Over at The Atlantic, there’s an article that tries to make the case that All in the Family basically changed television forever.

All in the Family was the first program to genuinely reckon with the cultural upheaval of 1960s America. TV would never be the same.

I’d have to agree.

As the article (by Ronald Browstein) notes, before Norman Lear’s breakthrough sitcom, network TV was safe, down the middle of the road shows that could appeal to almost anyone. Think The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction – bland, inoffensive time killers.

After All in the Family, the viewing audience was more open to more challenging shows, such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and M*A*S*H, for example. Without these shows, I don’t know how we would have gotten to much more challenging fare, ushc as The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Streets..

And today this in-the-cultural-moment shows continue with Fleabag and Breaking Bad, among others.

But those last two shows also exemplify another trend – or connected series of trends – that has, over the past decade or so, has once again “changed television forever.”

When All in the Family first aired in 1971 (wow, that’s 50 years ago!), there were three networks (ABC, CBS and NBC). You watched shows in their time slot; if you missed a show, tough noogies until the summer reruns. Offerings were half-hour sitcoms and hour-long dramas, and most shows had 20-24 episodes per year.

No more:

• No more time slots – Shows drop – usually the whole series – on one day and you can binge watch it all.
• Streaming – Need I elaborate how this has changed everything?
• Networks are now the followers – Streaming services like HBO, Hulu, Amazon Prime have original content that over blows the networks’ offerings out of the water: Fleabag, Game of Thrones and so on. What’s the best network shows out there? Law and Order: SVU season 22? How about sitcoms? They’ve almost disappeared from network TV. But HBO’s brilliant Veep, Amazon Prime’s Fleabag (yes, I’m obsessed), and Catastrophe.
• Shorter seasons – I believe The Sopranos started this.- the first five seasons had only 13 episodes each, vs. networks series’ length of 20-25 episodes. Today, most streamers are just 10-13 episodes, some shorter. The brilliant Fleabag (I told you I was obsessed) has only two seasons of six episodes each. And that’s just right for this show.

And with the exception of big events (breaking news/weather, Oscars), there really isn’t a need to huddle around a TV as a family or whatever – stream it anytime you want on your smartphone, watch it on YouTube and so on.

Brave New World….

Picture part of screengrab from the former nest.com (now part of Google)

I recently added a new wireless network to my house – a Netgear router that spits out wireless at twice the rate of my (admittedly old) Cisco/Linksys router.

I currently have both networks running; the idea is to slowly move all the devices in the house over to the new network one at a time so nothing has down time: Laptops, smartphones, iPad and so on. When everything is safely switched over, pull the plug on the old router.

Yesterday, I switched over my Amazon Fire Stick to the new network; no problemo.

When I went to update my smoke detector – a Nest Protect – it was a little weird. It was easy to navigate to the list of available networks and punch in the password and all, but afterwards there was no indication of just what wireless network it was attached to. The new network was at the top of the list of available networks, but no check mark or what have you to explicitly say what network the smoke detector was talking to (since both the old and new are currently active, hard to say). And when I re-added (?) the new network, I still had to enter a password. Shouldn’t it remember the networks that have been previously added, like smartphones do?

For a device that is otherwise a case study in intelligent – and beautiful – design, this is a weird oversight. End of the world? Decidedly not. But surprisingly odd.

Well, it was a weird year of winter weather – 2020-2021.

We got a surprise dusting of snow on Halloween – much to the chagrin of the kids collecting candy, — but then stayed pretty much snow-free for the next 12 weeks, and the temperatures were wintery, but not Arctic degrees.

Then, sometime in early or middle January, the snow came.

And came and came.

It didn’t really let up until mid-February: We had several big snows – 4, 6, 11 inches, – but the worst of it was that it just kept coming. Like summer rains in Florida – every day at 3pm it rains for 27 minutes and then the sun comes out – we woke up almost every morning with an inch or two of snow.

For the most part it was light snow, and easy to deal with, but combined with some pretty cold temps, the snow never went away – it just kept accumulating.

The picture shows the snow along the front sidewalk (front step to easement sidewalk) and you can see that it is not mounded or drifting. Almost 16 inches, and that includes a month of settling. The mounds at the end for the driveway made it a challenge to back out – you couldn’t see anything potentially coming.

And then – on February 17th, a couple of ducks landed in our backyard, picking at the seed under the birdfeeder. This isn’t unusual, we often get ducks during migrations (some are locals that often come in the summer). But it was still weird to see them inside the almost snow fort that we had carved out at the base of the feeder.

And then their friends came – some 50+ mallards landing in more than a foot of snow in the backyard, completely covering the base of the feeder with others spread all over the back yard. They didn’t stay too long, but it was a strange sight.

As I write this, we are predicted to hit the mid-60s and I plan to barbecue for the first time this year! While I expect a little more snow (it is March in Chicago….) generally cooler weather for the next few weeks, it feels like we’ve turned the corner on winter. Phew!

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