Tag: breaking bad

My TV Top Ten. What is Yours?

tv-showsBarb and I were almost home the other night when a familiar tune came on the car radio. “In my opinion, that’s the BEST TV SHOW EVER,” I said. And that got me thinking. What were my favorite TV shows of all time? So here, from #10 to #1 is my list. The only rule for selection is that there are no rules. It is my list, I get to say what goes on it. Feel free to disagree. I am sure you will!

#10-#7 My Early Years

10. The Dick Van Dyke Show: The classic work life-home life sitcom. Barb can still crack me up with an “Oh, Rob” or put me in my place with a “You’re no Albert Schweitzer.” I was young, Mary Tyler Moore was adorable, and Ritchie was getting attacked by birds. What was there not to like?

9. What’s My Line?: You thought Jeopardy! would be my favorite game show? Wrong again, reader. Another classic from my youth, no moderator was ever as smooth and urbane as John Charles Daley. And when the host has 3 names, I knew the celebrity panel had to be classy too, even if I had never heard of Bennett Cerf or Arlene Francis. And Dorothy Kilgallen was sort of hot to my 7-year-old eyes.

8. Saturday Night Blackhawks Hockey: Only a few Blackhawks games were televised in the ’60s. But every Saturday night during the season, I would knock on my next-door neighbor Jeff’s door at 6:30. We would play a game of table hockey (he had a great set with 3D plastic players and a ball-bearing puck) and then settle in to watch the Hawks play another “Original Six” opponent. The TV set was black and white, but there was no problem picking out the Golden Jet, as Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, and Glenn Hall did their best to bring Chicago a winner.

7. Ray Raynor and Friends and The Dick Tracy Show: Ray Raynor, playing the jumpsuited host during the morning in the former and Officer Pettibone during the afternoon in the latter, had my full attention. White Sox (and Cubs) scores, Chelveston the Duck and some decent cartoons kept me entertained.

#6-#1 Adulthood

6. Breaking Bad: After starting to watch the family drama  Parenthood in its 4th season, Barb and I decided to go back and watch the earlier seasons–our first binge-watch. Our next binge-watch:  Breaking Bad, a very different family drama. Mr. White and Jessie had special chemistry together, and not just the crystal-meth kind. We did not watch El Camino, the recent sequel. Heard it wasn’t all that good!

5. Hill Street Blues: The greatest show of the ’80s, it was the cop show that stood above all other cop shows, before and after. FOMAE (fear of missing an episode) led us to buy our first VCR. VHS of course–we didn’t want no stinkin’ BetaMax.

4. Veep: Laugh out loud funny and bitingly mean and all-around magnificent. Julia Louis Dreyfuss and the whole ensemble cast made Washington D.C. seem as miserable as it truly must be. I loved it even before there was a real dramedy in the White House.

3. Game of Thrones: Maybe I would have ranked it higher before the final season, but come on, #3 isn’t all that bad. Love and hate. Red Weddings and Walks of Shame. And battles. Lots of battles. So why isn’t Arya Stark starring in a sequel?

2. Seinfeld: Yada, Yada, Yada. And Julia Louis Dreyfuss too.

1. The music I heard in the car that day was Alabama 3 talking and singing their way through “Woke Up This Morning.” I cannot hear that song without seeing James Gandolfini, cigar smoke swirling around his head, driving past the Meadowlands and Satriale’s Pork Store. Tony Soprano on the move, inviting us to New Jersey and The Sopranos, the greatest TV series ever made.

You agree with me on all of these, right?  If not, let me hear about it.

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To the Family Who Will Buy Our House, Whoever You Are

 

our houseOur house…

…was our castle and our keep.

Madness, 1982

It is late February now. The weather changes from day to day, bright and sunny on Tuesday, windy and stormy by Wednesday. Most of our  trees are bare, though we fear these temperature shifts may confuse them into early budding. And we don’t want confusion. We want it all to be perfect. This will be the last spring we will watch the lawn spring to life, the last Mother’s Day weekend Barb will spend planting her brilliant mix of annuals, the last season we will enjoy the magnificent white explosion of the magnolia at the end of the driveway.  By spring of next year we will be in our new home, loving it I am sure, but missing this house, the house that has been our castle for so long.

We trust you will enjoy this home and this neighborhood as much as we have. This is the place where our children grew from toddlers to graduate students before heading out on their own. A place of backyard dance parties and Grand Staircase prom pictures. Kitchen table games of “Sorry” as intense as any episode of “Game of Thrones.” Annual Father’s Day driveway basketball challenges against my sister’s family, that always seemed to end with Laury in tears. The chanting of B’nai Mitzvah practices and the tinkling of piano practices. Technology progressing from dial up modem to hardwired home network to whole house WiFi, as Barb and I binged on our favorite anti-heroes: Tony Soprano, Walter White, Jax Teller.

Will you understand the love and care that Barb put into choosing every fixture and floor tile? Will you cherish the master bath light fixture we stumbled on in Las Vegas, the kitchen fixture we discovered while staring through the window of a closed lighting shop on a cold Thanksgiving Day in Charleston, South Carolina? We hope you will appreciate the skill of Stan the Cabinet Man, whose creations support the beautiful marble countertop on the kitchen island. Or maybe you will just like the bones of the house, and will choose to make major changes in the decor. It will be your house, your opportunity. We just hope you are gentle!

We are still debating when to put the house up for sale. Assuming (should we assume?) all goes well, our new Ranch on the Pond won’t be ready until autumn, so we will prefer not to move much before then.  But we imagine you are a family with children.  You will want to be in your new house by mid-August to take advantage of the great neighborhood schools. We understand– and don’t think for a minute we would be moving out of the Stevenson School District if we still had teens! So we will put the house on the market early, probably a spring real estate listing. Maybe you will see it online, or maybe your realtor will bring you to the house and you will be blown away.  Mortgage rates should still be low, so that should be a plus. And who knows, after you see the property you might Google us and come across this blog and maybe that will help convince you to buy. But if the timing is just right, that graceful magnolia at the end of the drive will be in full bloom. And this house will win your hearts.

CORRECTION: The original version of this post stated the Las Vegas fixture was in the dining room.  Oops!

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