The news is always bad stuff, because that’s what competes best for our attention. And according to Rolf Dobelli’s book Stop Reading the News, we’re better off without it. I think that’s largely true. But, asks the mystical feel-good 90s TV show Early Edition: What if you got tomorrow’s news today? Would you try to change it? Prevent the bad stuff from happening?
Gary Hobson, a newly unemployed stockbroker, is kicked out of his Chicago apartment by his soon-to-be ex-wife and, while living in an old hotel suite, mysteriously starts receiving a printed copy of the Chicago Sun-Times a day in advance. The accompanying orange cat seems to want him to help people (rather than, say, place sports bets), so helping people becomes, well, not only his full-time job but his entire identity, his raison d’etre, like it or not.
Two former co-workers serve as the devil and angel on his shoulders: Chuck tells him the world can take care of itself, and that Gary should take care of Gary (and also his best friend Chuck), while Marissa (a blind woman full of faith in humanity and faith in Gary) is the voice of conscience and encouragement. Although the paper requires constant time and attention, when Gary takes care of it, it takes care of him. He can’t hold down a job or a relationship, but the paper makes sure he has what he needs: a roof over his head, an adorable cat, and once in a while, maybe even a shot at romance once in a while.
Speaking of roof over his head, I wish at some point when I was in college in Chicago that I’d gone and found the old brick building that they used to represent McGinty’s, the downtown Chicago sports bar Gary operates with his two friends in Season 2. For sure it was still a real place then; who knows what’s happened to it in the last two decades… I know I passed through Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in 2007, but the last time I spent any time in the city itself was before that.
The premise of the show offers endless opportunities to tell stories. Some stories are about the origins and workings of the magic paper itself, though (unsurprisingly) no complete explanation ever emerges. Some situations force Gary to make a choice between two incompatible courses of action, or strain his willingness to cooperate. Many require him to waltz (or rather, sprint) into a dangerous situation and leverage whatever is written in the newspaper to awkwardly talk someone out of a rash act by sheer force of will. Sometimes he just has to shove someone out of the way of a falling piano at a particular time on a Tuesday afternoon. Often the would-be victim is the opposite of grateful. Some of his missions require strong detective skills because the incident he’s supposed to prevent is barely specified. Often he thinks he’s solved the problem, but he winds up back where he started, or worse. That’s only temporary, though: the show is hopeful (if sentimental) and all the episodes resolve in some satisfactory way. You could say it’s fate, or the will of God, or just the tendency of the universe to sort itself out as long as we’re willing to give it the best help we can.
The show is a bit like another 1990s show, Lois and Clark (1993–1997), in that the stories involve a modest and good-hearted hero with some sort of superpower, a midwestern American metropolis, and a newspaper, but Early Edition has way less romance and zero science-fiction.
If you think printed newspapers are so last-century (which, to be fair, is true) and you lack the strong nostalgia I have for the characters, setting, and musical theme, a more up-to-date show with almost the same premise is Person of Interest (2011–2016). In that show, a reclusive billionaire hires a traumatized former military operative to track down people in New York City so as to prevent each of them from being either the victim or perpetrator of a violent crime predicted by his hidden but omnipresent and possibly sentient AI-powered surveillance system.
I saw some episodes of Early Edition in high school. (Back then, Gary’s life as an independent adult made him a lot more mature than I was; now he and his friends seem fantastically young. Sigh.) At some point, living in Singapore, I acquired DVDs of the first two seasons; those were the only ones released for some reason. My husband and I just finished watching those discs in May; I’m not sure whether I ever made it through both sets of DVDs before that. As of August, I now have a copy of the complete Early Edition, comprising all four seasons. I’m keen to watch Seasons 3 and 4, now that I’ve got them, although I have no idea if they’re any good! I don’t know if I’ll remember any of the episodes. Heck, I didn’t remember that in Season 2 they tried to make McGinty’s into a high-class restaurant for a while before turning it back into a bar. I guess we’ll see!
