I was a kid before the WB and UPN (later merged as The CW) followed Fox, America’s 4th broadcast television network established in the 1980s, to become the 5th and 6th, so I remember unaffiliated local channels that would air stuff that was bid out to individual channels market by market in syndication (Xena was syndicated! Star Trek: The Next Generation was syndicated!) or like reruns from a generation previous like Small Wonder or What’s Happening.

And this was before the internet, this would be one of like eight things you could passively watch in realtime (like 60 if you had cable) if you felt like having some contact with the wilder world from a chair. A huge share of ‘90s and '00s culture was basically in reaction to everyone having had this as their main cultural context for decades.