"My Life and Times" was an uneven series. There were episodes that were just simply mundane. At moments, however, the poignancy for which the show reached came through--then disappeared again, to turn up the next week, or perhaps not. Part of the problem may have been that the situation of a Boomer reaching his eighties simply has not happened yet. The Boomer in the audience could not or did not want to identify with Ben Miller. Yet his fate will undoubtedly be that of some of us: When he tries to explain his life to the young nurses taking care of him in 2035, they do not know the difference between the 1960s and the 1980s. (Come to think of it, this is a problem of already since the Millennial generation does not remember the '60s at all and only barely recalls the '80s.) On the other hand, one of my favorite episodes was the somewhat flawed attempt to imagine from the vantage of 1991 what it would be like on New Year's Eve 1999. That would be a good episode to see again to see what they got right and what they did not. Speculative fiction always risks a great deal when it looks to the future. It imagines that some things will change more than they will and that others will change less, but the show rightly guessed that there would be a few nut cases running around predicting doom at midnight and that the clock would bring in the New Year with nostalgia and celebration but no doom. All in all, an unusual show but one that did not have enough steam, enough daring, to execute an ambitious and provocative idea.
Review of My Life and Times
