Just yesterday I got to the end of yet another binge-watched TV series — this one “Shameless,” on Netflix, an 11-season romp through Chicago’s South Side, with a title that describes all the characters and their behavior perfectly. If you haven’t seen it, tune in only if you have a high tolerance for vulgarity, sex, nudity, bodily functions and disfunctions of every stripe.
Because if you’re OK with all of that, this show is a don’t-miss gem.
But it was the very last episode that got me thinking of buffalo robes. Of course, buffalo robes have nothing to do with a show set in modern-day Chicago, but stick with me a bit longer — I’ll explain the connection.
Filmed from 2011 until late 2020, each episode of “Shameless” was grounded in South Side culture, a lifestyle and ethic that in many ways has remained unchanged through the generations. Read novels written nearly a century ago by Chicago authors James T. Farrell, Theodore Dreiser or Nelson Algren and then watch “Shameless” and you’ll see what I mean.
Still, this is TV we’re talking about, and one surprising feature of the series is how few topical references found their way into the show. Although set in “the present,” the writers clearly did not want to date the show too narrowly by mining material that would lock it into an identifiable year. As such, it is the perfect show to binge-watch this year, or next year, or some year decades from now.
Their restraint is remarkable, considering how turbulent and unsettling many of those years were.
But then, in season 11, all that changed. It was 2020, and suddenly characters walked around wearing bandanas or surgical masks over their faces. The “timeless” nature of the series was gone in this last season, locked for all time into an identifiable year.
And then, in the final episode, the writers went one step further, commemorating for all time exactly when this series came to an end, when two of the regular characters get into an angry face-off with a woman wearing a “Stop the Steal” T-shirt. The timeless quality of the series came to a screeching halt, locked now not only into a single identifiable year, but a specific month late in that year.
It was, for me, a buffalo-robe moment.
For generations, a tradition among plains Native Americans such as the Lakota was to paint images on a buffalo robe to mark the most significant event of the year. It was called the “winter count” because it measured the time from “first snow to first snow.” And because the yearly images were sequenced side-by-side, the robe over time became a tribal history book spanning generations.
Events commemorated might range from a phenomenon in nature like a prairie fire, or an exceptional harvest, or a spectacular buffalo hunt.
Or a sweeping pandemic.
Or a thieving raid by an opposing tribe.
And binge-watching season 11 of “Shameless” last week was, for me, a winter count buffalo robe of Chicago’s 2020 — a year marked by pandemic masks and election-result-denying wackadoodles who feel that some other tribe has robbed them.
Watch that episode any time next year, or a decade or a century from now, and you’ll know exactly what year it was made.
But turn off the TV and consider your own personal life. We all have our own year-by-year “winter count buffalo robe” that we keep painting, don’t we? Significant events in our own lives become twined into the events of the world swirling around us in a way that locks them forever into an unforgettable time and place.
I know that JFK was assassinated in November of 1962, because I will never forget my freshman-year study-hall teacher, Mr. Michi, announcing it with tears streaming down his face.
I know the O.J. Simpson trial took place in late October, 1995, because I have a photo of me holding my newborn grandson, Quentin, in a hospital room, with the Simpson trial on the TV screen in the background.
I know June of 2010 was a soccer World Cup month, and the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup, because I watched both from a chair next to my wife’s hospital bed, as she lay near death from a stroke.
I am sure you have your own “winter count buffalo robe” in your head as you read this — images from your own life, each frozen in time and place, commemorating the intersection of your own personal journey through the long highway of historic events.
The moon landing.
9/11.
The Cubs winning the World Series.
The road — and the robe — go on forever.
And in quiet wintery moments, it pays to light a candle, stare into the flame, and binge-watch your ever-evolving winter count buffalo robe.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
