It's a well-known, but still mind-boggling fact, that Cleopatra (the famous one, specifically, Cleopatra VII) lived closer to our own time than she did to the building of the pyramids (which were millennia old by the time she and Mark Antony were mashing lips- as old to her as a building built in 500 BC would be to us today).
It's easy to lose the events of the past in the time stream, as well as their relation to each other. It's easy even when you're talking about the timescale of a single human life, as I recently found out.
I turned 42 late last year. One of the unexpected side effects of my maturity is losing (and then shockingly re-gaining) a sense of the past, and realizing just how much past-ier the past has become. I am, in short, old enough now to have seen a bit of history. Who would have thought that an old sitcom would show me the way?
Kindly follow me below the spaghettified carrot mass for the scoop.
Thanks to an offhand comment by a good friend during a recent phone conversation, I’ve re-discovered a classic. She mentioned the TV sitcom Barney Miller, which ran for eight seasons between 1975 and 1982. In case there are any young ‘uns out there who don’t know (or old 'uns who've forgotten), Barney Miller followed the everyday adventures (and non-adventures) of an eccentric group of police detectives in the fictional 12th Precinct of New York.
First off, a plug for the show itself. There are a whole lot of things to recommend it. Most episodes take place entirely within the confines of two sets: the squad room and Captain Miller’s office, giving the whole a familiar and intimate feel. The writing is character-driven and top-notch. The cast of characters is diverse, especially for the time, including African-American, Asian-American, Latino, Jewish, and gay characters (plus Poles and Irish, the whites who get picked on the most), and even when the humor focuses on stereotypes, it’s never played for cheap laughs or degradation. Most impressive of all is the fact that while it is a cop show (and I normally hate cop shows with a passion), it focuses on the characters and their everyday struggles and foibles rather than the cheap and easy vulgarity of violence. Instead of gory murders, the detectives usually get called out to pick up purse-snatchers, burglars, obscene phone callers, and the guy down at the laundromat who decided to wash the clothes he was wearing without having anything else to change into. Instead of going rogue and battling their superiors and acting without orders, they rib each other, drink bad coffee and type out paperwork. On those rare occasions there is actual violence, or danger, it makes it all the more poignant. It’s little wonder that surveys of real police officers reveal that Barney Miller is their pick for most realistic cop show ever, and well as being their favorite overall.
I hadn’t watched the show since it originally aired, meaning I hadn’t seen it since I was about 6 years old (I remember Jack Soo, and since he passed away in 1979 I must be remembering somewhere in the first four seasons). Watching it again, I’ve gotten little flashes of memory, things that seem familiar through the many years that have passed. I couldn’t understand or appreciate the show when I was 6, of course, so it’s more about impressions and feelings instead of remembering dialog or situations.
But now, as an adult, I saw again the world that I once lived in... that I grew up in... and I recognized just how long ago that really was.
Fish, the senior detective (played by the wonderful Abe Vigoda) is a couple of years away from mandatory retirement. He talks about joining the force in… wait for it… 1938.
1938?! Wait a minute, are you kidding? Someone merely born in 1938 would be 76 years old, and someone old enough to be a cop would be at least two decades older than that! I know he's supposed to be old, but come on, comedic license! This time you've surely gone too...
Nope. Episode set in the present day (when it was filmed), which was 1976. 1976-1938 is only 38 years. Fish really has been a cop since the 30s. Another character like this is Frank Luger, Barney Miller's superior, who dresses in clothes from the 40s and 50s. The effect today is surreal. Is he a time traveler? A Bogart cosplay fanatic? Nope. He's just old-school. In the 1970s, he's only 20-30 years out of date... just like I would be if I put on that Def Leppard concert T-shirt I still have somewhere in the back of my dresser.
The building that the 12th Precinct is headquartered in was built during the Great Depression, which is a plot point in the show because the building is always leaking and falling apart. Well, sure, you have to expect that from a building that’s over 80…
No. Make that over 40 years old, as Captain Miller himself says. It sort of changes the point of the quip. We expect an 80 year-old building to have some issues, because it's old. We don't really expect it from a 40 year-old building. The reason for the trouble, according to the maintenance man character, is that they skimped on materials and build quality during the Depression. Thus, the point is not that the city is housing them in an old building, but rather that they're housing them in a poorly-made building. (Also thus, a throwaway line becomes a history lesson.)
A character is introduced who looks to be in his 50s. He talks about getting a purple heart in Vietnam…
No. Make that World War II. Heck, a person in his mid-50s today would have been too young for Vietnam.
Some of the jokes have aged in very interesting ways. In one scene, a detective takes a report on a stolen car. He asks for the make and comes back with 1958 Studebaker, which the audience laughs at. Now why would they laugh at that? A '58 Studebaker today is a 56 year-old classic car, something I'd be happy to own... not a laughing matter if it's stolen!
Oh, wait. This is 1976, and a '58 Studebaker is an 18 year-old beater that's probably ready for the scrap heap. It's exactly the same as calling the cops today and reporting the theft of your 1996 Ford Escort (with 250,000 miles on it, plus a bad clutch).
Being the age that I am, I can accept a lot of the stuff in the show that might really stick out to younger viewers. The phones are all land lines. There are no desktop computers. The detectives all type their reports on manual typewriters, and get ink all over the place when changing the ribbons. When they need to pull a perp’s file, they walk over to an actual filing cabinet and thumb through about a dozen yards of actual paper. I remember stuff like this. I used a card catalog that had actual cards in it. I typed my first big paper in college on a manual typewriter, for Pete's sake. But to kids these days, that technology looks the same to them as propeller-driven airliners, cars with tail fins and iceboxes look to me. Quaint things, from a past they can't remember.
The Cleopatra moment... the realization that the era of Barney Miller… an era that I, myself, remember… is exactly halfway between today and the Great Depression, between the era of Barack Obama and FDR, gives me goosebumps. This was only a few years after the moon landings, only a few years after the great civil rights struggles in the south. I was alive then, and I wasn't ever aware of it.
Am I just starting to… get old?
Yup.
Incidentally… Abe Vigoda, who played Fish as a crotchety old man with an ever-changing list of age-related ailments, actually was in really good shape. The testament to that is that he’s still alive and well today… and in his 90s.
See? There’s hope for us all.
10:20 PM PT: Edited for clarity in a few places, plus a bit of new material. Thank you again for reading!