I grew up in a very rural area. We only had two stations regularly. ABC and PBS. If the weather was right, we could occasionally see NBC/CBS if the weather was right although it would be a fuzzy and often came in/out.
I could go to my Grandma's house that was up on a hill and her aerial could pick up CBS out of Paducah (I think.) I would walk across the field and up the hill and spend Saturday night with her and watch Amazing Stories and Twilight Zone and then go to church with her in the morning. Those were probably my most favorite "Prime Time" shows. On Saturday mornings we watched Looney Tunes, Ghostbusters, Pacman, Smurfs and Ewoks and some kind of a show with bears and berries that my brother liked. Pretty much anything on ABC. If we were lucky we could catch the Hanna Barbara series on some of the other stations. I loved Thundarr the Barbarian and the Herculoids and Spaceghost. Except Scooby Doo. I hated Scooby Doo.
When my Dad was home he would want to watch the Memphis wrestling (Jerry "The King" Lawler) et al, he would laugh a lot. I personally hated it but we only had the one TV.
A lot of Saturdays we were doing things so we didn't watch every weekend. We were either fishing or hunting or looking for Indian artifacts or going to local historical parks (there is a Civil War battlefield in nearly every cardinal direction). It always made my school educational trips a little boring because we had usually gone there at least 4 times before we ever got there on a school trip. I usually got to be a "tour guide" for my friends though since I had already been there.
Now, when I was a little older, we got "Satellite"!
This was before all the "scrambling". So we had all the stations. We watched Disney East and (again on West) and Robotech and Voltron (the cat one) and Galaxy Rangers on WGN. I really enjoyed those.
"Satellite" also had the stations that were way on the "east" side. *wink* The only bad thing is the traverse motor didn't have the "umph" to overcome gravity and get it back to the "ok" channels. Being a budding engineer, I worked out a system of putting a weight on the traverse switch in the living room and then use a broom to push the dish over so the motor could start pulling and the run like crazy to get back up to the house before it ran off the track the other way.:o
My Dad used to like to "surf" the news feeds. All the stuff that was being beamed that would later be cut and edited. Those news anchors used to do some very funny things. Much farting, off color jokes and other such.
Now that could backfire. One day I was doing it and there was a newsfeed out of Eastern Europe, IIRC. It was a very beautiful and very pale woman with her eyes closed. Since I had a thing for very pale women even then, I was transfixed. It was zoomed in on her face. It zoomed out and she was missing everything just below her shoulders. I was a live feed of a mortar attack on a village market. I didn't look anything like the movies. It is still burned into my mind over 30 year later. :(