I’m always looking for a good television series to sink my teeth into, much like the books I read (and write for that matter), stories that are slow burns, that last, that reveal bits of characters and their pasts piece by piece, slowly. I don’t like short stories very much or quick-to-rise, rushed action. Some people do and that’s fine, but it’s not my taste to read or write that way. I often find myself upset, lost, and sad when a series I love ends, regardless of which medium it’s being told in.

When I begin a television series, it’s easy to give up on the first couple episodes. People rave about it, while I’m at a lost to like it. However, I find that really good series are slow to catch and the same is true for the novels I love. Of course, some never catch, the flame burning out to gray ash before it can be inhaled, and you decide to move on; it’s not worth it. Life is too short, and fiction and creative stories too plentiful to waste time on, time that is so elusive as it is. But I always give my novels 100 pages and my shows three full episodes before I give up. Oftentimes, I’m so very glad I did as they turn out to be some of the most thought-provoking and provocative of tales, tales that make me think and question and reflect.
Bloodline, a series I started, is one such show. A slow burn for sure, Bloodline lights that fire, revealing bits and pieces in glimpses of the myriad hues of yellow, orange and red, the crackle loud at times, and others, soft and nuanced, where we mostly see things in a third-person, limited fashion, through the eyes of the protagonist, John. It gets interesting when he and his siblings lose their father, and we start to learn their pasts as the memory of their father, their hero, starts to unravel. They start to realize they really didn’t know their father at all. It made me think of my parents and the glimpses they let me see of them, but made me question, like these characters, if I really knew them at all. I began to see that my perception of them is very much that of Mom and Dad, a narrow, myopic view, like many roles or hats we wear in life. The sister or the writer or the teacher, but that those things don’t begin to explain who we are, not truly, not the essence of our spirit or being, but only labels.

I’ve realized that though I had glimpses into my Mom’s past and her extremely tragic and difficult childhood, I didn’t really know it or understand it much; certainly, I never gave it much credence or weight. She was my mom. The stoic. Likewise, my dad, too, though I knew of his tough upbringing, a mother that didn’t want a boy, who relegated his sleeping to an attic without heat, causing health issues to plague him throughout his life from severe illnesses he had developed, he was my dad, my rock, my hero, whose threshold for pain is probably one of the reasons he died so young. Had he been diagnosed earlier who knows. But he was used to pain. And I realize there is so much I didn’t know about either of them. Glimpses only go so deep.

And the show has also opened up some memories that I had buried, that I hadn’t thought about in years and years, much like the characters themselves had. I talk of my dad a lot, how he was my hero, and he was. But make no mistake, he, too, was flawed; he was no saint. He may have seemed that way with me, but he had a dark side, and it’s interesting how this show has somehow caused certain memories to resurface, things I had forgotten, by choice or otherwise, I’m not sure.

​We often like to put our parents on pedestals, especially when they pass, remembering only the good in them, trying to engrave their legacy into our minds in a way we think they’d want or how we want to immortalize them. But they were people long before they were our parents with stories and dreams of their own, some realized and some not, triumphs and failures. It is those things who “make” people who they are, who they become, and it’s disconcerting to think how little we actually get to know of them. 

We read. We watch visual representations in the form of movies and television shows. And we choose those we relate to. We do so because it’s what makes us vitally connected as humans. Not as our professions or our roles in life, but as people first, people connecting and thinking and hopefully reflecting. I can only hope my readers can feel the slow burn of my stories, not giving up early on, but watching the fire grow with each turn of the page to discover that things are not always what they seem, where the pasts of my characters are exposed to be as much a part of their present and their future…just like our pasts are.