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Beyond the vagaries of home and family, reruns bring back a whole range of social attitudes that are purportedly bygone. In Gilligan's Island (1964-67), for example, everyone kowtows to the millionaire, even on an island where his money means nothing. In Hazel (1961-66), a normal middle-class family can find, afford and need a servant—and not because the mother is working or has more than one child. In The Odd Couple (1970-75), two men of a certain age can live together, in traditional masculine-slob and effeminate-fussbudget roles, without an automatic assumption that they are homosexual.
Reruns are sustained commercially by an audience of adults as well as curious children. Some of the audience's affection is only for the familiar. But some, plainly, is for a world that seemed simpler and safer—if not always in reality, then at least in the idealized views of TV programmers of the day. It is probably no accident that the Christian Broadcasting Network's over-the-air and cable services rely heavily on wholly secular reruns from the self-confident and squeaky-clean '50s. Adults are likely to be wistful, and children intrigued, about a time when society's rules were clearer and conformity with them more satisfying—and when, as awestruck viewers of The Millionaire (1955-60) have learned, a dollar was really a dollar.
—By William A. Henry III