Waking up some hours later, I decided to develop a themed snippet I'd written and saved back in June.
The fifteenth anniversary of my mom's passing was this past Wednesday, the 13th, which in 2008 fell on a Saturday. The approach and arrival of the anniversary was in mind this week, but while there are some important life lessons about the impermanence of life, and the hubris of even for a moment taking opportunities and time for granted, I don't want to focus my remembrances of her on the ending. That's likely what found me coming back to this shelved fragment.
One side-note: Yes, in a better world I'd be including at least one pic of my mom, but sadly all of my really good pics of her went into a combination of the memorial display at her funeral, and in sections of photo albums ceded to siblings at the time. I'd gone through drawers and boxes of photos in the late '80s, organizing them and getting them into albums. The understanding then was that I wanted them either back or proper scans of them, but none of that's happened in the past fifteen years. It's a sore spot, but it's also one that instantly wilts me. I don't like conflict, and so I avoid it.
As the years pass for those of us left behind, one of the bittersweet touches are when we see something that reminds us of someone who's gone. Often it's one of those "perfect gifts", so there's a mild flush of excitement at having spotted something you know would be very well-received, quickly overtaken by the memory that they're gone. Similarly, in a streaming age -- and it's really just a variant on what might happen if one's channel-surfing and spots some show or movie that someone you knew was a big fan of -- we'll come across complete seasons of shows being made available on one streaming platform or another.
My mom was a big fan of tv detectives, so when looking over what's available to Amazon Prime members back in June (when this was occurring to me), the additions that popped for me were the Buddy Ebsen, 1972-'80, elderly detective drama Barnaby Jones seasons 1-8, and the Mike Connors vehicle created by Levinson & Link (often first/best remembered as the creators of Columbo - another series I know she enjoyed, which these days are all over on Peacock) 1967-'75 Mannix seasons 1-8.
I occasionally watched Mannix with her, and can easily summon the opening theme music in memory. Composed by Argentine pianist and composer Lalo Shifrin, here's a 4:41 compilation of the show's openings and some closings, with more visual than sound revisions, though there were some shifts in the arrangement. It was only in revisiting this that I remembered how the show started with Joe Mannix being a loose-cannon recruit for the modern, computerized detective agency, Intertect. Joe had no patience for the punchclock and computer-driven aspects of working for such an agency, and so would almost routinely ditch company protocols despite the protestations of his technical boss Lew Wickersham (Joe Campanella), who would nonetheless continue to employ Joe because they were old friends and he got results. By the second season, Desilu head Lucille Ball and producer Bruce Geller looked to improve ratings by ditching the Intertect baggage. They had Joe quit the agency between seasons via a line of dialogue in the season-opener, and set up shop as a more traditional private detective, complete with secretary and gal Friday Peggy Fair (Gail Fisher), a rare at the time series role for an African-american, a role she played through the end of the series.
The show went out through odd circumstances, in what amounts to a moment of pique by one or more unnamed CBS executives. The show wrapped its eight season in a top 20 spot in the ratings, and all were assured that it would be picked up for season nine. However, ABC had been years into trying to make some progress in the late night timeslot, primarily against television institution and ratings leader The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson on NBC, and also against The CBS Late Movie. They'd attempted various talk show formats and other programming, but none of it was working. They'd been developing a working relationship with Paramount, though, and Paramount owned and controlled the older episodes of the show. ABC bought the rights to rebroadcast the reruns in late night. Unhappy CBS executives thought viewers might stop watching new episodes if they knew they could watch older ones five nights a week on another channel. So, in the 11th hour the show was pulled from the grid for the following season. Series star Mike Connors found out about it when a reporter contacted him for some comments, leaving him feeling "so lost."
Shifrin, who at 91 I see is still out there somewhere, is more than deserving of an extended spotlight at another time, for his compositions for both films and tv. Just keeping to the tv side, I have to post one of his most famous and enduring themes, the one for Mission: Impossible.
I couldn't get into Barnaby Jones, unfairly never quite being to separate the latter actor from his Jed Clampett role from the previous decade, and otherwise liking less and less what I read about the man himself -- though that's mostly politics. Still, even there I find that that show's theme music is easily played in my head.
Not in the detective genre, but another one in that June list that I know she enjoyed was the Burt Reynolds, small town life sitcom that ran on CBS from 1990-'94, Evening Shade. By that point I was already being lost to a combination of career I'd stumbled into in '88, a lengthy commute (that was already burning through cars and my youth), and the family I was creating, with sons born in '90 and '92. Consequently, I have no memories to draw on for this show aside from being aware that she watched and enjoyed it. Here's a collection of three variants they used on the show's theme.
The sepia-toned small town nostalgia element is key, and as I know my mom had few fond childhood memories, I can understand the appeal of seeking out surrogate ones to replace them with.
The show had a promising cast, and I think I'll give the show a controlled-release try this fall. No binge-watching, but instead pacing it out.
Now, chances are I'd have been more inclined to have made gifts of series box sets of discs if some early buys showed she handled the format well, but it's all academic as she passed unexpectedly back in '08. I wasn't in a financial position to do that sort of thing - certainly not as casually as I could these days - while she was still around... anyway, I'm mucking this up by trying to flesh out the details of a parallel universe.
The initial trigger in this is imagining her getting to enjoy being able to see these shows, in order and complete, pretty much whenever she'd want to. Moreover, I'm imagining it in a world and circumstance where they'd be handy for each of us to (re)watch them, we each had the time for it, we'd have that shared bit of time-shifted topicality. I'm taking an imaginary route back to join the information age elements of today with my childhood years when mom and I would spend time together.
My thoughts go more routinely to elements of self-directed life as I count down to a planned (there's that hubris again) transition to a life where I'm no longer filling out time sheets detailing work that I only do because I need the pay and "benefits." As currently in mind, that's just under three years off.
Anyway, that's my streaming content-linked diversion for the group blog for this week. The writer and actor strikes continue, so new, scripted, domestic content is becoming scarcer by the day. The streamers and the broadcast networks are increasingly leaning on a blend of imported material, games and "reality" programming, and a shell game where they're temporarily moving content from one outlet to another, to give it that "new to you" feel.
I believe the timing of things for this fourth and final year of the Consortium of Seven blog is such that I'll only have two more weeks here, so I have some other transitional decisions to make. We'll see if I've decided on something by next Friday. - Mike
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