A 1990s Australian lounge room with a CRT television showing a surf beach and a red and yellow flag, a corduroy couch, and a TV Week magazine on the coffee table
Entertainment

Cheez TV, Rage and The Simpsons Every Night: Australians Name Their Favourite TV Eras

Sarah Robbins · September 26, 2026 · 6 min read

On AFL grand final weekend, a simple question in an Australian nostalgia forum asked people to rank Seven, Nine, Ten, the ABC and SBS at their peaks. Hundreds of replies later, the answers read less like a ratings table and more like a shared diary of after-school cartoons, Sunday night movies and late-night SBS.

The post went up in r/AustralianNostalgia with a plain title: at their individual peaks, how do you rank the big five original free-to-air channels? Nobody agreed on the order. Almost everybody agreed on the shows.

What comes through is how much Australian television was a routine rather than a menu. People don't remember choosing a channel so much as moving through a day that the networks had built for them, from breakfast cartoons to the moment Ten told the kids it was time for bed.

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