More Unpopular Opinions on Pop Culture

A while ago I was ranting on here as to how much I hated Quantum Leap, despite its apparent popularity with the rest of the world.  The thing is that I knew I didn't like practically from the first time that I saw it - I knew that I would never warm to it.  Sometimes, of course, the opposite happens - you start out disliking something then come back to it and find, for a while at least, that it is at least tolerable.  Which is what happened with Red Dwarf, although the period during which I found it tolerable didn't last that long, but, to be fair, instead of going back to disliking it, I simply became indifferent to it.  Conversely, there are those TV shows you really liked when you first saw them but, upon becoming reacquainted them after a long period of not seeing them, you find that you can now no longer stand the show.  This has certainly been my recent experience upon encountering Monty Python's Flying Circus when a streaming channel I have access to ran a marathon of the programme, with back-to-back episodes.  I initially tuned in right in the middle of that sketch featuring Eric Idle in drag screaming 'Spam, spam, spam!'  I immediately recoiled, thinking 'Jesus, this is horrible'.  Further attempts to watch episodes elicited the same reaction.  Apart from Terry Gilliam's animations, none of it seemed funny anymore.  It just came over as a bunch of Oxbridge undergraduates showing off.  

Bearing in mind that I first saw Python when I was a child in the early seventies and then thought it absolutely hilarious, I thought at first that it was simply a case of both the material and the presentation of having aged badly.  That and the fact that it had subsequently been repeated to death, imitated and parodied to exhaustion, I thought, was probably another reason why it no longer seemed funny - it had just become over familiar.  But then I thought back to my childhood and realised, in retrospect, that the younger me had really only been entranced by those aforementioned animations and sketches like the 'Ministry of Funny Walks' - most of the rest of it frequently baffled my seven year old self.  As I got older I appreciated the stuff I hadn't really understood more, but I never found as funny as I thought that I had as a young child.  Of course, hearing every sketch being badly recounted by idiots in the Student's Union common room, then the saloon bars of various pubs, for decades afterward has doubtless also blunted the show's impact.  Still, as I've discovered as a result of binge watching various other old TV series on the aforementioned streaming channel, TV comedy often doesn't age well - they've run Mork and Mindy a few times and boy, how irritating does Robin Williams seem now?  Yet, back in the day it all seemed so fresh and innovative, (well, the first season, at least - then they started tinkering with the format from season two and it rapidly went down the toilet).  Much as I like nostalgia, there are definitely ties when it is better not to go back and binge watch, as those shows you used to love will only disappoint you.  It's probably better just to hang on to your cherished memories of what you thought they were like.