For no reason I can understand (possibly because My So-Called Life is back on the air), I’ve been thinking about a short-lived TV series from 1991 that starred Tom Irwin, who played Angela’s father on MSCL .
It was called My Life and Times . Irwin played Ben Miller as an old man in 2035, looking back on his life. Each episode took place in a different year, with highlights of Miller’s personal life intersecting with important moments in real (pre-1991) and speculative (post-1991) history. A cool idea that was obviously ahead of its time (no pun intended).
According to… well, one guy on the IMDB, only six episodes ever aired. I watched several episodes and know three of them:
1989, when Miller was in San Francisco for the earthquake of that year.
2000, New Year’s Day, when there was some sort of stock market crash or Y2K-type event, in which Miller lost thousands of dollars.
1960’s, when Miller was a college student, so all the Baby Boomers could reminisce about their halcyon counter-culture days (who do you think was this show’s intended audience?).
Does anyone know in what years the other three episodes took place? Were there any more “futuristic” stories? Does anyone even rememer this show?
I remember the episode in which he meets a woman in the nursing home who just happens to be a woman he came very, very close to marrying. I think her name was Jesse or Jessie.
I was pretty young when it was on but I remember liking it alot.
An episode I remember that has not been mentioned.
In the future there is a food shortage and the main character gets a job as a supervisor at a food rationing station. If I remember correctly there’s osme sort of riot and he has to decide which side to be on. Management or starving workign class.
I liked that show and identified with it somewhat, as the main character would have been not much older than me.
I liked the earthquake episode, the guy trapped with his boss, who slowly faded due to internal bleeding. No gross out scenes, rather melancholy instead.
Wasn’t that a filler during one of those writers’ strikes?
I think I recall an episode in which he was teaching his (son? Grandson?) that there are better alternatives to brute force. He was like a shipping supervisor for a futuristic company that had an obnoxious bully. Eventually the bully insisted the protagonist give him a shipping manifest that he refused to provide. Repeated lines were “Give me that Manifest!” “No!” and the bully knocking the protagonist around the warehouse and none of the coworkers getting in the bully’s way. Eventually the police came and hauled the bully away.
The kid asked “How can you say you won the fight when you got beaten up and didn’t fight back?” and the protagonist said, “Because I kept my job and stayed out of jail; he didn’t.”
It was a weird episode to watch. I was watching it after coming home from the dojo and I kept thinking the protagonist could have moved a few times to ‘let’ the bully break his hand(s) and still not have “fought back.”
–G!
A few years later, I kinda thought the “My Life and Times” framework seemed like the root of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV show.