In a golden age of situation comedies on broadcast television, it is easy to overlook the five-episode series called “Free Country.”
The show featured a character named Joseph Bresner, who, in flashbacks from the present, reminisced about events in the early 1900s when he emigrated to New York City from Lithuania.
The producer, director, and star of this show was Rob Reiner, who was murdered yesterday at his Los Angeles-area home.
The body of work Reiner has produced in his entertainment life included formative comedy, coming-of-age movies, military court drama, and even pure fantasy.
But “Free Country” has stuck with me, nearly five decades after the show’s initial run. It was a show without a laughtrack, but it had good-natured humor. It showed life in New York in the 1900s, which meant “a-ha” moments such as when Bresner turned on the faucet in his apartment for the first time.
Most suburban teens my age wouldn’t have understood the singularity of this moment, as utilities are a given no matter where you are in America.
But consider the water running out of the tap: it had a reddish, rusty tinge. Today, rusty water is something to be concerned about, whether it is a fault in the hot water heater or pipe corrosion.
In the time period of “Free Country?” Any kind of running water through a tap was a miracle for immigrants coming to the U.S.
Reiner captured the lives of these people coming from Eastern Europe and settling down in a rapidly growing Manhattan of a century ago.
It is a show which only ran five episodes before being stopped from further production by ABC network suits who considered the show too esoteric for broadcast. Five decades on, given the kaleidoscopic variety of television programming available on the streaming space, that would not have been given as an excuse in the present day.
Tributes to Reiner are being broadcast on morning television, as they should. They will touch on his major works as an actor and director, as they should.
I’ll remember “Free Country.”