TOD:
By the time we got cable in our neighborhood in about 1978/79, the fare wasn't as daring as other DRs have reported. Garden State Cable never had any kind of public access programming like other cable outlets had, so there wasn't much in the way of the craziness that NYC had during the 70's.
I'm not recalling a lot of the early stuff, at the mo'. I remember a fun show on HBO hosted by Dick Cavett that looked back at the early decades of the 20th century. NOT NECESSARILY THE NEWS was generally a pretty funny show ( I would love to see this on DVD.) I was also a fan of FRAGGLE ROCK for the first two seasons or so.