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While Lucille Ball is etched into the side of Sitcom Mount Rushmore, by the mid-1980s, the TV comedy well had run dry. Check out her acting IMDb in the 1980s — it’s a complete blank for the first half of the decade. She’d been off TV since a bit in a Cher variety special in 1979. Sure, she had plenty of residuals to keep the lights on, but she “wanted to go back to work because I like to work," she told The Abbotsford News, as reported by MeTV.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do until I saw my first shopping bag lady in New York,” Ball confessed. “When I started passing her and not giving a second look, I got worried that something was wrong with me. The lady had become part of the scenery, and I wasn’t caring. So when CBS called and...

We live in a golden era of sci-fi on TV, where "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" come in multiple flavors, "Stranger Things" is an event every season, and the CW recently wrapped up an entire universe of DC Comics superheroes on the small screen. Fortunately for all sci-fi fans, this is a time where the people who make such shows grew up loving them, and critics who review them were raised on the concepts and get it. This is all a relatively new phenomenon.

As recently as the '90s, TV critics weren't necessarily big on high-concept sci-fi, and the people making these shows didn't always know what they were doing either. Even if they did, producers over their heads weren't necessarily making the best decisions either. Superheroes on TV were entirely different three decades ago, and the weekly format was just discovering the notion of season-long arcs. There were growing pains to be sure,...