Roy Scheider of Jaws fame starred as the captain of a research and diplomatic envoy vessel in a future where depletion of the Earth’s resources has led to the only cities remaining underwater, where they harvest the bounty of the ocean. It’s easy to sort of deride seaQuest DSV as essentially “ Star Trek underwater,” but in its earlier episodes that comparison was only half right.

WWF, meanwhile, kicked off its own “Attitude Era,” still considered the high-water mark for pro wrestling as a whole. The single biggest heel turn in history took place Jwhen Hulk Hogan did the unthinkable and became a villain, forming the New World Order in WCW and ushering in several of the most exciting, over-the-top and influential years the wrestling world has ever seen. Good things arose from the competition between Ted Turner’s WCW and Vince McMahon’s WWF and the so-called “Monday Night Wars” that resulted, as the quest for ratings drove creativity and some of the most popular characters of all time, including Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Goldberg, Sting and more.

The ’90s came in with dayglo excess and left in a flannel daze, bemoaning the death of grunge and the incoming and clearly unavoidable disaster of Y2K.Įven more so than in the golden age of the WWF in the late ’80s, the late ’90s was the most popular and relevant that pro wrestling has ever been on a national scale. It was a transformative period for so many televised genre programs, from science fiction and mystery to horror and absurdist humor. Sincerity seemed to rule the airwaves as the ’90s opened, gradually replaced by a sense of cynical, defeatist satire as the decade progressed. It was a decade of wholesome family sitcoms and subversive cartoons that flew under the radar and straight into cult fame. (Do you even realize how many terrible animated shows there were featuring anthropomorphic animals in the ’90s? I suspect that you do not.) In that decade, I watched some of the best shows, such as the aforementioned Simpsons in its heyday, and I watched some absolute dreck-I’m talking Street Sharks and SWAT Kats-type stuff here. I was born in 1986, which I would argue essentially makes me the quintessential ’90s child, coming into the decade as a four-year-old making some of my first television memories and leaving it as a jaded 14-year-old, certain that The Simpsons probably had “a season or two left, at best.” But one thing is certain: I watched a whole lot of TV.

1992 nielsen ratings