyver's tagline? "Part boy scout. Part genius. All hero." I ... didn't think it was possible to love this show more.)

See, when it comes to old television, I have a sort of cognitive disability. I mean, above and beyond the obvious. 1985 is really when I started to develop consciousness. Before then all I have are a few hazy memories. Being praised in class one day for having a superlative nose-blowing technique. Reading Hop on Pop. Learning about Judaism in preschool and thinking, briefly, that maybe I should ask my parents if we could have a religion, too. Discovering Easy Cheese.

After that, though, it's a veritable smorgasbord of recollection. And, naturally, a lot of the background noise - I guess what you'd call my cultural baseline - comes from television, which we kept on almost constantly due to the fact that my father and I are actually incapable of doing only one thing at a time.

(A typical father-daughter scene: the two of us, in front of the television, simultaneously watching a movie, each reading a book, carrying on a conversation, and occasionally consulting the Internet for God knows what. It's annoying as shit. We carry on like this long-distance, too, videoconferencing like the weirdos we are. And it's not like we're pooling our mental resources to, like, cure cancer or anything. I'm pretty sure the last thing we watched together was golf. We also talked about NASCAR. Sometimes I think someone should really beat the living crap out of us.)

Anyway, when I'm unable to draw upon this acquired knowledge, it's not nearly so easy to parse the hodgepodge of modern media. It's like trying to read a poem without having a clue what conventions are at work - all I manage to process are heaps of broken and poorly colorcasted images.

Perhaps this will make more sense if I explain how I like to pull apart a given show. During my recent period of unemployment, I finally watched the entire run of Freaks and Geeks. This unbelievably excellent show aired when I was a freshman in college, the only extended period of my life when I didn't have constant access to a television. To make matters worse, that year was the start of my dark obsession with theatre, which further reduced my television-viewing opportunities. (In retrospect, that might have been part of the reason why I was so psychologically unstable that year.)

So I missed out on a few things that year: Sports Night, The Sopranos, Family Guy. And, of course, the late, great Freaks and Geeks, which, unbeknownst to me, was so chock-full of cultural interconnection that it's practically the fucking Waste Land of television series.

I mean, just look at the people. Most everyone knows the delectable James Franco from his work in Spiderman and that James Dean biopic. (And if anyone doesn't know him, they soon will, as he's pulling a Jude Law in the next year, appearing in approximately 317 movies including, hilariously, a version of Tristan and Isolde by the director of Waterworld and the writer of the Tomb Raider sequel.)

Also well-known is Linda Cardellini, who had the bad luck to be involved with Scooby Doo but the good luck not to be the one impregnated by Heath Ledger while working on Brokeback Mountain. And, while I'm thinking about Dawson's Creek and its related tragedies, I should also mention that Freaks and Geeks features Busy Phillips, who played Audrey on the Creek. And Mike White (Chuck & Buck, School of Rock, Jack Black's next eight projects) was a writer on both shows. Although he did not, as far as I am aware, make any personal appearances in Capeside, despite the obvious and awesome potential therein. Mike White and Pacey Witter. Think about it.

Ben Foster prepared for his future work as Russell on Six Feet Under by playing the only slightly more developmentally challenged Eli. John Francis Daley will soon be seen again on the small screen in the fangirl spectacular Kitchen Confidential, which also stars Xander from Buffy and the dude from Alias who didn't bang Jen Garner. (I just read an article about this show and I could almost hear the E! television chick humping her desk through my cable modem.) And speaking of Buffy, Sarah Hagan was actually on the last, lamentable season, instantly recognizable not only because of her crazy long face, but also because she played the exact same character in both shows. And in Grey's Anatomy. And in Orange County. And, if we're going to be perfectly honest, in every other role that she will ever have, because even though she's a lovely girl ... man. It looks like someone sat on the side of her head when she was a child. Like, for months.

Other entertaining obscurities. Also on the show were Trace Beaulieu and Joel Hodgson, from Mystery Science Theater 3000. (Full disclosure: At one point I might have subscribed to the MST3K fan newsletter. Yeeeah. Even I'm a bit embarrassed by that.) The creator, Judd Apatow, is clearly some sort of genius, having worked on The Larry Sanders Show, The Ben Stiller Show, The Critic, and Celtic Pride. The man even gets his email correspondence published in Harper's. And in the show's most brilliant, most satisfying bit of casting arcana, Thomas F. Wilson, the occasionally sadistic P.E. teacher, is better known as the rather legendary Biff.

Think how long it would have taken to look all of that up if I were, you know, socially well-adjusted. As it was, even though I might not have known the actors as they were on the show itself, I knew them from other projects and from other gossip sheets and celebrity rags, and I'd read enough of what was essentially a collective critical swoon to be able to hobble together without too much trouble a picture of how Freaks and Geeks figured into the pop-culture landscape. And even so, I probably logged a few hours on the Internet and in "who the hell is that guy?" conversations with Annie. And that's just for entertaining trivia about cast and crew. And for a show that was on only six years ago.

So you see, because my own knowledge of pop culture drops sharply once you break that mid-80s barrier, getting a grip on pre-1985 television is just a crazy effort for me. I mean, I have enough trouble remembering which president came after Truman; I haven't anything close to the understanding of the media and culture of the time that I would need to grasp the nuance of 50s situation comedies.

You don't see specialists in 20th century Irish literature switch breezily to a focus in colonial American literature. And I don't claim to have any impressive insight into or expertise in television that predated me. Because when it comes right down to it, on a very basic level I just don't get The Dick Van Dyke Show like I get Diagnosis Murder. Same language, same country, same beloved national treasure. And yet, for me, an entirely different world.