Adventures of Mason #7

Our Shows Got Primetime

Or: What Power Rangers and X-Men Taught Me About Being Taken Seriously

When I was a kid, my absolute favorite show was Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

I remember when the action figures came out. My father searched high and low for a Red Ranger. Then the Zords. Each new piece of merchandise was a quest, a triumph, proof that this thing we loved was real enough to exist in plastic form at Toys "R" Us.

Then Season 2 premiered in primetime.

And so did X-Men.

As I look back, I can't really remember anything else quite like that moment.

What Primetime Meant

Primetime wasn't just a time slot. It was legitimacy.

Primetime was where the real shows lived. The sitcoms adults quoted at work. The procedurals that ran for twelve seasons. The stuff that got written about in TV Guide and discussed around actual water coolers in actual offices.

We'd had some superhero and sci-fi shows before. But they seemed to get moved around a lot. Saturday mornings. Weird afternoon blocks. Time slots that suggested the networks didn't quite know what to do with them or didn't think they mattered.

But Power Rangers and X-Men in primetime? That sent a message.

It said: this is important enough to compete with everything else. This is worth protecting in the schedule. This is legitimate entertainment, not just something to keep kids quiet while their parents read the newspaper.

One of the biggest messages sent, I think, was that superheroes and sci-fi were coming to primetime to stay.

And they did. A few years later we got shows like Smallville. Then the Arrowverse, crushing it in primetime for years. Eventually the entire culture shifted and now superhero stories are everywhere—theaters, streaming services, the zeitgeist itself.

But in that moment, it felt revolutionary.

The Ritual

There was something super cool about watching Power Rangers and X-Men in a time slot normally filled with sitcoms and adult procedurals and/or bedtime rituals.

It meant I had to negotiate. Had to make the case that yes, this was worth staying up for. That yes, I'd done my homework. That yes, I understood this was a privilege and I wouldn't squander it.

It made the shows feel even more important. Not just because they were good—though they were, to my eight-year-old brain—but because I had to earn the right to watch them in that slot.

And then the next day at school, we got to talk about it.

The Water Cooler

Talking about it at school the next day was even better.

We got to have our own water cooler conversation.

Not about Friends or NYPD Blue or whatever the adults were discussing. About whether Cyclops made the right call. About how the White Ranger's Tigerzord was objectively superior to all previous Zords. About whether Rogue's powers were a curse or a gift.

We got to feel like participants in the larger conversation of television. Like our opinions mattered. Like we were part of something that was happening now, in real time, not just catching reruns or watching something that had been deemed "for kids" and thus quarantined to a safe, dismissible time slot.

Of course, I went to a religious school, so we had to talk about it out of earshot of the adults tasked with keeping us pure.

Power Rangers was probably fine—they were technically fighting for good, even if the violence was questionable. But X-Men had moral complexity. Magneto had a point. Professor X's dream was noble but maybe naive. These weren't simple hero-versus-villain stories, and I think some of the adults sensed that and weren't sure what to do with it.

So we had our conversations in corners. During recess. In hushed tones that made it feel even more important, even more like we were onto something the adults either didn't understand or didn't want us to understand yet.

What It Taught Me

I didn't know it at the time, but those shows were teaching me things that had nothing to do with martial arts or mutant powers.

They taught me that stories about outsiders matter. That found families are as real as biological ones. That power comes with responsibility, but also with the need to question who gets to define what's "right." That sometimes the people society fears are the ones trying hardest to protect it.

They also taught me that when something you love gets taken seriously by the culture at large, it changes how you feel about loving it.

It's not just "your thing" anymore. It's a thing. Something worth discussing, worth analyzing, worth defending or debating. Something that exists in the same space as everything else people care about.

That feeling—of having your interests validated by their placement in the schedule—probably shaped how I think about art and entertainment more than I realized.

What Primetime Looks Like Now

Of course, today primetime looks a lot different.

Streaming killed the shared schedule. You can watch anything at any time. Water cooler conversations happen in group chats and Reddit threads and TikTok comment sections. There's no collective "did you watch it last night?" because "last night" doesn't mean the same thing anymore.

I don't know if that's better or worse. Probably both.

But I'm grateful I got to experience that moment when our shows—the ones made for us, about the things we cared about—got promoted to the time slot that mattered. When someone at a network decided that kids' opinions were worth programming around. That our stories deserved the same respect as everyone else's.

Even if we had to discuss them quietly, out of earshot of the purity police.

Especially because we had to discuss them quietly.

It made us feel like we were onto something important.

Turns out, we were.

If you're a certain age, you remember exactly where you were when the White Ranger first appeared. That's the power of appointment television. That's the power of being taken seriously.