Oh sure, it helps if you can recall dateless Friday nights spent cringing at the musical stylings of Pink Lady and the alleged comedy of Jeff Altman. But you don't need such memories to find the bland optimism of this promo kind of sad.
Facts Of Life inexplicably found success, but Here's Boomer and Pink Lady And Jeff remain among the more notorious failures in TV history, prime examples of the slapdash, coke-fueled, what-the-hell-were-they-thinking style of programming so common in the late seventies and early eighties. (As opposed to now, of course, when everything on TV is pure gold.)
What really shines through in this spot is a complete lack of irony; this was surely the last time in history when a voice-over could use a phrase like "traveling across America and right into your heart" without it being intended as some vaguely post-modern comment on the very triteness of the phrase. And as for the guest lineup on Pink Lady And Jeff, again, we'll not see such a bizarrely mismatched parade of talent again unless it's a joke, a reference to how randomly guests were chosen for TV shows back in the day.
Much of what's on TV now is better than what was on then. Production values are certainly better, and even the worst shows now assume a certain level of awareness (if not actual intelligence) on their audiences' parts. Which is fine when it brings us something like The Sopranos or The Shield or Arrested Development or even simple, well-crafted entertainment like the Law & Order franchise. But it's impossible to imagine any TV network, broadcast or cable, bringing us something as hopelessly naive as Here's Boomer, and we're somehow poorer for that.
