I (and Jayme, because she watches via osmosis while staring at either her laptop or iPhone screen) am re-watching a CBS show from the early 2000’s called “Cold Case”. It’s a weekly cop procedural with a quasi-time travel twist. It’s not going to win any Emmys, but it’s a comfortable watch. Not a lot of thinking involved. But I do like to guess “who did it”, as they roll out the suspects in the first half of the episode. I get it right about 50% of the time.
Last night, the episode centered around a young cop duo from the mid-1950’s. One of the young cops was the son of the sergeant. The other was married with a kid on the way. They were tight friends, and partners on the force to boot. As the friendship grew, they realized it was more than just a friendship. And, suddenly, one of them was shot dead while on duty. The detectives back then never found the killer. Cold case. Done and done.
Now, obviously, our modern-day detective heroes come in a solve the case, because that’s what they do. I often joke that this show could have been called “Wow, the original detectives were shit!”. But that doesn’t have quite the ring to it. “Cold Case” is a much better name. That’s why they pay the Hollywood types, and not me.
I remember watching it when it was first on. It started before we spent close to a year in Europe. It was before we had kids. I fell right into the thinking that the show runners obviously wanted. It presents “the past” as difficult. Unfair. Problematic. And it’s not to belittle the past, mind you. It’s there to show the audience how far (the collective) we have come. How much we’ve overcome. How much we’ve progressed. It was a little self-congratulatory, now that I think about it.
But I watch these episodes now with a different perspective. Even in the roughly 25 years since the show first aired, I can see and feel the difference in the “where we are” of it. The ideas of racism, homophobia, immigration, white flight, women’s rights, toxic masculinity, etc. have all taken a sharp turn since the turn of the century. They’re back and even, dare I say, in vogue now. People are proud of it, much like the characters in the depiction of “the past”.
I always viewed these movements as moving forward. Never backward. Forward toward a better state. A better result. Toward a new and better normal.
And yet, here we are on the precipice of a government-sponsored, 53%-of-America-backed turnaround on one or all of these issues. And it saddens me.
