Best TV Shows 1980s by Year: Cheers to Seinfeld
1984: ‘Miami Vice’
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Don Johnson stars as James “Sonny” crockett, a stylish undercover detective working in Miami, alongside Philip Michael Thomas as Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs. miami Vice distinguished itself with its vibrant visuals, synth-pop soundtrack, and focus on the drug trade. The show’s aesthetic heavily influenced 1980s fashion and culture.
Miami Vice was a ratings hit and earned five Emmy Awards during its five-season run. It also launched several music careers, featuring songs by artists like Phil Collins and Jan Hammer, whose instrumental theme became iconic.
1985: ‘Moonlighting’
Moonlighting starred Cybill Shepherd as Maddie Hayes, a former model turned detective agency owner, and bruce Willis as David Addison, a wisecracking private investigator. The show centered on their cases and the witty banter between the two leads. Moonlighting also relaunched Shepherd’s career and was notable for the way it frequently broke the fourth wall.
1986: ‘ALF‘
Goofy alien creature ALF, aka Alien life Form (Paul Fusco), crash-lands in the suburbs and finds his spaceship to be beyond repair.Weird-looking and with a cranky attitude, ALF is nevertheless taken in by the Tanner family, and he learns about earthlings, makes new friends and consistently tries to eat the Tanners’ pet cat.
ALF only ran for four seasons, but it has endured as a classic sitcom of the 1980s in no small part due to its superb joke-writing and the top-notch integration of the ALF puppet into the show. ALF’s popularity at the time generated a mass of merchandising that made the character a huge commercial success.
1987: ‘Star Trek: The next Generation’
The second live-action series in the Star Trek franchise follows the adventures of the USS Enterprise-D nearly a century after Captain Kirk (William Shatner) finished his original five-year mission. In his place, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) carries on kirk’s legacy as he explores alien worlds with his eclectic crew.
Star Trek: The Next Generation was a massive success, accruing a whopping eighteen Emmy awards during its seven-season run. The Next Generation brought a new generation of viewers into the Star Trek fandom, and in 2021, it was ranked by Empire magazine as one of the best television shows of all time.
1988: ‘The Wonder Years’
During the late 1960s and early ’70s, teenager Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) comes of age in his suburban town while witnessing the birth of the counterculture movement and other past events. throughout the show, Kevin endures the many obstacles of adolescence pertaining to family, friendship and first love, with his best friend Paul (Josh Saviano) beside him.
The Wonder Years was an incredibly influential sitcom in how it was formatted, written and structured, awarded the Peabody Award in 1989 for “pushing the boundaries of the sitcom format and using new modes of storytelling.” At only thirteen, Savage became the youngest actor ever nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Led Actor for a Comedy series.
1989: ’Seinfeld’
In New York City, comedian Jerry seinfeld dates, tells jokes for a living and balances the many absurd situations in his life, usually involving his wacky next-door neighbor Kramer (Michael Richards), his selfish, neurotic best friend George (jason Alexander) and former flame-turned-friend Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).
Subversive and uniquely hilarious, the famous “show about nothing” is usually considered to be one of the greatest and most influential sitcoms of all time – many even consider it to be the best sitcom of all time. Many of its episodes, characters and lines of dialog are so cemented in pop culture that you may not have even realized they came from Seinfeld first.
It’s always the right time to watch a good horror movie. But October is prime spooky season, and to stream a merely OK horror movie just seems wrong. To avoid doing the scariest month of the year dirty, Watch With Us has compiled a list of the 10 best horror movies of the 1980s, when […].