By Steven S. Drachman, July 6, 2026.
So: I have this memory, from many many years ago.
I was seven years old, sitting with my mom, watching a grownup crime show. I remember this was in my living room, and the TV was a big old model with a rounded screen; it had four legs and stood on the floor. This was really very unusual, because I was just seven years old, and I wasn’t allowed to stay up late watching TV at that age. Also, where was my dad? I don’t know.
On the TV screen, as I recall it, a man in a black suit and a tie was rowing a rowboat in a lake. Suddenly, two scuba divers leaped up on either side of the boat and pulled him underwater. A long, impossibly breathless and violent underwater fight ensued.
My mother said, “Oh my gosh, can you imagine what that would be like, to be pulled underwater, slowly running out of breath, knowing that you’re going to die…?”
Suddenly, I could imagine it very well!
The fellow managed against all odds to fight off the scuba divers, he burst above the water, breathless, and the image froze as a shifting checkerboard of black squares blotted out different parts of the frame.
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THIS KIND OF FREAKED ME OUT FOR YEARS. Many times I have found myself in the middle of a lake in a rowboat or canoe, and every single time, I have thought about scuba divers leaping up on both sides of the boat to pull me underwater. Not really worried about it, but, as my mother once helpfully suggested, just imagining what it must be like to know that I am about to die, as the breath leaks from my body. I wasn’t really sure if that memory was real, though; it sort of felt like a dream. I eventually decided it must have been a dream.
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BACK IN THE TIVO ERA, I decided that I should watch Mannix. That wasn’t the only one; I kind of felt like I should watch Kojak and Baretta and all the other 1970s crime shows that I hadn’t seen when they originally aired. But for some reason, Mannix was especially stuck in my head, and I thought I should start there. I didn’t know why.
We were ReplayTV subscribers, which was kind of like TiVo but not as popular, and the name wasn’t as cool. So I added “Mannix” to my list of weekly search terms. Every week my device searched automatically for the keywords “silent” (so I would catch the weekly silent movie on TCM) and “Mannix”, among a few other things (“David Bowie,” probably). Every week, I’d get a notice about that SpongeBob SquarePants episode in which David Bowie voiced the King. Every few weeks, I’d get to see a silent movie. But not a single channel among the hundreds of cable stations ever showed a rerun of Mannix during the years that I searched this. An episode of a Dick Van Dyke murder-mystery-medical show kept popping up, in which an old and really uncool Mike Connors reprised his Mannix character, seeking to reopen an unsolved case. But the original show itself never appeared.
A couple of years ago, I ordered the full first season on DVD. And I was flabbergasted when I watched the opening scene, which ended with the same shifting black mosaic.
I knew finally after all these years that my weird traumatic television memory had been real. Indeed, my traumatic memory had really happened at precisely forty-one seconds after 9:12 p.m. on Sunday, October 8, 1972.
My memory was only a little incorrect; in fact, Mannix wore a weirdly color-coordinated tan outfit, white shoes with no socks, not a black suit; and he was operating a motorboat in a bay off the California coast, not a rowboat in a lake. But otherwise my memory was spot on.
Finally I understood my inexplicable fascination with a show I didn’t know I had ever seen.
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AND A GOOD THING, TOO! Because Season One was magnificent, really a shockingly excellent show, beyond what I imagined a 1960s and 1970s crime drama could be.
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I CALLED MY DAD and asked him if he ever watched Mannix.
“Are you kidding?” he exclaimed. “Every week! One of my all-time favorites!”
Why didn’t I remember that? Because of the trauma, you see.
My mom had recently died, so I couldn’t talk to her about that. But I know what she would have said. “Oh, everything is my fault.” That’s what she would have said. (She would have said it sarcastically, self-pityingly. But, indeed, everything is her fault.)
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RECENTLY, I’ve lost interest and patience in discussions of what we Jews call The Situation. One side shouts “Genocide!” The other side shouts “Antisemite!” The first side responds, “But some Jews agree with me, so I can’t be an antisemite.” (An argument made by the Nazis; look it up.) Then the other side responds again, and you know what they say. It’s like dueling banjos in Deliverance.
So I figured, look, for a while, let’s talk about Mannix instead. We are not going to learn anything from each other talking about Israel/Palestine. But there is a lot to learn about Mannix. Always more to learn about Mannix! And learning is always better than not learning.
As with everything, when life gets too difficult, there is always Mannix to fall back on. Mannix is your crazy friend who punches everybody with his disconcertingly long dangly arms, but who means well, probably; though maybe not. You’ll see a lot of Mannix in Oblivioni for a while.
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Coming up next: my review of Mannix, Season One, Episode One: “The Name is Mannix”
^^^
Steven S. Drachman is a writer.
Illustration of the author and scuba divers, drawn by Kalyee Srithnam, augmented by AI.