February 18, 2021 4.6K votes 976 voters 59.0K views
Over 900 Ranker voters have come together to rank this list of Outdated TV Plots That Only Made Sense In The '90s
Voting Rules
Vote up the '90s TV episodes that would confuse young viewers today.
It seems like there's more content out there than ever before, but for some reason, people still insist on watching old sitcoms on Netflix. The kids really dig their "Must See" TV from the '90s. Which is great, because '90s shows like Friends, Frasier, and Fresh Prince are classics, but it's also worth noting that there are tons of plots and jokes in them that make for absolutely outdated episodes (or would just never happen).
Just think about how much drama ensued on '90s shows simply because voicemail was still a thing. Or that "adult material" used to be something you had to go out and get. Wild times, friends. Here are just a handful of dated TV plots from the '90s that make absolutely no sense now.
What's more '90s about the Friends episode, "The One With The List" - that Chandler is bragging about his new laptop, or that it's... a Compaq? Probably both. In any case, the guy is very excited about his new laptop, which had "12 megabytes of RAM, a 500MB hard drive, built-in spreadsheet capabilities, and a modem that transmits at over 28,000 bps."
Fancy, right? With all those specs - built-in spreadsheets! - the first thing he really wants to do with the computer is play Doom, which was all the rage back then, too. Oh, simpler times.
A lot of drama on Friends could have been avoided if they just had cell phones. But what fun would that be? The best part about voicemail in the '90s was the fact that you could theoretically check your own - or someone else's - messages from anywhere, just by calling the right number and having the right password. Which also meant you could "take back" a message if you were sneaky enough.
Sadly, this leads to a super embarrassing moment for Monica when she leaves a message for Richard, only to end up obsessing about it so hard that she calls his voicemail repeatedly and ends up recording a message in which she blames her erratic behavior on her period. She then sets it as his outgoing message, meaning that everyone who calls him will hear how utterly insane she is. Yeah, he will definitely be changing his number after that one, Mon.
Sure, knowing that someone is liking posts on Instagram and not sending you a text back is excruciating, but that doesn't mean things were any easier back in the era of portable phones and voicemail. Case in point: the Seinfeld episode called "The Millennium," in which Jerry stresses over his spot on his girlfriend's speed dial.
Played by Lauren Graham, Valerie adjusts his place on her speed dial depending on how their dating situation is going at the time, causing Jerry to lose his mind in typical fashion. Meanwhile, in the most '90s way ever, Kramer and Newman are throwing competing "millennium" parties because that, too, was a thing.
If you think getting telemarketers calling you on your cell phone is bad, imagine being poor Kramer in 1995. In the Season 2 episode of Seinfeld, "The Pool Guy," he replaces the phone in his apartment and gets a new number, one that is a single digit away from the movie showtimes hotline.
Yes, kiddos, if you wanted to go to a movie in the '90s, you looked up the movie's times in the actual newspaper or called a generic number to get a full list of times. It was tedious, but not as bad as having people mistakenly calling your house at all hours of the day.
Can you believe that people used to actually pay for such things? In Season 4, episode 17, Joey and Chandler are living their dream when they discover they can somehow get free adult flicks on Monica and Rachel's television. Back in the day, you had to be brave enough to actually add such channels to your cable package (or stay up late enough to catch it), so when the guys realize a glitch in the system has given them access to the good stuff for free, they settle into the living room, lest they leave and miss any of the action before it goes away.
It completely derails their lives - so who knows how unproductive they would be if they were able to just log onto the internet and get the kind of access we now have?
The Simpsons always has "ripped from the headlines" jokes, which explains the entire Halloween episode in Season 11, when Y2K causes a bunch of robots to take over and destroy the world. If you were alive in 1999, you definitely considered the possibility of the world ending after Y2K, so The Simpsons was right to tackle it.
It's funny to watch now, but people were really scared! Between voicemails and dating chatrooms, the '90s were a terrifying place for TV.
