ENDINGS
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
~ Orson Wells
Me, I make no such claims. I’m still making up for lost time because I spent several of my formative years with no TV. In fact, I have created a personal TV Show Hall of Fame. Let me tell you about my top ten.
First off, in the days before the big RCA console conked out, every Saturday morning found me searching frantically for a green-tinged plastic sheet. It was supposed to be in the lamp table drawer, but sometimes migrated to the living room closet or the desk. I was in such a hurry because Windy Dink was starting, and how could I connect dots or decode messages without my magic drawing screen to slap on the TV screen? It was the birth of interactive media and I was there.
I left Winky Dink before it was cancelled, as I grew beyond such kiddie games. But it left me with a life lesson. I resolved not to reenact those harried searches anymore. Now I pretty much know where everything is at all times. Though some things still migrate.
Overlapping with the end of Winky Dink came my second entry, The Uncle Johnny Coons Show which I watched daily over my tomato soup and grilled cheese when I came home from school for lunch. My favorite part – the Crusader Rabbit cartoons. I even sent in for a decal of Johnny’s head that we ironed onto a dish towel, which made him an even bigger presence. I don’t remember it, but I’m told that he ended his relationship with all of us young viewers one day when he signed off as usual. Thinking that the mic was off, he then said, “Well, that ought to hold the little bastards.” It was a less open-minded age then, and he was through. Nowadays, he would get 10 million hits on YouTube and his own reality show.
My mother, trending toward adult pursuits, substituted As the World Turns which soon led to the addition of General Hospital. I count them #3, because all those lunches with all those people with all those endlessly repeating problems fascinated me. Early job training for my life as a therapist? Possibly.
Then came the dry spell. The RCA fizzled out. It could not be fixed and was carted off to TV heaven leaving a giant void in the living room and in my life. I was sidelined, and while TV advanced, all I had was bits and pieces I’d hear from my friends or glimpses I’d snatch at their houses.
My favorite night of the month was church committee meeting night when Mom would drop me off at the permissive household of the Summerhill family where I could watch 77 Sunset Strip and Johnny Carson. A dream come true, but they didn’t make my Hall of Fame due to my limited access.
My mother was steadfast and uninterested in restoring my TV life. She bought me an encyclopedia instead. In early adolescence I finally wheedled her into buying a flashy little red portable and I plugged back in, but I was forever behind.
It was summer, the first time I didn’t come home for the summer break from college. My roommates and I lived over a laundromat in campustown. We rushed home from our classes to gather in front of our little TV to watch Dark Shadows, my #4, the tale of vampire Barnaby Collins and his lady loves. It was thrilling, romantic, and very creepy. The end of summer brought that to a close, and it was time for me to prepare for adult life.
It was perfect timing. That Girl Ann Marie showed up in the person of Marlo Thomas to give me a glimpse of how a nice girl-career girl survives in New York City. It became my 5th entry. She had a good-humored boyfriend named Donald Hollister, and an easily-alarmed father looking out for her. My friends and I met in the housemother’s living room every week to watch and imagine our budding lives. Maybe we could have it all like Ann Marie – career, love, adventure.
The next transition was easy, to my #5, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, with Mary throwing her hat into the air in excitement. While her TV producer dreams came true, her romantic ones lagged behind. Her work life was a lot more complicated than Ann Marie’s, and she counted heavily on her friends to get her through. By the final episode when the whole news team sidled across the floor in a group hug to get a Kleenex, I knew what was in store for me. They pointed out what I’d already figured out, that life can change in a flash, so you’d better be ready.
Before I knew it I was a grownup with my own husband, in search of a show we could both agree on. I know for a fact that nobody but us remembers Petrocelli, because I’ve asked around, but it makes my #6. Barry Newman played a young lawyer who lived in a trailer out in the desert where he planned to build his dream house. It only lasted two seasons and he never got around to that house. Hmmm. Dreams imagined but not realized. Duly noted.
By then Lou Grant had come back to life in his own series as a newspaperman with two young assistants (Linda Kelsey as Billie and Robert Warden as Joe) who he ran all over town searching for the real story. I named them #7 because I so wanted to be on that team. And I could have used a mentor like Lou to toughen me up.
Once the kids showed up, we needed a family show. My kids tell me that they wanted to watch Golden Girls, but I said it was too risqué, but that doesn’t sound like me at all. I am very broad-minded and oppose censorship. Instead, we settled on Quantum Leap, which became #8. Dr. Sam Beckett, played by Scott Bakula, was trying to get back home from a time travel experiment gone wrong. Every week he would pop up in a new place, a new time and a new identity, always with a mission to set something right. At the end, he would leap and land is his new locale with an “Oh Boy!” Wow, what would it be like not to recognize yourself, or know anything about the people around you or what is expected of you? Good training for picking up cues and figuring things out on the fly maybe, but boy, would you want to get home.
Then we moved into the glory years of the Chicago Bulls and our family’s attention moved to their games. By the time we looked up, the kids were growing and leaving, and family TV night was history.
David and I tried to keep it up in the first year of empty nesthood with The Education of Max Bickford on Sunday nights, another show that no one else remembers. College professor Richard Dreyfuss was raising a teen daughter and young son alone while being tempted by a prickly former student/former lover now professor Marcia Gay Harden. Great portrayal of kids, great cast, good enough to qualify as #9. One season.
“Wait,” I thought, “you create this whole world and invite me in to empathize with your characters, and now you slam the door in my face?” No fair.
Julia Keller of the Tribune knows my pain. She recently wrote about abandoned viewers like me, “We’re supposed to love again. But that’s like asking a widow for a date on the way home from the cemetery.” One thing I like about Julia – she’s smart as they come, yet admits that she watches TV.
After so many goodbyes, my expectations dwindled. I turned to Law and Order reruns, and had a one-season affair a couple of years ago with a new series called Cupid before it was gone. David retreated into sports and more sports, and animal shows. These days we do manage the occasional House episode. He likes the bad attitude; I like the medical mystery.
I know I am supposed to just DVR everything now like my friends do, and gleefully fast forward through the commercials, but I enjoy the serendipity of what I happen to stumble across. I see new shows but I’m reluctant to give myself over to them. I have more important things to do, don’t I? Wait, am I turning into one of them, the superior ones who scorn TV, or just protecting myself from further pain? I think it’s the latter.
I make them work to attract me now. If a new show can draw me in, they still have an opportunity to make the list. Currently, Castle is vying with The Good Wife for the #10 slot.
I guess my TV life has been a fair representation of the rest of life. Something/one is a perfect fit, for a while. Then things change. One of you moves on and you must regroup. Your companions change, your interests too. There is always an ending around the corner.
What ends leaves something behind, though. It can be a dish towel, or an ambition, or knowledge about times and places you’ll never see, or a memory of who you were when it was part of your life. That’s good enough for me.
CBH 12-10
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