While I’ve been on a PBS kick lately, I’ve become hooked on a show that my local station has on Tuesday nights (and you can probably see episodes online) called We’ll Meet Again. Each week it focuses on some historic event and two ordinary people who were caught up in that event who were deeply affected by some other person they encountered during that event. Now they’re trying to find that person again (or, sometimes, relatives of that person). We spend most of the episode on the events of the history, see some of the search, and then see the reunion. At that point, I’m usually in tears.

The World War II episode focused on a Japanese-American woman trying to find the childhood friend who stood up for her during the anti-Japanese sentiment following Pearl Harbor and then welcomed her back from the internment cap and on a Jewish man who’d been a refugee in Singapore (an open city, so it was one of the few places Jews fleeing Europe could go) during the Japanese occupation who was looking for the daughter of the people who were surrogate parents to him. There was an episode about the Mt. St. Helens eruption, with a hiker trying to find the helicopter pilot who rescued her and a scientist trying to find the family of the scientist who saved her life by sending her away just before the eruption. The Vietnam episode focused on a man whose parents sent him away to try to escape to America when he was 12 looking for the aid worker who helped him flee and on a Vietnamese woman whose American father was forced to leave his Vietnamese wife and family behind when the US pulled out trying to track down her father or any family she might have in America. Last week’s episode focused on 9/11, with a man who escaped the hotel in the middle of the World Trade Center complex just before the first tower fell trying to find the woman who comforted him and got him to a safe place and a chaplain working at the Pentagon in the aftermath looking for the other chaplain who helped him keep going during a crisis of faith.

There are two things I find utterly fascinating about this program. One is that it shows us these major events through the eyes of ordinary people. These aren’t really the ones in the middle of the action. They’re the people caught up in events they had no control over. That offers an interesting perspective on these events.

The other is how small an act of kindness can make such a huge difference. While there have been a couple of big, heroic things, like the helicopter pilot flying into a dangerous area to look for survivors, most of the things that mattered so much to these people that they’re tracking down people decades later have been relatively tiny things. The Japanese-American woman never forgot the girl who met her at the schoolyard gates and walked into the school holding her hand when she returned from the internment camp after the war and was afraid of how she’d be received at school. She tells her story at schools and always mentions that friend. When they reunited as elderly women, the friend had no idea how much that had meant. It was a little thing to her, but it meant the world to her friend. The chaplain ministering to the recovery workers at the Pentagon in the aftermath of 9/11 had maxed out on what he was able to take, and it was another chaplain kneeling beside him and placing a hand on his shoulder and just being there with him that gave him the strength to go on, so that now he’s had a career of ministering to the troops, including those deployed overseas.

And that really makes you think. What little gesture of kindness might you make that means the world to someone else? You don’t have to rush into a burning building or take a bullet for someone to matter a great deal to someone else’s life. Every single day, we have the opportunity to make a difference by being kind, showing compassion, and noticing when people need something.

Yesterday morning I was off returning all my cable equipment, and now for the first time in my adult life I don’t have cable TV. I also don’t have any means of recording something I want to watch later, since I’d need a digital converter box to use my VCR. I do have a DVR on order, but it won’t be shipped until April. However, things have changed since the last time I went without a VCR, which was 1990. Now there are all kinds of streaming options for watching online. We didn’t have the Internet in a consumer form in 1990, and what did exist was pretty much text-only.

It turns out that there are a lot of local stations that weren’t included in the cable service, so there seems to be plenty to watch, especially if you like Star Trek or Night Court. One of the stations seems to be running episodes of the late 90s version of The Magnificent Seven (aka Attractive Men Wearing Leather and Riding Horses — apparently one of the reasons it got canceled is that they sold it to advertisers as a good way to reach male viewers, but for reasons the network executives couldn’t fathom, it drew a large female audience instead). About the only thing I’m missing is a good way to get my documentary fix, since the PBS digital subchannel that they were using for PBS World (basically, lots of documentaries) got turned into PBS Kids, which is less interesting to me. However, they also have a Create channel, which seems to be 90 percent cooking shows with the occasional This Old House and travel show. Fortunately, my library offers a few streaming services that have documentaries, and then there are a lot of DVDs at the library. Walking over once a week or so to pick up new DVDs to watch will be good for me.

On my first cable-free night, I watched a little of the Olympics (using the antenna!) and found that the picture was actually sharper and brighter than I got with cable. Then I watched a livestream of a wind symphony concert from the University of North Texas, via the Roku. See, I’m already becoming a lot more cultured.

I really hope to spend more time reading and writing. My book count was down last year, though I did read some pretty big ones that I should have counted as two. My writing time was way up last year, but I need to get back in a groove because I haven’t been doing as well this year so far.

The strange thing that’s bothering me the most and that I’m missing the most from cable is the clock on the front of the box. It had brightly lit, tall numbers that I could see from across the room, even without my glasses, and since it was set by the system, it stayed on time. I keep glancing in that direction to see what time it is. I have an atomic clock in the living room, but it isn’t lit up and the numbers aren’t as big, and it isn’t near where the TV is for easy glancing. I guess I’ll have to set the VCR clock, which is what I used in the old days before we got the fancy cable boxes with the digital readout on the front, but those numbers are small enough that I’ll need my glasses even to see from the sofa.

It’s strange the little things you get used to. But I’m sure I’ll adapt.

It’s my last day of cable TV, and yesterday there was some news that somewhat justifies cutting the cord. They’re cancelling Once Upon a Time.

I have such a love/hate relationship with that series. It had so much potential, but most of that potential went unrealized, which was frustrating. This final season has been a real mess, with me transitioning from enjoying it but snarking about it to pretty much flat-out hate-watching. They got rid of most of the characters I liked, even including one whose actor is still on the show (playing a different character who’s a different version of his original character) and the new characters are weak. They’re not even trying to make any of the worldbuilding make sense.

For instance, the timeline. This is driving me nuts. The new central character is the kid from the first six seasons, now all grown up. There are flashbacks taking place about 9-10 years ago, in which he’s already an adult, and then in the present day he has an 8-9-year-old daughter. But the same actors as before are playing the people who were adults in his life when he was a child, and they aren’t doing anything to age them, but they haven’t explained why at least 15 or so years have passed since the end of the previous season and one character grew up but nobody else has changed at all. I’m aging weirdly so that no one believes how old I really am, but if I look at photos from 15 or 20 years ago, there is a difference. One of these characters is immortal, which explains the lack of aging, but it doesn’t explain the others.

Then there’s the new setting. The new curse moving the fairy tale characters to our world didn’t create an isolated small town like before. They’re in a neighborhood in Seattle (present-day Seattle, in spite of so much time passing, but I’m sure that will eventually be explained), where the fairy tale people are mixed in with “real world” people, and I’m not sure how that works because two of the characters are cops in their cursed identities, and that would require having a background that could be checked. Someone couldn’t just magically appear out of nowhere and become a cop, and since magic doesn’t work in our world, would it be able to alter memories so that “real world” people remembered having worked for years with someone who just arrived? That sort of thing needs to become clear for the world to work.

And the city is so blah. I do think you can make a city feel magical. Look at Neverwhere. Or Grimm. Or Enchanted, Inc. Or any urban fantasy. They just haven’t done anything to make their setting feel like a place where you might meet Cinderella or Rumpelstiltskin.

So, I’m curious to see how they wrap it up, but the series going away means I won’t have to find a better antenna that will bring in ABC for next season (unless ABC comes up with a new series that sounds good).

And, meanwhile, I may have come up with a way to play with some of the ideas and concepts I liked from the show that I felt like the show didn’t explore without it being super obvious where I got the ideas. That was a challenge because the concept was so unique that there wasn’t much of a way to file off the serial numbers.

My main summer project, in addition to writing books, is rehabbing my wonky knee. At the moment, that means two therapy appointments a week, plus “homework” of exercises I’m supposed to do on my own every day. The homework amounts to just under 45 minutes, which is about the length of an episode of a TV drama, minus commercials. That makes it a good opportunity to rewatch a familiar series I have on DVD. I already know what happens, so it doesn’t hurt if I’m a bit distracted by counting reps or have to turn away from the TV to do a particular exercise, but it’s engrossing enough to divert me from all the work, and there’s enough curiosity about what happens next when I only vaguely remember to encourage me to exercise the next day so I can watch the next episode (or extend my workout to the rest of my body and watch a second episode). So, the official TV series of my knee rehab is Once Upon a Time. It’s thematically appropriate to a book idea I want to play with later this summer, if I ever finish the current book, and with the series going into a new phase in the fall, it’s interesting to revisit the beginning.

Spoilers for the series to-date are possible.

I remember being very skeptical of the concept when it was first announced. I remember the sitcom “The Charmings.” There would definitely be a temptation to go overboard into camp, but on the other hand, there would be the temptation to take a cynical approach. However, I love fairy tales. I love fairy tale retellings and mash-ups, so I was intrigued enough to set my VCR (yes, I was slow to jump on the DVR train) when it premiered, since I had to sing in a concert that night. They pretty much hooked me from the opening shot of Prince Charming riding to Snow White’s rescue. Basically, this was a show made for me, with contemporary fantasy, fairy tales, and portals between worlds. Then they made Snow White a sassy bandit fighting a one-woman rebellion against the Evil Queen instead of spending all her time keeping house for the dwarfs, and I was hooked.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the series ended up living up to the promise of what they set up in that first season. In some ways, it went badly off the rails, and that makes for frustrating rewatching. The continuity is terrible, as they kept contradicting themselves. Worldbuilding was never these writers’ strength, but somehow their world because weaker and less defined over time instead of becoming richer and more detailed. Storybrooke in the first few episodes of season one really seemed like a magical place, a small town that someone how managed to be both an idyllic “typical” American small town and a place right out of a storybook. The residents didn’t know they were fairytale characters while they were under the curse, but there were still little details suggesting their true identities. Somehow, all that was lost when the people remembered who they were later and the town seemed a lot more “normal.” They also apparently lost the budget to hire extras, so that there were other patrons in the shops, people walking up and down the streets, and cars driving by in season one, but by season six, the town felt deserted, like only the main characters lived there, and there were no buildings other than the diner, the library with its clock tower, and the houses where the main characters lived, with no buildings in between. There are a couple of lovely CGI shots of the rooftops of the town, as seen from the windows of some of the characters, that were used in the first couple of episodes, and they seem to have forgotten that there’s a whole town out there.

Meanwhile, the fairytale world seemed a lot stronger in the early going, where it really seemed like a place where all the characters lived together. In later seasons, it felt more like silos, or like the characters only ran into each other for that one event. We saw that most of these other kingdoms were in walking distance of each other, and yet none of the rulers seemed to have heard of each other.

I think there was also some waffling about the premise. The writers mentioned in interviews that they were telling the story of the place where the Evil Queen could get a happy ending. There was also a scene in the second episode of a bunch of villains gathered and learning that the curse that was going to be cast would take them to a world where villains could win. That seemed to be setting up the idea that the fairytale world was black-and-white, where the odds were strangely stacked against villains — you were either a villain or a hero, and if you were a villain, no matter how good your plan was, you just couldn’t win — and our world had more shades of gray, with the possibility that the villains might be able to come out ahead. They didn’t take that route at all. We never saw those gathered villains again and don’t know what became of them when the kingdom was transported to our world. The villains don’t seem to have done too badly in the fairytale world — the Evil Queen managed to rule for some time and probably could have remained in power if she’d been content with where she was instead of unable to be happy if Snow White wasn’t happy. I don’t think the writers every really figured out how their world worked and what they meant by heroes and villains, in spite of devoting an entire story arc to it.

Plus, when you think about it, transporting the entire kingdom to a small town in Maine, where they lived frozen in time with no sense of their true identities, was a pretty lame revenge scheme. The Evil Queen still wasn’t happy because she’s the kind of person who’s never satisfied, and she spent decades just watching her enemy lead a mildly dissatisfying life while still being more or less content and happier than the Evil Queen was. She didn’t use the different rules of our world to really come out ahead, didn’t really do anything to make her enemy suffer all that much until the curse was weakening and people were becoming more like their true selves. I kind of feel like the curse and the rationale for it were mostly just a handwave to get the fairytale characters to modern America rather than something that was given any thought or development.

Still, it’s fun to see which modern people are which fairytale characters, or what the fairytale characters are doing in our world. I love the nonlinear storytelling in the flashbacks in the first season, where we start with the curse being cast and work backwards to find out what was really going on, with other parts of the story being a bit mixed up, so seeing a later part puts a previous part into a different context. It was this kind of stuff that got me hooked, for better or worse. I’m done with disc one of season one, so we’ll see what other thoughts I have as the story continues to unfold.