Don't want to set off another round of arguments on what is a "classic" TV show and what isn't. But I have to tell a funny story that's actually true.
American commercial television, of course, only dates back to a little before 1950. Saturday I happened to wander into our local public library for the first time in a long time. I noticed they had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica's Great Books, second edition. This edition added some more books to the original set and controversially dropped a few, sort of like replacing Password with Name's the Same, only it was Jane Austen for Henry Fielding.
Mostly irrelevant aside from this math major: the new set dropped Apollonius' Conics, which is only one of the finest math books ever written. Mortimer Adler should have been shot for that offense alone. What's next, dropping Archimedes? I'm gonna get on the GBN (Great Books Network) message board and yell about bringing the classics back...smile.
Anyway, in the introduction to the set, the editors announced that nothing after 1950 was even considered for inclusion. I swear, I thought about our endless debates about what is old enough to be a game show "classic" when I read those words.
By their standard vitually no television game show could qualify as "classic." Which makes some sense. The time since 1950 looks like pretty brief when compared to the age on the Aeneid or Hamlet.
The editors even threw up their hands and admitted they couldn't be sure that their selections from 1900-1950 would look truly "classic" a hundred years from now.
I know, literary standards aren't appropriate for TV shows, as any TV critic will tell you with a very loud laugh. But it just shows how slippery the concept of a "classic" can be. And how age requirements for "classic-ness" can fluctuate wildly from one world to another.
Now that I think about it, though, some of the works in that Great Books collection date from as late as the 1930s. So they stand in much the same age relationship to Shakespeare and to the present as, say, WBSM stands to Name's the Same. So is WBSM a classic just like Name's the Same?
This is getting too metaphysical for me.