Discussion
I may be one of the only Americans my age who can say this, but ST:TNG premiered where I lived the same year my family of origin first got a television. so it was extra formative for me.
(it's a less weird scenario than you think, my parents simply refused to own a TV and they gave in the year TNG hit our rural backwater market on broadcast television; we never got cable so it was the four major OTA networks and no Fox plus VHS tapes only, as our TV was one of those 13-inch TV-VCR combo units.)
I think there might have been a deal where the station which usually carried religious programming carried TNG because none of the others would, but I might be misremembering. I swear we tuned in to the only UHF channel to watch it though.
there was a similar deal (albeit not on the Jesus channel) to bring The Simpsons to the local market since there was no broadcast Fox affiliate, and then it was Controversial™ because schoolkids started saying "eat my shorts."
like I said, Flyover Country.
anyway, I left that state for good in 1995 which is the same year meth arrived, and that plus cheap satellite TV plus the internet erased the cultural lag by the turn of the millennium, as gone as it would ever be in that part of the USA.
the very next year however I would visit distant relatives in rural New Brunswick who still had party line phones and were paying CAD$30/g for weed in 1996.
this has been tall tales with grampa deutrino, don't forget to leave a tip in the med fund jar!
(and yes... they had party line phones with touch-tone direct dialing. 3 houses per phone line with distinctive ring. in Canada in 1996. granted the "town" was a literal wide spot in the road half an hour from anywhere else, but still.)
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this was maybe 1989 or 1990. it wasn't unusual for syndicated shows to premiere 1+ years late where we lived, the state didn't have television *at all* until the early 60s IIRC, and national trends were still landing perceptibly behind the rest of the country into the mid 90s there. gotta love growing up in actual Flyover Country™.
I just barely missed getting on the internet before my family owned a TV, as a matter of fact. I might have been on Prodigy before we did, I can't remember.