Thinking back to television when I was a kid – that is, the early 1980s in Switzerland -, I mainly remember these: German entertainment shows featuring all the beige in the world, the cheesy US series of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the likes of Simon & Simon and Knight Rider, and the Japanese anime adaptations of (mostly) European children’s literature, from Heidi to Pinocchio. Just as much as the daily and weekly fare, though, I remember the ‘prestige television’ of the time: the big miniseries that featured impressive casts and that by and large were concerned with more mature themes. I remember these being something of a family event that we’d gather in front of the TV to watch: Roots, Fatal Vision (starring Karl Malden, that big-nosed embodiment of integrity), the German Das Boot (which I’ll always think of as a miniseries, since I don’t think I ever saw the original cinema edit). To pre-teen me, these felt excitingly like grown-up television, and while I would probably not have put it like that at the time, they felt so much less generic and more ambitious than the ongoing series I was otherwise watching at the time.

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