In praise of my life and times...

Back in 1991 for a few brief weeks a wonderful little jewel of a television show flashed like a comet briefly across the airwaves and died away into obscurity. Its title was My Life and Times. In the year 2035 an elderly man named Ben tells about episodes in his life (out of sequence) cover moments from the late 1970's to 1999. 

The show starred some amazing (at that point quite young) actors including Tom Irwin in the role of Ben, Helen Hunt as Ben's first wife Rebecca, and a glowing, ethereal Claudia Christian as his star-crossed love Jessie.  Only six episodes were aired between April 24, 1991 and May 30, 1991, but those few episodes made a significant imprint in my psyche. 

But this post isn't really about the TV show My Life and Times but rather about the wonders of my very own life and times, and how the Internet has transformed my personal experience of my own life. 

Yes, the TV show My Life and Times left me with memories, images and themes that have frequently surfaced over the past 23 years...but I could not remember the name of the series itself. Nor did I know the name of the actor who played the title role, although I would never forget his face, and always thought of this series whenever I encountered him in TV and movies. Yesterday, watching a rerun of Castle there he was, that familiar face, and it reminded me again of how I'd loved him as a young man in that short lived series.  

I wanted to find out if with all the movies and television shows now on-line was that half-remembered series out there to be seen?  But I didn't know his name, and I didn't know the series name. While I was pondering this problem, I happened to be reading recent posts on Facebook and  noticed that one of my friends had shared something from the page of Claudia Christian. Ah ha! I did remember that Claudia was in the cast (a name that I do remember because of her four years with Babylon 5). 

Armed with Claudia Christian's name it was off to IMDb.com the most useful tool for fans of television and movies. A quick scan of Claudia's filmography turned up the name of the series, My Life and Times, which I was surprised to see aired in 1991, some four or five years earlier than I imagined. Click on the link to My Life and Times on IMDb and there were all the other actors names, including Tom Irwin...so nice now to have a name to go with that so very familiar face. 

A Google search of the series title lead to some interesting things, including some articles written about the series at the time it aired. Best of all was a post on the blog Television Obscurities http://www.tvobscurities.com/articles/my-life-and-times/#comment-1080674 that provided me with a wealth of information, including the fact that: "My Life and Times was never repeated nor has it ever been made available commercially."

Having already done a quick search of Hulu.com and Netflix.com I suspected that to be so...but there was still Youtube.com to consider.  Sure enough someone named maureenkh1 has collected all six of the broadcast episodes broken into two acts (minus commercials) and shared them for everyone.


And because my life and times include blogs, and embedded video, I can share the first part of the first episode with you all.

When this series aired, in the spring of 1991, the Internet existed, and e-mail existed. But most the tools and resources that I used to aid my failing memory and bring that moment of my past back to life and share it did not.  The time I live in are both marvelous and perilous.