Appointment television
I can binge a good TV series. For a plot-twisty crime drama, I can choose “skip intro” for nine hours at a stretch, watching some detective unravel a complicated whodunit. But I sometimes miss the days of delayed gratification, when our favorite shows aired once, then vanished, with no on-demand option available.
If you missed the “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” special in the 1960s, you had to wait a full year for another shot. My friends and I crossed our fingers every December — please don’t let the school Christmas program fall on the same night as “Rudolph.” We were equally devoted to “Frosty the Snowman” and all the follow-up Rankin-Bass hits, like “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Santa Claus Is Comin’ Town.” That show gave us one of animation’s most iconic villains — the Burgermeister Meisterburger. He hated toys and Christmas. This was event television.
But the anticipation of a good TV drama wasn’t limited to childhood. I was around in the 1980s, when Thursday nights meant “Hill Street Blues.” We lived with my mother-in-law then, in a homey duplex on West Mountain in Fort Collins. Illness had brought her back to Colorado, to be nearer to her family. We moved there to be nearer to her.
We built some cherished traditions during that time — dinners around her Scandinavian Designs table, with its clever leaf that slid out from a hidden compartment; Sundays on the living room floor, with the newspaper crossword and a six-page comic section; evenings in the back yard, with rumaki on the grill, where I learned that anything wrapped in bacon is good, even water chestnuts and chicken livers.
Sandwiched among those many moments was our weekly appointment for “Hill Street Blues.” Our viewing ritual involved Dunkin’ Donuts, which seemed befitting for a police procedural. Dunkin’ franchises weren’t as plentiful then as they are today. If you wanted a good cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, you had to be resourceful. You had to know people. You had to “have a guy,” and he had to be connected.
My mother-in-law had a guy. He was a friend of hers from the Boston area, where Dunkin’ Donuts originated. He bought several bags of their whole-bean coffee every month and mailed them to her. We were set.
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