YMMV / Turn-On

• Broken Base: Reactions to the leaked episodes are extremely divisive; no surprise considering this show's history. One side finds the material unfunny at worst and bewildering at best, and think it was deservedly cancelled. On the other hand, it's developed some admiration from people who appreciate how Turn-On pushed the limits of television, and insist the show's Surreal Humor and subversive presentation was decades ahead of its time. Still others consider it a case of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: the presentation was innovative, but the material just wasn't very good and relied way too much on shock value.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The concept of the show is that it's comedy entirely generated by computer. Advances in Artificial Intelligence have led to lots of current experiments with exactly that same idea. And since modern AI comedy (like Nothing, Forever) has exhibited the same tendencies toward Non Sequitur gags, Surreal Humor and So Unfunny, It's Funny jokes that Turn-On did, it looks downright prophetic.
  • Several modern commentators have noted that watching the show's short self-contained skits give you a similar sensation to watching a half-hour of random TikTok comedy videos.
• Quirky Work: It says a lot that even after almost six decades and Mind Screw becoming a common mode in American pop culture, the finished episodes still come across as a relentless attack on the senses built around quick joke-like fragments, rather than a Sketch Comedy show, making the whole thing feel like a fever dream experienced under the influence of the entire inventory of a CVS pharmacy. You can only imagine how alien and disorienting it must've been for people channel-surfing on a winter night in 1969.
  Nathan Rabin: (In a 2023 review of the show) I love drugs but Turn-On was way too druggy for me.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Besides all the hot button issues from The '60s that were used as the basis for gags (birth control, drugs), there are some very specific topical references from early 1969, like South Vietnamese prime minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ and his professed admiration for Adolf Hitler (suggesting that Kỳ requested a swastika-shaped table for the Paris peace talks), and the war of words at San Francisco State University between striking students and university president S.I. Hayakawa (with Tim Conway portraying Hayakawa as a Samurai).
• Values Resonance: Reputation aside, one thing in the show's favor is that, especially by 1969 standards, it had a very diverse cast, split evenly between men and women, and multiracial, with two African-Americans (Teresa Graves and Mel Stewart), a Latino (Carlos Manteca) and an Asian-American (Cecile Ozorio) alongside the white majority cast (Bonnie Boland, Hamilton Camp, Maxine Greene, Ken Greenwald, Debbie Macomber,^note Not the romance novelist Maura McGiveney and Bob Staats).

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