Coffee & TV: Getting On, Dr. Grady's Bottled Cold Brew
TW: death
Welcome to the 32nd installment of my newsletter about my two very favorite things in the world.
“Getting On” (HBO, 2013-15) is probably the best show I never think about, but this morning, as I drank my Dr. Grady’s Bottled Cold Brew and scrolled through texts, WhatsApp threads, and emails from my mom and my brothers/sister, I wondered if I felt like watching an episode. It’s not a mood elevator, but it is very funny and very good.
I’m actually not a huge fan of Dr. Grady’s Bottled Cold Brew, but I’ve been traveling a lot since April and haven’t quite been able to get my iced coffee game up to par. I used to have one of these, but it didn’t produce the promised 4-4.5 cups of coffee, and I found myself hand-washing the grody filter basket way more than I’d prefer. The coffee also seemed to pick up off “flavors” from my refrigerator. I’ve also tried using a french press left to brew overnight, which has the same issues, although a slightly better yield. Dr. Grady’s, at 8.99 for 8 servings, doesn’t seem, like, out-of-control expensive, and the preparation/cleanup can’t be beat. Just pour and rinse! Which I did, as I fired up HBO Go.
“Getting On” is set in the Billy Barnes Extended Care Unit of a hospital in Long Beach, California, a ward that specializes in disease and injury in the elderly. Our protagonists are new director of medicine Dr. Jenna James (Laurie Metcalf i.e. Aunt Jackie from Roseanne), and new nurse Didi Ortley (Niecy Nash i.e. Raineesha Williams from RENO 911 and too many other cultural blessings to list here). Alex Borstein plays nurse Dawn Forchette, the HBIC of Billy Barnes until Dr. James arrives in disgrace, reassigned after a public meltdown. The first episode is a whodunnit revolving around who shat in a chair.
Didi:
Dawn: “Excuse me?”
Didi: “Someone shit on a chair.”
Dawn: “Okay, well first of all, it’s “feces”, it’s not “shit.” It’s not “turd.”
Didi: “There’s a feces on a chair in the lounge.”
Dawn: “Okay. I’m coming. Show me where.”
Didi: “I’ll get a Kleenex and clean it up.”
Dawn: “No, first we have to file an incident report.”
Didi prepares the report:
Billy Barnes is having a lot of problems. There’s been staff turnover, budget cuts, and standard-of-care issues. Capital-B-Bureacracy and cozying up to Big Pharma. (American healthcare is fucked, did you know?) The hospital is moving to a “customer centric service model with data driven metrics.” Dr. James can’t get her parking validated. Etc. Etc. Dawn is the cringe-y overshare-y coworker that corners you in the break room to discuss an ongoing emotional problem while chewing with her mouth open,
and Jenna, the most self-absorbed, incompetent, oblivious boss you’ve ever had.
Jenna, to Didi: “Parking Nazis…Do they hassle you about your parking permit?”
Didi: “I don’t have a car.”
Jenna: “How do you not have a car in Los Angeles? How do you get to work?”
Didi: “I take the Blue Line.”
Jenna: “How do you get to a…Blue Line?
Didi: “My husband drops me off on his way to work.”
Jenna: “Well, none of us should have a car really…reduce our carbon footprint…but I couldn’t live without my Audi.”
Billy Barnes cares for elderly women, many of who are widowed, terminally ill, disabled, and alone, dying, or close to it. Well, death is a part of life, just as much as terrible bosses and annoying coworkers. It is probably the genius of Getting On that it never lets you forget that, even while what’s actually happening on screen is screamingly hilarious.
Also in the premiere, a patient is admitted after emergency services found her wandering on the median of the freeway in her nightgown. The woman doesn’t speak English, and no one can figure out who she is or what she’s shouting about. Didi is at last able to get Language Services on the phone to do a translation via speakerphone.
Didi: “Oh, great. Thanks. Dawn, she’s saying ‘I can’t stand this, I wish I was dead, please kill me.’ It’s Khmer, she’s Cambodian.”
Who amongst us!!
A few days after I left my job in late March, my grandmother died from Parkinson’s related complications. She had been in a nursing home for several years. I remember one of the last times I was there, in the day room of this otherwise dismal facility, there was a small glass enclosure where a pair of songbirds lived. My grandmother really loved birds, especially hummingbirds, and we all talked about how nice they were. I tried unsuccessfully not to cry. I knew, sort of, that this was the last time I would really ‘see’ my grandmother and as it happened that was correct. Her funeral was in early April, and I went home for a few days then, which was the beginning of my Spring & Summer of Rest and Relaxation/Grady’s Bottled Cold Brew, which keeps nicely in your refrigerator if you are away for extended periods of time.
I went home again in June to meet up with my brother Andy and my sister when Andy completed his tour of duty in Afghanistan. My mom picked me up from the tiny regional airport that is still an hour away from our house and on our way home she stopped by a warehouse to pick up some kind of giant valve my dad needed for his work.
I’m always worried about my dad working too much - he is 66 and has Parkinson’s too, as well as a very physically demanding job - and on the drive home I asked my mom how things were going at the office. She told me he had been working til all hours of the day and night cleaning up some industrial property he needs to sell.
“Mom, can’t we just hire some teenager to do this stuff? It’s unskilled manual labor, right? I know Matt and Mary and Andy and I would all throw in some money to help out, if that’s the issue.”
“We are paying someone,” my mom said.
“What do you mean, paying someone? Did you hire someone? Are they not working? Who is it?”
“Kenny Cyrulik.”
“Isn’t he, like 80?”
“He’s 74.”
“Christ. So between you and Dad and Kenny, the average age of the people moving heavy shit and crawling on top of the roof of this stupid property is seventy?”
No comment from my mother except for the implied one, which is, you know how your dad is.
I was home for a week and me and Andy barely saw him, he left for work early in the morning, came home late, ate dinner in 5-10 minutes, and went to sleep. This is not terribly different from how he was when I was a kid, but I did hope older age would ease his schedule somewhat.
Getting On is actually a remake of a British show, same name, same concept. As far as I can tell, it’s almost a scene-for-scene reproduction, at least the first couple episodes, save some minor differences. But, like the British-to-American version of The Office, the differences add up to more than a few extra scenes. We Americans don’t have stomachs for unrelieved bleakness. Mawkishness, sure, but not an unflinching gaze into the cavernous void of existence. I’ve tipped my hand, here, that I find US remakes drained of the vitriol that makes UK originals superior, but the US Getting On does something else. It is humane. A lot of shows are about humans but not humane, and it’s really hard to do this while operating in a primarily satirical/absurdist mode. But Getting On does.
In the very first scene of the first episode Dawn plays a phone game while taking a patient’s pulse. Mid-high score, the patient, Lillian, dies.
Dawn bags up Lillian’s belongings and calls Lillian’s sister Sandy. We see Dawn removing the cake Sandy made for Lillian’s birthday.
After the hubbub of the turd chair and the Cambodian woman and other shenanigans, the show ends with Dawn is breaking the news of Lillian’s death to Sandy, while trying to avoid revealing she has eaten some of Lillian’s cake.
“I didn’t think it was going to happen so fast,” Sandy says.
The acknowledgement that an 87 year-old woman is someone’s baby sister is the only beat unique to the American version. It really kills me.
It probably was not great on my psyche to watch this while reading through messages from my brothers and sister and mom about how my dad is still working too much, and how he’s pushing himself really hard to make the 18-hour drive up to meet us all for our family holiday tomorrow, to a cabin in the middle of nowhere only accessible by boat, an actual death trap built atop a rock pile that he spends his entire “vacation” performing dangerous repairs on. Two summers ago I walked in on him installing some sort of electrical panel near the sink.
Me: “I didn’t know you knew how to do that.”
Dad, gleefully: “I don’t!”
He did it, though. He managed to wire an entire cottage for electricity by just reading the instructions. I kind of wish he was not so good at this stuff, because every time he performs a dangerous repair and gets away with it, it’s more ammunition in the arsenal that we all worry too much about him and he is fine and he is an adult that can do whatever he wants with his own body, which is pretty rich coming from someone who voted for forced-birth Supreme Court justices. The irony’s lost, I already tried. Also ironic: me worrying about someone else’s self-destructive instincts!
Between him climbing a 25-foot tall tree, sans safety measures, with a MOVEMENT DISORDER THAT AFFECTS HIS HANDS AND FEET, in order to cut it down while still in it, and his adventures on top of sheds on industrial properties, his love of overwork, and his truly terrifying driving, I came to a conclusion when I was home in June, which is that my dad is going to die. Like, everyone is going to die ofc, but my dad is going to die pretty soon. He said ten years two years ago, and my mom says five. My dad is an optimist and my mom is a pessimist so take from that what you will. I’m just sitting here drinking some medium-OK iced coffee and hoping it doesn’t happen in front of me next week, but then, maybe that would be better than it being prolonged over years in a sad elder care facility. I know he thinks so.
Until next time,
Ruth
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