You also chose one of the worst sitcom's to serve as your example, as Married with Children ran for god now... how many years? You DO realize that those principle actors probably never have to work again from the residuals they made from that show.
For the sake of argument, The Honeymooners was also very successful in its time. But if Jackie Gleason made the exact same pitch, wrote the exact same scripts, and presented it the exact same way today as he did back then... do you think it would be as successful? I'm pretty skeptical.
There's not much in the way of TV that can be considered timeless. The material is out there, but there's not much of it. Mostly, we appreciate things like sitcoms as a product of their times.
Similarly, many of the Old Guard are a product of their times. I read an essay by Richard Osterlind at one point where he briefly talked about comedy. Predictably, he said swearing was a no-no. Fair enough. Profanity should not be a substitute for wit. But he went on to describe who he thought the most timeless and enduringly funny comedians were: Bob Hope and Red Skelton.
I had to put the book down and try to evaluate if I had read that correctly, because no one I know under the age of 30 ever found either individual all that funny. Hey, I grant that Bob Hope (before he started phoning it in) had a tight sense of comedic timing, but he was a product of his time.
When my generation thinks of a timelessly funny comedian, Jerry Seinfeld is the name I hear the most often. I hear a few other names like Stephen Fry of course, but the point is that Richard Osterlind is speaking for the time he grew up in and during which he made his professional career. I agree with him in principle, but it's the fine details where things have changed.
The archetypal magician personas, the cheesy uncle, the used car salesman, and all those other overly simplistic tropes have moved from the realm of standard to cliche. They're stereotypes. I believe that's why audiences reacted to the Letterman appearances the way they did. They're saying things like, "Are these guys being bad on purpose?" When you hear those words, something has gone seriously wrong.
To go back to black metal for a second, the genre (debatably) went through three different phases. In the first phase was the bands who would lay the groundwork.
Venom started out by taking the apocalyptic dreamscapes of Black Sabbath and injecting more aggression and violence into them.
Hellhammer (which would later become Celtic Frost) pushed the music into ever bleaker directions. The early Hellhammer tapes were a thing of legend. No one had ever heard anything like it before. When
Celtic Frost came forward with their debut album, Morbid Tales, the title track asked the question, "Are you morbid?"
Mercyful Fate amplified the shock rock theatrics of Alice Cooper. King Diamond wore Edwardian suits and ghoulish face paint on stage. The songs they wrote were like miniature horror movies or chilling ghost stories.
And finally
Bathory melded artistry with practicality in their recording. They didn't have enough money to record anything really high quality, so they simply wrote music that made the most of the lo-fi production.
This was what many consider the first wave of black metal, most of which wasn't even technically black metal itself once the genre coalesced. Hang on, I am going somewhere with this.
The second wave of black metal started in Norway. At the forefront were bands like
Mayhem,
Burzum, and
Immortal. These were young guys who listened to the works of Venom, Hellhammer, et al, and decided to continue this new direction. They created a genre defined by its anti-mainstream ethos. How much so? This is a picture of one of Mayhem's vocalists, Per Yngve Ohlin, known on stage as "Dead":
Keep in mind also that this is the
tamest picture of him in existence. This entire band was completely goat****. Some of the songs Dead penned include Funeral Fog, Freezing Moon, Buried by Time and Dust, and Necrolust. DO NOT do a search for Dawn of the Black Hearts. Trust me on this one.
Over the course of the late 80's and into the early 90's, a rush of similar bands came raging out of Norway with a similar aesthetic. Lo-fi production, tremolo picked riffs, blast beats, inhuman vocals, nightmarish and violent lyrics, obsessions with superstition and mythology, and more than a few espousing strongly anti-Christian philosophies. The wave is generally considered to have ended following the murder of Mayhem's founding member and guitarist Oystein "Euronymous" Aarseth at the hands of his former bandmate and musical contemporary Varg Vikernes.
This period was dubbed "True Norwegian Black Metal" by the hardcore fans and bands in the genre since have been trying to emulate it even down to the staunchly anti-mainstream ethos. A lot of them still object to the expansion of the genre such as in symphonic black metal (
Dimmu Borgir,
Emperor,
Bal-Sagoth) and folk/black and Viking metal (
Einherjer,
Melechesh,
Primordial). Personally, I quite like these sub-genres, and I see the objections from the purists to be similar in some ways to magicians who insist on continuing to perform the same material in the same ways year in and year out with little to no variation or experimentation.
The point is that purists are actually hurting that which they love. Second wave black metal style can still be good music, but rigidly adhering to a formula leads only to stultification and stagnation. Criss Angel may be a veritable grenade of a debate topic with magicians, but just go to a metal message board and start a thread talking about how much you like Dimmu Borgir. It will be a perfect storm of elitist oldbies versus acne-riddled teen angst. Despite the band's commercial success and generally doing a lot to elevate black metal beyond its stereotypes (well... musically anyway), the scene has pretty much disowned them.
I'm not saying that magicians have gone to the same extreme. But our community does have a tendency to be very slow to change. Maybe it's one of those, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," things? Maybe people just aren't paying attention? Whatever the case, I see what's happening to black metal and find it to have some uncomfortable similarities to what's happening in magic.