It was fun while it lasted: Outta Sight Retro Night

Effective September, WGN America drops its Sunday night classic rerun lineup, AKA "Outta Sight Retro Night." Well, it was a good run, and it gave us a few years of good times (though it never actually aired "Good Times"). It's a shame that WGN is going in a different direction with newer sitcoms like "Old Christine," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," shows that are already running other places, but, hey, let's keep it positive here.

Instead of bemoaning the loss of Outta Sight Retro Night and listing it as another reason to yearn for a la carte cable pricing, let me praise WGN for giving a nice treat for classic TV fans on Sunday nights for several years. That's right, it's Sunday, and I feel mellow.

Thanks to WGN, I was able to enjoy virtually the entire run of "Newhart," a show I mostly missed in its original era. I also saw many "Barney Miller" episodes, and WGN made it through a whole cycle of that series.

I wish there were more cable networks showing TV programs from before this decade, but them's the breaks. Most of this stuff is on DVD, anyway. Let's just sit back and appreciate that in this day and age, a national superstation was willing to take a chance and show--gasp--a TV program from the--gasp--1950s! WGN not only showed a black-and-white classic in "The Honeymooners," but it showed the Lost Episodes, which exist in grainy kinescope form that probably makes most modern TV programmers physically gag. That's bold stuff. It was rough-looking (and edited for syndication--hey, WGN wasn't perfect), but it still got on because it was arguably the best sitcom of all time.

Outta Sight Retro Night didn't last forever, but it lasted almost 2 1/2 years, and that's longer than I expected.