My wife, Elizabeth, and I just made the switch from cable to streaming. No thanks to me. When eight-track tapes were popular, I had a four-track tape player. When it was universally agreed that video tapes should be VHS, Dad had a Beta player on our TV. I distinctly remember one of my high-school students, when all my music was on cassette tapes, which frequently unspooled and vomited torrents of celluloid spaghetti, about something new called a “CD.” He put one on for me—was it Flock of Seagulls? The Thompson Twins?—and we listened to it. He closed his eyes as the music played, like a dreamer in a 19th-century opium den. That CD was State of the Art.

Once upon a time, so were these television shows.

So, given my penchant for history (and for being 72 years old), I started to search for TV shows from my younger years. The only other requirement was, on our new-fangled Streaming Contraption, that they be free. Sure enough, up came my second-favorite TV theme, from one of my all-time favorite TV shows, a wicked take on life in El Lay, just a few generations removed from the arch (and evocative) writing of Raymond Chandler, the creator of Rockford’s archetype (and The Dude’s, in The Big Lebowski), Philip Marlowe.

This was a detective show, too, and not one of my favorites, because it was about a bunch of snitches who worked undercover. The problems are that it’s a decent opening theme and that it includes one of the stars, Peggy Lipton, the mother of the just-as-beautiful Rashida Jones, below, in her recurring role on Parks and Rec.

Karen Valentine was adorable, too, but about all she did after Room 222, a show about high school teachers, was to appear regularly as a guest star on The Love Boat, a show I detested because it was insipid, as was its theme song. But Room 222’s theme was kind of charming. Maybe that show was one of the reasons I became a teacher. The Black teacher, Lloyd Haynes, was handsome and cool and nobody’s fool. The principal, Michael Constantine, kind of immortalized himsefl (Windex!) many years later in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

But the second show, after Rockford Files, that I streamed was based on yet another crush from my teens. Here she is:

My family watched Marlo Thomas every week. Mom adored her, too. As to me? The lavender dress and parasol, and then, when she musses her hair at the end of the sequence, were pretty much all I needed, at fourteen, to get through the following week. (I met her father, Danny Thomas, at the Madonna Inn and got his autograph for my AGHS Christmas Formal date, Jeri Tomson. VICTORY!)

If you know that I loved That Girl, it’s not a far jump to my next favorite TV theme. The song’s not all that great. Mary Richards’ Mustang is cool, and, of course, Mary Richards Herself was Mary-freakin’-Tyler Moore, with whom most males my age had already fallen in love—when we were little boys— thanks to her Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

When I was in college at the University of Missouri, about six of my (male) friends and I watched the last episode together at our fiend Tom’s house in Columbia. We were devastated, and drinking far too much after the closing credits did not help at all. We just became even more morose, and it lasted a couple of days.

Lest you think I watched shows only because of my Teen Crushes, I will remind you that I also wanted to be a spy when I grew up. Pays more than teaching, I guess. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a favorite—it was on Friday nights, enough to lead me to begging for a ride home after AGHS football games so I’d get there in time to watch. But my personal favorite, in the spy genre, was I Spy, with Robert Culp’s cover (a pro tennis player) and the banter with his trainer, Bill Cosby. It was revelatory to have a Black man as a lead character. Many years later, of course, Cosby would betray us—I never liked the smugness of Dr. Huxtable, anyway. My Cosby drove a stick-shift Shelby Cobra in downtown San Francsico, afraid to the point of death of letting go of the clutch and brake on Telegraph Hill. Maybe my distaste for Dr. Huxtable was a premonition. But I Spy was a terrific show and the chemistry between Culp and Cosby was brilliant.

Finally, and many of you might know this already, but our favorite spy show—my big sister Roberta and me— was Britain’s The Avengers, very camp, very spoofy, very Mod. I wanted to be the protagonist, John Steed. He was unruffled, wry, prone to popping a bottle of Moet Chandon at the drop of a (bowler) hat, drove an MG convertible. If anything, he was cooler than Culp and Cosby and just a shade shy of James Garner in whatever international measure they might use for Coolness.

So, yes, this is my all-time favorite television theme.

But let’s be real, okay? The other reason I wanted to be John Steed was the fact that his co-spy and best friend was Emma Peel, as played by Diana Rigg. Here’s the opening to the 1965 version of The Avengers.

And lest you think me alone in my regard for Emma Peel, here’s a song about her, among many alt-rock songs performed in her honor (Dishwalla, a group I love, has a song about her, too.)

And, in case you’re wondering, we would’ve watched these shows on a TV a lot like this one, a 1964 Zenith color TV—the first color TV we had—when, out on Huasna Road, we got three channels: KSBY (NBC), KCOY (a latecomer, CBS) and, thank the gods, KEYT (ABC), because it was ABC that ran The Avengers.

I’d love to take that TV apart today and regard all its tubes and transistors, all of them now quite quaint. But the other reason I’d love to take the 1964 Zenith apart is in the faint hope that Emma Peel might still be inside.