Ba-da-dahm-dahm!

I've been watching The Rockford Files lately during nap time. It's a good way to keep the laundry going, and I can bring it up on the tablet when doing dishes.

It's a good show for being made aware of how much things have changed. For instance, holy cow there are a lot of pay phones. They're everywhere! And a lot of kinds of booths, and mounts. A lot of design work went into phone kiosks, back when everyone used pay phones.

I've also been interested by just how many things we take for granted were already in the air in the mid-1970's. Season 4 is a big one for almost-weekly "A Very Special..." theme episodes where things revolve around Making A Point about racism, sexism, ageism (!), and so on. 

Season 5 toned down the "everything this time is about the Theme" aspects of it, but layered in cultural references. There have been a couple of episodes so far where the central character is a successful business woman. In one, we were lead to expect her to be the villain, but she was just hard-driving. In the other, she was the victim but self-absorbed. But it's the small things, details that could be one way, but were another, or could even be left unaddressed. 

The one I keep coming back to is a second-tier character in a murder about... oh, it's The Rockford Files, so it doesn't really matter, the story is convoluted. But this second-tier character is nicknamed Captain Crunch, and when Rockford asks someone about him, he's asked if he's planning to make some long distance phone calls. It's 1978, and what could be an easy-to-digest cops-n-robbers show is making casual references to underground system hacking. It was big news as far back as 1971, when John Draper (the real-world phreaker called Captain Crunch) was quoted in an Esquire article. 

But it's still, even in a world with only three TV networks and an active magazine culture, it's a fairly obscure thing to just toss into the story for no good plot reason. So anyway. In addition be being full of high-speed car chases, laconic pacing, and folksy charms, it's a show papered over in a strange sort of timeless contemporaneousness.