Agree, Cheers is absolutely an 80s show.
Although it didn't start until 89, I think Seinfeld kind of straddled the decades.
Friends is all 90s all day.
I was curious so I looked it up:
Cheers:
Aired 9/30/82 - 5/20/93. Ratings were soft the first three seasons (82/3-84/5) but then spiked and peeked from 85-91. It was the #1 show in 90/91 and drifted down the last two years.
Seinfeld:
Aired 7/5/89 - 5/14/98. Ratings were soft the first four seasons but then spiked in the fifth (93/4) and peeked from 94/5-97/8. It was the #1 show in 94/5 and again in 97/8.
Friends:
Aired 9/22/94 - 5/6/04. Ratings were a little soft the first year but mostly stable throughout the show's run. It was the #1 show in 01/2.
I definitely agree on Cheers being an 80's show. It was #1 at the VERY beginning of the 90's but most of the show's run was in the 80's as were most of it's highly rated seasons.
The three shows were never on simultaneously as Cheers ended a year and a half before Friends began. Seinfeld straddles the gap but notably Seinfeld didn't really take off until after Cheers went off the air so, of the three, the only two to be really big at the same time were Seinfeld and Friends in the later 90's.
I really hadn't thought of Seinfeld as an 80's show but I guess I should because, thinking back, I can't think of any internet references even in the later seasons when the internet was definitely "a thing". I'm defining "a thing" here is widely available and utilized by the general public rather than narrowly available and mostly only utilized by "computer nerds". (Aside on that later). Netscape Navigator was initially released in December, 1994 and I view that as really the beginning of the internet for normal people so:
- Cheers was off-air before that.
- That was fairly late during Seinfeld's run.
- Friends started right about the same time as the internet became widely used.
Aside on Netscape/the internet:
I graduated from HS in 1993 and I've made the observation before that I think my HS experience was more similar to people who graduated 20-30 years before me than it was to people who graduated 5-10 years after me.
In terms of cultural change for HS students I think the big items would be:
- Widespread availability of the pill in the mid-60's. Prior to that sex among unmarried HS students was MUCH less prevalent and MANY people got married very soon after HS.
- End of the draft in 1973. Prior to that guys in HS were, for the most part, planning on their post-HS military service.
- Widespread adoption of the internet in the mid-90's.
- Widespread adoption of mobile phones in the late 90's / early 00's (am I right on dates here, I mean for normalish HS students not just high paid executives).
The end of the Draft was announced in early 1973 so HS graduates from the class of 1973 (now 70ish) were the first class to graduate without a draft hanging over their heads in about 30 years. Maybe I'm missing something, but I really don't see any dramatic cultural differences between them and HS graduates from my class, 20 years later.
People who graduated five years after me in 1998, however, had a very different experience. For them the internet was widely available and a substantial portion of HS students had mobile phones.
Little anecdotal example:
I graduated in the spring on 1993 and started at Ohio State that fall. On my dorm floor there were probably 50+ guys and, in total, there were two PC's and two Word Processors on our entire floor. Remember Word Processors? My brother graduated from HS six years later in the spring of 1999 and started at Ohio State that fall. There were four guys in his dorm and between them they had SIX computers: Each one had a PC and two of them ALSO had laptops. That is purely anecdotal and probably doesn't scale well but the difference between 1 pc for every 25 guys (0.04 Computers per guy) and 1.5 computers per guy in six years is staggering.
Also, when I started in 1993 NONE (IIRC) of the guys on my floor had a mobile phone. I moved out to a house shared with four other guys the next year and one of the things I handled was splitting up the long distance charges on the landline phone bill because we were each calling home on the house landline. By the time my brother started at Ohio State I think that most students had their own mobile phones.
