‘You couldn’t make a show like that today.’ This refrain was the subtext or text of countless headlines and think-pieces from 2010ish up to the early 2020s. The gist was that even relatively recent shows (Friends, The Office, The Big Bang Theory…) didn’t adhere to the higher level of sensitivities now expected. The phrasing presupposed a linear idea of progress: the past was the bad old days, whereas we know better now. That which was passé was not just unfashionable but offensive. Or the preferred term for when someone couldn’t pinpoint a specific issue beyond datedness: problematic.

This way of looking at old shows never made sense to my rerun-loving self. Sure, when you watch old shows, you might wince at dated terms (“coloured,” “homosexual,” etc.), and you may encounter different sensibilities in terms of how delicately topics come up. But if you pare it down to the question of whether everything up to 2018 give or take was the Dark Ages, the answer is an easy no. Some things were better, some worse, some just different.

What am I thinking of, specifically? Too many things to name, but here are some: The matter-of-fact treatment of Ricky Ricardo’s Cubanness on the classic 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy seemed neither ahead of nor behind the ways identity would come to be addressed (bits of each, therefore a wash). The Mary Tyler Moore Show depicts a universe more feminist and sex-positive, sometimes even less homophobic, than the one around me when watching it as a 30ish millennial, the same age as Mary on the show.

Are You Being Served?, the innuendo-filled 1970s-1980s department-store Britcom, could be looked at as regressive on the gender front (the background includes both bimbo characters and busty mannequins, with much manhandling of both), but it’s fundamentally a show about labour strife, from the perspective of the workers. The Mr. Humphries character, the salesman ever-ready to measure a male customer’s “inside leg,” is either a mockery of camp gay men or just… a camp gay man, played by John Inman, a gay actor known for his work as a........

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