Maybe you lived abroad for a year or two, grew up in a redneck town with no TV, were in a coma, or, like me, your family couldn’t afford cable TV. Then you went to college and didn’t have a TV after which you promptly immediately got married and had kids, so you might have a pop-cultural void of things that happened, and have to hear about them in Netflix documentaries or when friends mock you for “not getting” the pop culture reference.
Not having cable when it first came out in the early-1980s was most significant when it came to the birth of MTV. Everyone talked about it, and put a spotlight on the kids from the poor side of town as much as whether/when your family acquired an Atari gaming console. My brother and I would sit up watching “Friday Night Videos” every week at 11 p.m. featuring the lame and less popular MTV-reject videos thinking of how to score sleepover invitations to our friends’ houses where we could watch the astronaut planting that MTV flag and the Thriller video. This was the birthplace moment of “FOMO” as the “fear of missing out” engulfed us with the passion of a thousand flames.
I was in college from 1987-1991, married in ’91 and my first kid was born in ’94. These years are where my deepest cultural blackout seems to have taken place; a void that reappears periodically. Luckily I’m an enthusiastic documentary consumer, so this is where I learned what happened in the Jeffrey Dahmer and Menendez brother murders, and key moments in history like the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union that were all happening while I had no TV.
My relative non-awareness of pop culture continued to some degree throughout my childbearing years; a phenomenon that occurs for many mothers, particularly those of us who raised kids prior to the existence of the internet. I did read newspapers, but giving birth in 1994, 1998, 2003 and 2005 meant there was a lot more Nickelodeon and Disney on my TV for a bunch of years than current events, shows or movies. I’m still catching up on significant moving pictures from missed past eras.
Some pop culture phenomena you miss are more significant than others. You can walk around the world missing one of the sequels to a Marvel movie and no one will know or care. But someone brings up the “Soup Nazi” episode of Seinfeld or uses the phrase “we were on a break” from Friends and you recognize the pop culture references but you’ve never seen the shows because you didn’t have a TV in college? People think you’re weird. I made Golden Girls themed candles for a 50th birthday party recently having never seen a single episode of the show and was an albatross among my peers.
Can you go back and watch these shows now? Yes, but it’s not the same. I loved the show Moonlighting which I watched before leaving for college, tried to rewatch it recently and found it crummy. Even 30 Rock, which I hadn’t seen due to child-rearing and tried to watch—I found funny (particulary Alec Baldwin) but was surprised to find Tina Fey overrated and was completely turned off by the homophobic “lesbian crush” episode. Vintage humor is best enjoyed through time-warp, rose-colored glasses.
