The Best ’80s Sitcom Will Play 24/7 On A New Channel
The show must be out of this world.
This article is more than 2 years old
Television in the 1980s was something to behold, with MTV and network TV seemingly joining together to produce pop culture treasure troves for the masses. As any fan of ABC’s The Goldbergs could explain, the 1980s were rife with wholesome family programming mixed with a little flair and a lot of hairspray. Today shows like Cheers, Miami Vice, The Golden Girls, and Who’s the Boss tend to hit streaming platforms so that a new generation of viewers can enjoy the antics of classic television icons. But now, one sitcom is rising above the rest to be played on loop for Americans to enjoy once again. That’s right, it’s time for the return of ALF and it’s coming to Freevee.
According to a report by comicbook.com, ALF has begun streaming on Amazon Freevee, and it will continue to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. ALF first debuted in 1986 and ran for four seasons on NBC before its eventual cancellation. The name A.L.F. stands for Alien Life Form, and the series dealt with an alien who lands on Earth and takes up residence with a suburban family, the Tanners. One of the sitcoms to premiere in the 1980s with the show focused on a family named Tanner (Full House being the other one), ALF had a more snarky attitude towards family sitcom shenanigans, often seen through the eyes of the titular, cat-eating alien character.
Before ALF began its time on Freevee, it saw success in reruns throughout the 1980s and 1990s. A reboot of the show was planned at one point, but the idea was scrapped in 2018, per SlashFilm. Recently, the series captured the attention of a new audience when it began a marathon run on Shout! Factory. According to Deadline, the streaming service had acquired the rights to distribute ALF and had planned a 1980s-era blitz of programming centered around the sitcom. The move to Freevee may be a calculated move for Shout! Factory to call attention to their ideas for ALF going forward.
Borrowing from the charisma and charm that Steven Spielberg’s ET brought to the hearts of millions, ALF had tried to capture that sentiment with its alien at the center of the story. A hit with American households at the time, the series began a pop culture moment for fans, and merchandise reflecting ALF’s personality flew off the shelves. With the recent addition of ALF to Freevee, the hope seems that the series will gain new ground more than 35 years after it debuted.
For those wanting to watch ALF on Freevee, the streaming platform can be downloaded as an app. The app is downloaded automatically if you have an Amazon Fire Stick but is available to any user as long as they have an Amazon account. Even though the ad-supported Freevee is an Amazon product, the user does not need an Amazon Prime Video subscription as this is a separate service. The subscription service originally launched in 2019 under the IMDb banner of products and was once known as IMDb TV. Amazon, which owns IMDb, changed the branding of the service and launched its current iteration in April of this year.
