Obviously we are right now in "Peak TV" with tons of choices and really fantastic individual programs in almost every genre. So none of the past periods of tv compare with the last ten years or so.
BUT....pre 2005 or so, the only comedies and to a lesser extent dramas I can stomach to watch now are from the 70s. They took a lot more chances (especially comedy where modern day shows like Louis, Better Things, You're the Worse, etc...) and were not the overly sanitized "family friendly" garbage you got in the 80s and 90s. Sure there might be individual shows like Seinfeld or Friends that can be enjoyed now, I'm talking about the overall programming.
But comedies like All in the Family, MASH, Good Times, Sanford and Son, Taxi, and even tamer stuff like Carol Burnett, Welcome Back Kotter, Threes Company, Mary Tyler Moore, etc... hold up much better than their 80s, 90s and early 00s equivalents imo. I recently tried to watch Season One of Cheers on Netflix and it's literally unwatchably bad. And that's a standout from the era.
You lost me at Welcome Back Kotter. That show is excruciating horrible. There may not be a show that holds up less. The jokes are barely jokes...few rise to greeting card level humor.
I agree with your premise about the 1980s though. 1980s television, and even to a large extent movies, were hot trash...nostalgia really warps it. Without the nostalgia factor, very little of 80s TV, and not that much film, is of any value. By comparison, I do believe the 70s is better TV than the 1980s, but mainly because of the trash that was TV in the 1980s. 1970s film of course, is independently excellent.
I really think the "classic TV" of the 50s and 60s is still far better than the 1970s, from a writing, storytelling, acting and joke perspective. However, I understand the "sanitized" factor of that era, and it's fair to credit some of the chance taking and expanded horizons of 1970s TV. I just don't think that it pulled real quality storytelling with it.
I think it is really related to the film success...the 1970s was really when TV became considered an embarrassing bastard stepchild of the movies. There was prestige in TV in the 50s and 60s, but that was gone with the 1970s golden era in film. By the 1970s, almost anyone with artistic aspirations at all would rather fetch coffee on a movie set than be a show-runner on TV. I'm not saying that nothing was good at all on TV, obviously some people were pretty good at their craft, but even a lot of those relatively groundbreaking shows were pretty blech.
The 80s were the worst...film was already pretty much creatively bankrupt, and TV still got the of that talent that was already weak sauce.
And obviously, we are now living in the greatest era of TV since the development of the medium, with talent on-screen and off that easily rivals film.
