sergebroom | broken people in the naked city

When I was about 8 years old, I’d watch Naked City on TV. It’s been a long time since those days when John Glenn went into space, and I never saw the show again, not even in reruns. So, when I realized that it was available on NetFlix, I asked my wife to add some of the episodes to her queue.

I enjoyed it as much as I did then.

What’s interesting is that, while I had forgotten most of the specific details, what I did remember in spite of my having been so young was accurate. And that I, as an 8-year-old, had remembered what I remembered amazes me.

The show I remembered often had the main characters be peripheral to the real story. That’s exactly what I got.

The show I remembered was about broken people. That too is exactly what I got. The Fault in Our Stars has an obnoxious young actor killing cab drivers for their fares, and we’re shown the heart-rending reaction of one woman when she is told that her husband is dead. But we also found that, when he was growing up, the young man was physically abused by a father who wanted to beat out of his son that sissy acting stuff. In A Memory of Crying, a man who’d never been able to feel emotions fell in love with and married a young woman who dies giving birth, but his grief is such that he refuses to believe she’s dead. The Make-believe Man is a WW2 veteran who could never readjust to normal life and after years of homelessness and alcool, is about to die, but he clings to one last chance at life when some men, for their own purposes, offer to have him pretend to be someone important that others will listen to.

Good stuff.