Even Jessica Fletcher was Willing to Change
One of my guilty pleasures is watching old re-runs of “Murder She Wrote.” My son calls is Scooby Doo for old women. And unlike the intriguing nostalgia of series like Mad Men and PanAm, the 1980s are still tacky and corny.
What is intriguing are the technology changes that took place over the course of the 258 episodes and twelve television seasons. When the series began, retired school teacher Jessica Fletcher wrote her mystery novels on an old manual typewriter, and cellphones were basically non-existent. As the seasons went on, Mrs. Fletcher continued typing on her manual typewriter. She didn’t understand computers and didn’t want the hassle of trying to learn to use them. Remember this is a woman who didn’t even have a driver’s license.
Eventually though, the pressures of publishing convinced JB Fletcher to give up the typewriter. She starts out with a clunky cream-colored desktop and is in later episodes seen using a laptop. Cellphones progressed quite a bit during that time too, but I never saw her with one.
What’s the point of all this? To say that no matter how much we dread learning something new and completely foreign, no matter how much we resist change, there will come a time when it just doesn’t make any sense to continue resisting.
from my notebook 