Two Decades Behind / Live-Action TV

• Spoofed with the Robin Sparkles videos in How I Met Your Mother, which were supposedly from the mid-1990s but look as if they were made in 1986. Robin explains that "The '80s didn't come to Canada until 1993." The gag continues in a later episode, where Robin is credited in Canada with having invented grunge as a genre... in 1996.
• Shawn and Gus do this very self-consciously on Psych, where it's obviously supposed to be an In-Universe character quirk (other characters often call them out on it), but in the Class Reunion episode, their reunion seemed to be playing an awful lot of '80s music, given that they graduated in 1995. Even worse, Shawn and Gus are Californians, and the Golden State made the transition from the '80s to the '90s pretty darn quickly. In fact, by 1995 the '80s were already retro in the minds of many California teenagers!
• Camden in My Name Is Earl seems to be stuck in the late '80s or early '90s, even though that time was at least 10-15 years before the start of the series. Possibly justified; Camden is a pretty podunk county and it often takes a while for trends and technologies to catch on. Plus, many of the characters we see are either older or low income, two groups less likely to use new technologies as they come out.
  • Catalina's uncle in the episodes "South of the Border" is pretty anachronistic, because he was fortunate enough to have satellite TV in The '80s, and watched a lot of American television from that time period. But then his satellite broke.
• British TV comedy Butterflies is a prime example of this: a classic sitcom of middle-class suburban manners in which an aloof dentist is married to a dissatisfied housewife who dithers on the brink of an affair. They have two sons, meant to be hip and fashionable, but who in 1974 speak youth-argot which would have been dated even in 1964.
• Inverted in The Big Bang Theory. When Sheldon discovers his mother is having sex, he warns her "it's not all soda jerks, sock hops, and segregation out there", leading her to ask "How old do you think I am?"
• Inverted on M*A*S*H; while the show was set in the '50s, the attitudes and fashions (that hair!) of the characters was much more reflective of the '70s, when the show was filmed.^note This perhaps lampshades the fact the war the show's makers really wanted to portray was Vietnam - but TV producers vetoed this as being too soon. American viewers in the early 1970s would have had no doubt which controversial Asian war was being satirized with extremely black humor, which added to its popularity.
• Done intentionally in Flight of the Conchords, where all the media from New Zealand is several decades behind the times. Their technology is also several decades out of date, to the point that they are currently running TV ads for "the telephone."
• Meta Guy Abed on Community makes non-stop '80s references, with some stretching back from the late '70s and occasionally forward into the early '90s. This is despite Abed being in his early/mid twenties, and as such his reference pool should be mostly from works in the late '90s onwards. The real reason is that the creator of the show Dan Harmon was born in 1973 and thus his reference pool is mostly works from the '80s. The best example of this is that Abed has an encyclopedic knowledge of Who's the Boss?, despite the fact that the show would have started before Abed was born, and finished before Abed would have started pre-school. The show has lampshaded the oddity of Abed's reference pool; it still stands out as unusual, but not too unusual. The '90s, particularly early on, was the height of cable TV as a haven of reruns, and so many kids in the '90s found themselves watching shows that hadn't aired new episodes since 1989, to the point where someone who was born in '92 could easily be familiar with Who's the Boss. Add to that the fact that Abed is TV Tropes on wheels, and it holds up that as a kid he could have gone out of his way to watch shows whether they were new or not.
  • There are still some things that make no sense, like Abed using 2nd edition D&D - it's what Harmon would have played, but someone Abed's age would be more familiar with 3.5 or 4e.
• The premise of Portlandia, as explained in the debut episode's first sketch, is that Portland, Oregon is still stuck in The '90s.
  "Remember the '90s, when everyone had a handlebar mustaches, rode bicycles and brewed their own beer? [...] No not the 1990s, the 1890s."
• The Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey seems to dress this way... that is, one or two decades behind the show's 1910s setting. When the second series wraps up at the brink of The Roaring '20s (with Lady Mary mentioning "the boys' haircuts they're wearing in Paris"), the Dowager is finally catching up to the fashions from the beginning of the show (in 1912).
  • Justified in that she was around 70 years old already when the show began, so she wouldn't have been that quick to follow the new trends.
  • Also justified in that women of the day often kept to the clothing styles of their youth, if only because they'd become accustomed to wearing the underthings (and especially the corsets) that matched those styles.
• Referenced in Arrested Development. When performing as part of Tobias's band, Lyndsey complains about being dressed like it's The '60s, stating that "It's the twenty-first century. We should be dressed like it's The '80s".
• Played with on Chuck. Casey keeps a photograph of Ronald Reagan in his apartment which he salutes at every opportunity (though it's also a bit of Actor Allusion, as actor Adam Baldwin actually is a huge fan of President Reagan's in Real Life), to the point where Beckman reminds him that "the '80s are over." Most of the references to music, television, films and video games are also centered around the period from the late '70s to early '90s, during the time in which the characters (and the actors and the show-runners) grew up.
• Parodied on The Colbert Report in the April 26, 2012 episode. Stephen talks about how he can relate to today's youth much better than Barack Obama. He says things like "Turn off your Atari, Obama, because the game is over" and "They know I'm young because I always carry around a full deck of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and I love the Power Rangers."
  • Stephen discussed this trope during the 2008 Democratic National Convention, as pundits tried to wonder what prominent figures from The '60s, like Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., would think about then-nominee Barack Obama.
  Stephen: We stick with these 40-year-old battles because they are comfortable and familiar. We know how to take sides in these arguments. Besides, if we didn't, we'd have to address the problems of the present, and who wants to do that? Those things are monsters!
• Saved by the Bell fell victim to this by about its final season (1992-1993), as the costuming and set design were firmly rooted in a hyper-idealized early-eighties, although some have speculated that it might have been partially intentional. Some wonder if they didn't hang on to the bright and colorful eighties look over the grim and drab nineties simply to grab kids' attention while flipping through the channels.
• British soap EastEnders falls victim to this trope often. One one notable occasion in 2019, character Jay Brown calls his friend Ben "Arthur Daley", a reference to 80s show Minder, which ended before either character had even been born.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation clung to its vivid '80s hairstyles and decor well into the 1990s. This in itself isn't so noticeable (not counting the getup on Tasha Yar's sister). However, Star Trek: Voyager began as a semi-continuation of that show, with costumes/sets redressed from the TNG era. This had the unfortunate effect of making VOY's aesthetics seem oddly retro in the late nineties. Throw in a quasi-religious devotion to past continuity, and you wound up with a 24th-century Earth where everyone dresses like they've come back from Woodstock (a relic from Gene Roddenberry's time).
  • An in-universe example occurs in Star Trek: Voyager, as Starfleet changed their uniforms after Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant, specifically in Star Trek: First Contact. Even after establishing long-range communication with Earth, they still continued to wear the old-style uniforms.
    • This can be handwaved aside with the theory that the reason they didn't switch over was due to energy conservation (it's noted that replicator use is rationed due to wanting to save energy) and not wanting to replicate more clothes than they needed to, and while the crew still has usable uniforms in the old style, it's not worth replicating new clothes for everyone. If crew members do need new uniforms, it's easier to keep using the old style until they get home, and everyone can get the new style at once so the crew doesn't look mismatched.
    • In "In the Flesh", Voyager discovers that Species 8472 has an outpost in which they were training to infiltrate Earth disguised as Starfleet officers. Since the only Starfleet information Species 8472 has came from Voyager, they are dressed in the division-color-over-black ensembles from TNG/early DS9/Voyager rather than the black-and-grey uniforms from First Contact.
  • This would tend to happen in-universe whenever characters got tossed back to Earth history or something like it. In one episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, the crew visits one near-Earth planet with costume from the 1770s, then the 1870s, and both are wrong (the people are in early 20th century clothing). In the Voyager two-parter "Future's End," Tom tries to reference the Cold War, which is about a decade out of date.
• Frasier's portrayal of talk radio represents the climate of the '70s and '80s, before the politicization of the medium sparked by the launch of Rush Limbaugh and the subsequent flood of imitators.
• Guy Fieri, host of Food Network's Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, seems to have just gotten off the bus from 1995.
• Mickey Pearce in Only Fools and Horses, best known for his fondness for wearing Zoot Suits (known in the UK as a "spiv suit"). Not too unusual in 1983 when he made his first appearance^note the style was widely adopted by British ska revival bands, which were still popular at the time, but as the show entered the '90s and 2000s, it became a Running Gag that his sense of fashion was seemingly locked in the 40s or 50s and refused to budge.
• Sex and the City:
  • Invoked in the episode where the characters go to Staten Island for the night, to some function where they dance to disco classics. Carrie's closing voice-over says it reminds her of going to Europe because all the music is at least twenty years old. Also, the idea that Europe is that far behind also shows the character's ignorance.
  • In a later episode, Samantha's young assistant says that the difference between them is that while Samantha waited in line to get into Studio 54, she waited in line to get into Studio 54—the movie.
• Understandable due to the Walt Disney Company's longtime moral standards, but on the early '90s Disney-aired (but Canadian-produced) children's show Under the Umbrella Tree, Iggy the Iguana, a fan of rap music, was still listening to relatively innocent '80s-style rap (think The Beastie Boys) in 1991, even though gangsta rap was rapidly gaining popularity by that time. Since the show began production in 1986, this can easily be dismissed.
• In Supernatural, Dean listens to music from the '70s and '80s on his collection of cassette tapes, while driving his late-'60s muscle car. Mostly justified, as Dean has a strong emotional attachment to his car and simply likes the older music (both of which are a connection to his father), but it's less clear why he thinks Sam installing an iPod jack is heresy. Later seasons do show them updating their phones to modern smartphones, however, and becoming aware of things like Netflix.
• In an episode of The Golden Girls, Blanche accidentally gives away Rose's teddy bear to an evil little girl scout who holds it for ransom. Dorothy gets fed up and threatens to call The School for Bad Girls, who would put her in a sack and take her away, and finishes with, "and you will never eat ice cream or play jump rope again!!!" Funny scene, but the episode was made in 1987, and jumping rope was no longer standard "little girl" behavior. It would have been when Dorothy was a little girl, though.
• In The Honeymooners, the Kramdens' apartment is relatively antiquated, with an old sink and an icebox, as though it hadn't changed one bit in forty years. Alice continuously complains about how they have no modern amenities, because Ralph is too cheap for them.
  Alice: (to Ralph) To you, this place looks like George Washington's birthplace or something: it has to be preserved exactly as it was. You know what it looks like to me? It's more like Abraham Lincoln's birthplace.
• Oddly present on Wheel of Fortune. Puzzles pertaining to popular culture (such as the categories Song Title, Song Lyrics, Movie Title, etc.) will usually have the answer be something from the '70s or '80s. Modern pop culture has been referenced very rarely in puzzle answers since the mid-2000s, and categories that have relied most frequently on contemporary pop culture (such as Headline or Star & Role) can go entire seasons without use. However, the Classic TV category is almost entirely MIA too...
  • This may be because older media from the '70s and '80s are more widely known and established than more contemporary media. Even among people who are otherwise great at keeping up with modern day pop culture, works that are already-established standards are usually easier to spot than works that are only a few years old. A lot of sitcoms and dramas are also very conservative about referencing more recent media for the exact same reason.
• A documentary show entitled Channel 3 Moscow, produced for American public television in The '80s taking a look at Soviet television of the era, demonstrates this was apparently the approach with Soviet TV towards the USA. One feature criticizing American rock music doesn't seem to know the difference between Elvis and Twisted Sister, and juxtaposing it with old film from the '60s to show the alleged evils of rock. Another on extreme right wing movements deals with old footage of the KKK and American Nazis which took footage from the documentary The California Reich made in 1975.
• Some of the portrayals of out-of-touch seniors in Saturday Night Live's Amazon Echo Silver ad parody seem a little out-of-date themselves...like Kenan Thompson wanting to know how many people Satchel Paige^note dead since 1982 struck out the night before and Echo playing swing when another character says he wants to hear "black jazz". Those would have been funnier in the 1980s, not the 2010s.^note Of course, it doesn't help that most of the actors aren't made to look "Greatest Generation" age as the bit claims
• The title character in the 2015 public access show Sprinkler's Clubhouse is a firefighter clown, as the creator seems to be unaware that clowns have been irrelevant in children's media since Bozo the Clown's cancellation in the early 2000s. ^note  although Ronald McDonald is probably the only exception to this Not helping matters is that clowns started to become associated with Nightmare Fuel around this time due to viral videos of stalkers dressed as such.
  • In the "Basic First Aid" episode, a rap song about the importance of first aid shows Sprinkler performing a freestyle in a Michael Jackson's Thriller jacket while his friends shout "Go Sprinkler, it's your birthday!'' These examples are fresh out of the 1980s for a show made in 2016.
  • In an episode regarding Internet safety, the gang plays an educational web game about the topic, with the host being a '90s surfer guy who frequently shouts slang like "Dude" and "Radical".
    • The fact that this is a public access show further drives the point home as developing an independent TV series became more or less obsolete with the introduction of Web Video sites like YouTube in the mid 2000s.
• Despite being filmed between 2005-2011, Aussie show Spicks and Specks rarely acknowledged anything after 1989. On rare occasions when they did, it was usually presented with a tone of "look at what rubbish this is". They even did a series of special episodes which covered the '50s, the '60s, the '70s, the '80s... and then stopped. The only notable exception is the Never Live It Down moment when Myf Warhurst failed to identify "Smells Like Teen Spirit".
• Before time-traveling back to the Fifties, Sarah Jane Smith of The Sarah Jane Adventures is asked why she has so many Fifties outfits in her wardrobe as she would have been only a baby back then. Her answer was "The '50s came back in The '70s. I remember when this was quite the thing."
• The Christian superhero show Bibleman was a victim of this. Most of the jokes in the show consisted of the characters or captions pointing out they knew they were characters in a TV show or jokey references to things star Willie Aames remembered from his childhood, things like Cagney & Lacey or Donnie and Marie, or his own acting career from the 70s and 80s. That is, things that people in the target audience, whose childhood was in the late 90s-onward never would've heard about. The cartoon version launched in 2016 followed this proud tradition by trying to present The Mall as a popular hangout with the kids the heroes lectured. One such episode had the villain's plan to corrupt children with an evil online game he and his sidekick handed out physical pass cards for from a mall kiosk. Doing this he succeeded in reaching practically every kid in town!
• Lampshaded, sort of, in The Wire, after Snoop returns to Marlo's gang with the $668 nail gun she bought with $800 cash and then told the salesman to keep the change: "He said it was the Cadillac of guns. He meant Lexus."
• Deliberately invoked in The Young Ones, as the main characters had little contact with the outside world, particularly with Mike, who claimed to be "The Cool Person", yet his fashion sense was stuck somewhere in the 1970s.
• Most of Sunnyvale Trailer Park is portrayed as this in Trailer Park Boys. Most cars are from the 70s and 80s, the interiors of the trailers look like they haven't been redecorated since the 1970s, the electronics are all wood-paneled stereo sets, big bulky console televisions, or Nixon-era (Trudeau-era?) Polaroid cameras. Justified somewhat as most Sunnyvale residents border on extreme poverty and probably can't afford to update.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway?: During a game of "Questionable Impressions," Wayne Brady went through it pulling out impressions of radio personalities such as Ed Wynn. At one point, Greg Proops—in full Peter Lorre mode—snapped, "Haven't you got anyone from the last twenty years?!".
• The Alternatino skit Latin Pop Star, White Audience makes fun of the "Despacito" fad. The parody of Justin Bieber is almost ten years out of date. It references his boyish teen years.
• Inverted in this scene from the 1987 Made-for-TV Movie Deadly Care which is set during the sixties, Cheryl Ladd mentions her distaste for hairy men and acknowledges that a guy "has a great butt". Hairy men didn't fall out of favor until the the late seventies and girls and women didn't start fixating on men's butts until the early eighties.
• Parodied in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as a Running Gag with The Waitress. Despite being in her thirties and forties, the Waitress consistently fails to keep up with modern technology, her cellphone is at least a decade old, and she isn't familiar with the internet.
• Season 1 of The Umbrella Academy canonically takes place in 2019, yet there isn't a single cell phone in sight. At one point, two of the characters stuff themselves into a phone booth to make a call.

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