What to watch for hope and laughs while Trump is still president

My takeaway from three unsparing period dramas, set in the 1890s and the 1960s, is that we have transcended painful times before — and we will again.

Have you ever gotten hooked on a TV series then wondered if you’d manage to see it all? We’ve been playing a parlor game in my household with Murdoch Mysteries, which takes place (so far) in the 1890s and has 19 seasons (so far) and 334 episodes (so far). We’ve joked that this is our way of joining the Resistance — it’s a Canadian production set in Toronto, after all.

But now we’ve realized we don’t know what will come first: the end of the series, the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, or the end of our own lives. And we can’t decide whether to laugh or cry.

There is something irresistible about Murdoch Mysteries, the story of a very Catholic, proper and analytical detective. He’s maddeningly reticent in his personal life as he brilliantly solves crimes, has chance encounters with people like Nikola Tesla, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells, jumps on newfangled notions like Venn diagrams, and not only thinks up but creates his own versions of ideas that would be realized decades later — from night-vision glasses to a luminescent liquid that makes blood traces visible even after someone has tried to clean up.

This scientific, futuristic teasing is woven throughout the series, and since it didn’t start until 2008, you know the writers and actors had huge fun making Murdoch seem amazingly brilliant. But he is also amazingly awkward, and constantly making wrong moves or no moves (so far) toward his (so far) true love, Dr. Ogden. I should add that while it seems like we’ve been watching forever, we’ve only just finished season four. It’s early yet.

The series is not all playful. There are story lines about eugenics, sexual assault, racism, illegal abortions, and poor or orphaned children forced into indentured servitude or worse. And, of course, murder most foul, by all means imaginable and, sometimes, unimaginable.

I’ve begun to think of period dramas like this one as dark nostalgia. The Oscar-nominated Train Dreams is another example — the story of a young orphan named Robert who arrives in tiny Bonners Ferry, Idaho, on a train, quits school, makes his own family with his wife and child, and perseveres through a difficult, sometimes heartrending life.

Train Dreams starts in the Murdoch Mysteries era, not in a city but in a wilderness setting that highlights the dangerous physical work it took to build the West. What’s common to both is the unforgiving threats and perils of the times. Robert is traumatized by the murder of a Chinese man working with him on building a railroad. He moves on to logging, and witnesses several men killed by falling trees.

Yet Robert also experiences the kindness of a native American shopkeeper, of a Forest Service surveyor whose husband had just died, and of the affectionate dogs who show up one day and stay, tempering his isolation. Later comes the televised 1962 spectacle of John Glenn orbiting the earth in space, and Robert’s epiphany while seeing the world from a tiny biplane. He dies six years later at age 80.

That’s right around the time frame of yet another series in the dark-nostalgia genre, the most brutally raw and — because of that — in some ways the most encouraging. I’m talking about Inspector George Gently, an eight-season British drama set in northeast England (Newcastle, Northumberland and Durham) from 1964 to 1970.

Screen grab/BBC

In a British constabulary near the sea, the stage is set for 90-minute investigations of the ills, controversies, and overt prejudices of the 1960s: police corruption, political corruption, the Irish troubles, child abuse, union unrest, sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, disability, rape, prostitution, accidental pregnancies, war crimes, and corporate cover-ups.

Like Robert, Gently is a traumatized and lonely protagonist, even though he’s running an office and among people all the time. His sharp but flawed sergeant, John Bacchus, is a font of stereotyping and careless conclusions, on a scale of cringeworthy to deeply offensive, about anyone who isn’t a straight white male. Gently is determined to mentor him, in part with flashes of sarcastic humor, and plays the same role with a talented female cop he recruits to work with them. She copes with being patronized, ignored and insulted, but eventually wins the respect she deserves, even from Bacchus.

The past in all its ugliness is on display in all three of these period dramas. Watching them now is a reminder of ongoing attempts to revive some of that ugliness in today’s America. Yet these echoes from the past also inspire confidence — the certainty that what we have transcended before, we will transcend again. That the haunting last line of The Great Gatsby is only half-right about America’s terrible predicament.

“So we beat on, boats against the current,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, and that much is true. But while Trump and his retrograde allies are working hard to ensure that our entire nation is “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” as the sentence concludes, it will never happen. The strength of our oars against that current, and the tides of history itself, will prevail.

It has been quite a week/month/year. Here are links to a few pieces you may have missed since my last newsletter:

March 4: U.S. attack on Iran echoes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

It was beyond disconcerting to hear the Iranian foreign minister on Sunday sounding like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky circa 2022. But that’s the comparison that instantly sprang to mind when Abbas Araghchi told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week”: “What the United States is doing is an act of aggression. What we are doing is the act of self-defense. There are huge differences between these two.”

March 3: Can Lawsuits Tame This Rogue Presidency?

The state of the union is “golden,” Donald Trump boasted last week. He must have meant to say gilded, as in robber barons, corruption, and gaping economic inequality. But let’s not argue. We can all agree at least on this: The state of America today is litigious.

And plaintiffs are beating the government 2:1 so far.

Feb. 23: How I got past Massie Derangement Syndrome

He showed off his fully armed family in a 2021 Christmas card that still haunts me. But his recent bipartisan work on the Epstein files and the Iran war made me reassess.

Rep. Thomas Massie is the opposite of a lightning rod. Instead of conducting electricity harmlessly into the ground, the Kentucky Republican conducts controversies upward and outward, igniting conflagrations of news and social media headlines.

Feb. 16: The Disastrous First Year of RFK Jr.

I tallied the damage from just one week in Kennedy’s year of tearing down public health, and wrote: It is beyond comprehension that the Senate confirmed this man to oversee America’s health. The risks are so immediate and constant that it can be difficult to keep track of them all…

Feb. 5: Trump and the Kennedy Center: Renaming, Rebuilding, Revolting

IMAGINE A RENAMING SPREE in your town or state. The Donald Trump–Radio City Music Hall. The Donald Trump–Hollywood Bowl. The Donald Trump–Las Vegas Sphere. The Donald Trump Ryman Auditorium. Donald Trump’s Red Rocks. Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden.

Or, in a different vein, the Donald Trump–George Washington Monument. The Donald Trump–Abraham Lincoln Memorial. Donald Trump and the Mount Rushmore Four. The Donald J. Trump–John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame. The Donald Trump–William McKinley National Memorial, with a new inscription about their shared devotion to tariffs.