Nice idea. Those of us whose television watching began on B&W, and at other people's houses, are mostly into the vintage age ourselves, and finding we remember things (special things like TV!) from our childhood easier than what we did last week. 

My memories as a 5 year old, when TV came on air in my country, and our next-door neighbours got the first TV on the block, were comedies like I Love Lucy, Sunday afternoon movies (their lounge crowded with locals), and a couple of UK puppet shows.

Later 60s added Thunderbirds, Get Smart , Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, and cartoons. We loved staying with cousins for school holidays, as they had TV, which was still something of a status symbol.

I haven't seen the old shows for years, but when I did see them was quite struck by the COLOUR after watching in black and white!  Hogan Heroes wore different coloured uniforms? Magical Samantha and Jeannie were colourful!

I love the '60s TV shows, my all time favorite is Hogan's Heroes, I will watch it anytime. However I have so many that I enjoy, the ones in bold are part of my personal collection which keeps on growing even though I keep planning not to buy more. My sister Scarlet is tired of the collection expanding since it's stored in our room, but I still need one more season of The High Chaparral and two of The Big Valley just for the shows I'm already collecting. Anyway below are the shows I enjoy.

• The Wild Wild West
• The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
• Zorro (1957-1961)
• Get Smart
• F-Troop
• The High Chaparral
• The Big Valley
• Lost In Space
• My Favorite Martian
• McHale's Navy
• I Love Lucy
• Green Acres
• Rat Patrol
• It Takes A Thief
• and most recently The Fugitive

And from the 70s and 80s, I like Rockford, Baa Baa Black Sheep, The Six Million Dollar Man, Sherlock Holmes (starring Jeremy Brett), and Scarecrow and Mrs. King (my favorite not made in the '60s show). Oh my, Road To Avonlea (1990-1996) is vintage now as well.  

With The Fugitive, I watched a couple of episodes and then went bought the whole series even though the library has all four seasons. I really have no control when comes to adding to my collection, maybe that will be something I work on this year. This way though I can watch the show as quickly or as slowly as I want to, and I wouldn't have to schedule a library pick up. I've been trying to get my siblings to watch the Get Smart spoof of The Fugitive, now that we have finished watching Christmas movies I think it's very likely we will finally watch it. Plus we watched an episode of The Fugitive on New Year's Eve so now all the siblings have seen at least one episode.

SnowAngel

Hogan's heroes

Scarecrow and Mrs King

I Love Lucy

Andy Griffith

Zorro from Disney with Guy Williams

@starkat

I always liked Andy Griffith, the small town sheriff of Mayberry. Hogan’s Heroes was pretty good. It was quite funny with its wartime humor.  (We also have a Col. Klink here. 🙂 ). I don’t remember much of Zorro, but I do remember Guy Williams as Professor Robinson on Lost in Space, a show which may be too campy for some science fiction fans. I watched I Love Lucy in reruns many years ago.  What is interesting is that Lucille Ball helped to finance the original Star Trek and keep it on the air.  Scarecrow and Mrs. King I don’t remember at all.  My memory for most TV shows goes back to the 1960’s when I was a child, and of course we had only three channels back then.  🙂

@narnian78

I remember watching win lose or draw at my Grandparents house and the tv cutting off after it. It took me ages to learn how to sleep with a tv on. ?

Scarecrow and Mrs. King was an 80s show I think. Maybe late 70s. She was a housewife and he was a spy. 

@snowangel

I remember all of these shows, although the spy thriller that I really liked that hasn’t been mentioned here before was Mission: Impossible. Get Smart was fine comedy, but Mission: Impossible had the best plots, and I loved the exotic locations in other parts of the world.  Peter Graves was a much better actor than Tom Cruise, and Martin Landau mastered the art of disguise. Barbara Bain was strikingly beautiful as Cinnamon. The Man from Uncle was a bit bland for me, although I do like other black and white shows.  I used to like The Wild Wild West, although combining the western and spy thriller doesn’t seem to appeal very much to my sense of realism and believability .

My dad loved watching all those old Westerns when I was growing up, so many of the shows listed above are at least somewhat familiar. There were also numerous cop and medical shows back then, such as The FBI, Dragnet, Medical Center, and Marcus Welby, MD.  My younger brother especially liked watching The Rifleman.

The opening post mentioned Sliders, which I thought was a great concept. I quite liked some of the earliest episodes, especially with John Rhys-Davies as the professor. I also enjoyed Quantum Leap with Scott Bakula, but in my opinion the ending was very disappointing.

There are several broadcast TV networks airing old shows like these, like Antenna TV and Me TV. The latter has a "Saturday Night Sci-Fi" lineup airing as I type this, including Svengoolie (an inspiration for some local guys to make Mystery Science Theater 3000 that is still making new episodes), Star Trek, and several Irwin Allen shows I remember from childhood: Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, and The Time Tunnel.

(Trivia note: Lost in Space credits a "Johnny Williams" for music. Yup, it's that John Williams, years before his rise to fame with movies like Star Wars).

Heroes and Icons (H&I) also airs blocks of some older shows, including "All Star Trek" six nights a week - each classic series, with episodes aired in internal broadcast order.

@stargazer

Sliders was so much better when the professor was on it.  Near the end of season three he left and the quality of the show seriously declined.  Irwin Allen’s series were all rather campy, although some of them had enjoyable episodes such as the early Lost in Space adventures.  The original Star Trek was much better than all of Irwin Allen’s science fiction.  Some people think Gerry Anderson’s shows were campy, but I liked them for their fine artwork and beautiful sets.  Marionette puppets have an artistic charm and are fun to watch (especially for children).  Space: 1999 and U.F.O.  were beautifully photographed, although the stories were very improbable. At the time that the shows were made there was much more of an effort to make the programs look attractive and tasteful on the screen.  Quantum Leap was intriguing and fine quality science fiction, although I liked Scott Bakula better as Captain Archer in Star Trek: Enterprise.  I will sometimes really like shows that were canceled and think they should have been given more chances to succeed.

I liked the old classic Dr. Who better than the new series because it is more like vintage television, the title of this thread.  It had a lower budget and less technology, but that’s all in its simple charm.  For me television shouldn’t look too modern.

Does Gomer Pyle USMC qualify as vintage? I believe it's from the 60s or 70s. While it's not as popular as its parent show, I honestly find it funnier. Gomer is actually a variation of the Wise Fool archetype. He's oblivious to a lot of things but his worldview is usually validated by the end of each episode rather than that of the more worldly and cynical characters.

@col-klink

I watched Gomer Pyle as child, but I never cared much for it.  Gomer acted too foolish for me.  I thought he was kind of a twit, which was quite annoying rather than funny.   I didn’t mind him that much on The Andy Griffith Show, but when he had his own show it was unbearable. It’s kind of like Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island— he was just too much of a fool. It’s very sad that Mary Ann (Dawn Wells) passed away recently. 

Posted by: @narnian78

 The original Star Trek was much better than all of Irwin Allen’s science fiction.

Definitely agreed. I'm extremely familiar with Trek but less so with Lost In Space, so I've been watching them when convenient. Trek had its campy episodes ("The Apple," "The Way to Eden") but Lost in Space was worse, in my opinion. Dr. Smith is beyond annoying, though I know he's written that way. ("The Way to Eden" is picked on by Trek fans as "the space hippy episode" - but Lost in Space had a hippy episode that was worse. Must have been a '60s thing. 😉 )

There were mistakes in old TV shows, and some of them were embarrassing.  In the Flipper series Ranger Porter Ricks said, “I supervised the dumping of those cars”.  Sandy and Bud, his sons, were trapped in an old car which had been dumped in the bay.  So did the park ranger approve of water pollution? The show was made in 1964 when there wasn’t so much concern about the environment. People have said that in Jonny Quest racist comments were made, although I don’t remember all of the details since I watched the cartoon series as a child in 1964.  If it was merely being politically incorrect it may be forgiven, but it seems more serious than that. Calling people “savages” seems rather insulting, as some reviews of the show have said.  I used to enjoy those cartoons.  Today I am not so sure if I would like to watch the series again.

Just this evening I was introduced (via a comment on a short story I read on a fiction writing site) to a show called One Step Beyond, which aired for three seasons from 1959 to 1961. It reminds me of Rod Serling's classic The Twilight Zone in that it's an anthology series with opening and closing narration by a host, and there seem to be supernatural or otherwise unexplained elements present. (I watched several episodes on Youtube). I found myself trying to guess the ending in advance, and the ones I watched seemed to go for a 'softer' ending than The Twilight Zone might have.

I'd be remiss not to mention The Twilight Zone as well. I think it was the earliest TV show I recall seeing episodes of. (My parents wouldn't let us watch it, for fear of nightmares I suspect, but sometimes we'd catch episodes when visiting our cousins in the next town over). A friend has the complete collection of Twilight Zone episodes, and a couple years ago we watched them from beginning to end. Also, the SyFy cable channel airs a marathon of the show on New Year's Eve, and we make a point of at least looking in on it then.

That show has had at least two later iterations, once in the 80s and another in 2003. Each of those had some interesting episodes but didn't have the legs of the original. One episode of the 2003 version did a sequel to an original episode, "It's A Good Life," which starred a young Billy Mumy as a kid who could "send people to the cornfield" if they displeased him. The sequel, "It's Still A Good Life," features an adult Mumy with a child of his own who turns out to have a similar power. She's played by his real-life daughter, Liliana Mumy, and it's fun to see how they interacted on screen. And she's able to duplicate that spooky look young Billy Mumy made when someone's about to go to the cornfield.

@stargazer

It was only a couple of years ago that I first watched One Step Beyond. I was quite impressed with it and saw how it could have influenced later series such as The Outer Limits and Twilight Zone.  It had much of the same eerie atmosphere.  🙂