Extra notable to the discussion is that both "That 80s Show" and "Freaks and Geeks" failed to catch on. I never saw any of either, so they might have just been bad (though at the very least Freaks and Geeks seems to have been looked upon positively), but I wonder if it wasn't representative of the fact that we still feel that the 80s are more or less the modern era, in a way that wasn't the case prior to that, and so there's less to have nostalgia about.

Of course it could also just be that there were crappy examples of that kind of show throughout TV history that we just don't remember.