New Amsterdam

Near-immortality might be great, but only if other people can have it too, I would think. I think it would be very much a downer to remain forever youthful, while those around you-- your family, your friends, everyone you care about-- grow old, gray, and finally die.... over and over and over again as the decades and centuries pass.

I'd certainly see if I could arrange being run over by a Mack truck more-or-less accidentally in the course of my daily life, if I were in the protagonist's shoes.

I dunno, Hale. Considering the speed with which many people re-marry after the death of a spouse, or whatever, I think most people could find a way to keep going.

As for Rand's concern, we must all hope that anyone who's a fan of Leon Kass does not get any role in the next Administration's R&D budgetary requests.

Huh. Glad I missed it, then.

Dealing with long lifespans or immortality has been at times a really interesting sci-fi or fantasy (see: elves) concept. Things like relations to others (immortal and not), aversion to risk, the whole different mindset and perspective can make for interesting stories, and I hope that's a problem we wind up facing. However... this guy's primary mission in life is to die, and he's come to this point in only 400 years? That's a little hard to accept on the face of it.

I can see both an upside and downside. I'd enjoy being able to pursue myriad vocations, hobbies, travels, and other things - and the amazing technological progress over 400 years.

Some of the interpersonal issues would be difficult to deal with, I think. It's true that people do (generally) remarry fairly easily after a spouse dies, for example. But imagine having to go through not just the deaths of wave after wave of loved ones. Heck, suffering through 2 centuries of Presidential election cycles might make anyone long for the grave.

Could be an interesting show, I'll have to try and catch it next week.

He'd be the perfect guy to send to the closest star systems. Or as pilot of a space ark full of hibernating passengers.

It kind of reminds me of the Larry Niven classics with the semi-immortal Louis Wu. Wu would get bored then travel alone through space, not turning around and returning to civilization until he literally couldn't stand being alone.

As I recall he eventually never did turn around and instead set out to explore the universe solo.

My favorite eternal is the guy from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe who accidentally makes himself immortal but grows so bored with it all that he desides to insult the universe one person/thing at a time and in alphabetical order!
As I recall the key was a *really* hot cup of tea.

It is my understanding that New Amsterdam was even more of a downer but they rewrote/reshot some of it to make it seem a bit lighter. I caught the first part of the show but the beard on the guy when he was back in 16whatever was so chessy I turned it.

In one of Arthur C. Clarke's novels of the immortal city, the immortal people undergo a kind of death/resurrection whereby they come back in a new (or rebuilt) body with their old personality but with few, pre-selected, memories. They begin the new life almost as infants.
That is done, as I recall, because the accumulation of memories becomes excessive and is a handicap.
Consider that we don't always do the right thing, and sometimes we have terrible things happen to us or our loved ones.
The accumulation of shame, guilt, horror, and grief would, it seems to me, have to be dealt with in some fashion. Wouldn't it eventually become overwhelming?

A point made a couple times during the premier is that death is what gives value to life. It is finite, and therefore precious. If you have an infinite amount of time, then none of it has any particular worth. You can always get more. You can spend ten years playing tiddlywinks and not consider it "wasted," because you can get a hundred more years where that came from.

And the character can only infuse his life with value by finding love... well, that's a very nice twist.

Plus, the guy hasn't exactly wasted his time. We know he became an accomplished woodworker and jazz musician. I suspect we'll learn he put his time to good use.

Anyway, I don't think you can see this as futurist or sci-fi. Just a clever premise which may or may not turn out to be cleverly told.

Actually, it's the whole "true love" concept that's a turn-off for me. It's so typically a Hollywood cliché -- do they use that old 70s catch-phrase, "soul-mate" in the show? Not to mention the whole "love will kill you" undercurrent. Can't these people make up their minds?

There is also an economical aspect to everyone living forever (or even longer). You have to work to live. You can't just save up for "permanent retirement" then coast along forever. The only reason it works now is because people save up more than they will need (e.g. I bet I will die before my money runs out). When you live forever, you can never have more than you can need.

I could understand working for 100 years then coasting for 20 or 30 and then having to rejoin the workforce to rebuild your stock pile.

I've heard plenty of people say that investing would take care of things, but investing only works if there are others doing the work itself. Once there's nobody actually doing the work, there's nothing to invest in.

So living forever means working forever. And that might start sucking after a while.

Let me tell you, living over 300 years is not all it's cracked up to be. Take my word for it.

As for working, if I had known beforehand, I would have invested sooner. Now I'll have to wait another 70 years, but eventually I'll be sitting semi-pretty.

Seems like after the first century the problem of your loved ones dying isn't going to be so great, considering that clearly he hasn't found his "true love". Or has he been marrying a succession of women he didn't really care for?

Also, unless some sort of sexual / reproductive issue is bundled in, wouldn't a decent percentage of the city would be descended from him at this point?

Seriously, I know intellectually that being highly derivative doesn't mean it can't be entertaining. (This show's concept is just Angel minus the vampire/demon angle; or an unholy combination of Highlander, Beauty and the Beast, and a cop show.) But all the pre-publicity couldn't shake the feeling they'd come up with a cheesy variation but thought they were being deep.

I didn't get at all that the protagonist simply wants to die. He simply wants to experience love, and if becoming mortal is the way to do it, he's willing to do it. I don't think he's going to drop dead as soon as he finds the 'one' - the heart attack was just his body sending the message that the woman had been spotted. He seems capable of seeing her again without collapsing.

This is not exactly a new theme. The story of the choice between immortality and love has been told again and again - Gods who choose to become mortal because they fall in love with a mortal, for example. Even Heinlein explored that theme in Time Enough for Love. For that matter, Heinlein explored the notion that a person can live long enough that they really don't want to live any more. With Lazarus Long it took a couple thousand years, but with many others they reached that point much, much sooner.

And if you accept the premise of the story, that each person truly has one true soul mate, would you really want to meet that soul mate, watch her grow old and die, and then know that you'll never, ever find another?

The REAL problem with the premise is this: he has to find his 'love.' This is irrelevant to the other premise, detection. This theme of unrequited love will ruin the show, as it has ruined so many others.

Note to screenwriters: stop ruining man-shows with sappy bullshit romance. You've lost male viewers time and again with this approach. Not everyone is a gay writer living in NY or LA.

Interesting. Some 20 years ago there was a series of books in which the protagonist was a Roman soldier who was cursed to forever remain "what you now are" after participating in the Crucifixion. The early books were not badly written and one of the most interesting themes was the way the protagonist would see his loved ones age, and die, and yet he remained.

He could not die, but he was not insulated from pain, either physical or emotional.

Later on, the writer got lazy and after the first six or eight books the series got dreadfully hackish. At the end, after the original author perished in an alcohol-related gun mishap, the books were being ghostwritten by appallingly bad hacks who lost many if not most of the threads of the original story.

The author (at least, at first) was Barry Sadler, better known as the primary writer and singer of the 1966 #1 hit, "Ballad of the Green Berets." The first of the books was called "Casca: The Eternal Mercenary" and they're generally called the Casca series. The quality of the series took a dramatic nose dive after the first few stories, but when I saw previews for New Amsterdam I was struck by the similarity of the character's unhappiness to Casca's.

Sadler appears to have based his Casca in part on the protagonist in a 1966 novel, The Centurion, by Leonard Wibberley (quite a good read in its own right), and in part on the medieval legend of the Wandering Jew. I do not know whether any of these precursors figured in the plans of the New Amsterdam developers.

I won't be seeing the series in any event -- I'm celebrating my tenth year TV-free in 2008. I'm sure I've missed hours of entertainment in that decade, and I'll miss minutes more in the decade to come.

The REAL problem with the premise is this: he has to find his 'love.' This is irrelevant to the other premise, detection. This theme of unrequited love will ruin the show, as it has ruined so many others.

Note to screenwriters: stop ruining man-shows with sappy bullshit romance. You've lost male viewers time and again with this approach. Not everyone is a gay writer living in NY or LA.

We seem to be into a trend. We have here a guy who has youth, health, presumably (this being a TV show) not all that hard to look at, and (sigh)it's all such a bore and why can't he just find his true love so that he can die. I would think this was all pretty weird, except that I have been reading news reports about a young woman who has talent, education, lots of money, a beautiful mansion, an exalted position in society, healthy children, an interesting career, and a husband who may be president, and to hear her tell it, she (sigh) just doesn't know how she does it every day.

Can't die? Would make a perfect test pilot I should think.

Imagine how many degrees he could get, how the knowledge wouldn't die with him and could be expanded upon endlessly as long as he didn't have a closed mind.

Personally I think I'd take over Argentina.

And in regards to working forever, only a fool wouldn't be able to invest some Guilders in New Amsterdam and not be a bajillionaire a few hundred years later.

And in this category, let's not forget Jack Vance's short story, "When Hesperus Falls", about a man who wakes up in a distant future in which he is viewed as a sort of pet or zoo animal (much as we might view a Neanderthal, if one woke up from a glacier someday).

He lives in perfect comfort, has everything he wants ... except a reason to live. The title of the story comes from one of his more ... imaginative ... attempts to kill himself.

I don't find it at all hard to imagine this, and I think it's a serious error to assume that unlimited life and youth would be such an unmitigated blessing.

The only way to put an end to this (apparent, and obvious, at least to the script writers) misery of endless youth and health is to find his true love.

Then he can die.

Just how perverse is that?

Just how unoriginal is that?

This setup sounds an awful lot like the (inferior) "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" spinoff "Angel."

How did the "eternal youth" thing come about - was he by any chance cursed by Gypsies?

This show sounds like a horrible rip-off of Highlander (including the last, horrible movie), except that, being stuck in one city, he can't have been a witness to a great number of the major historical events of the last 400 years (though I'm sure he was a friend and advisor to all of the founders).

Shouldn't someone who has to find his true love be a wanderer, not someone who just has to hope that she lives on the Lower East End of Manhattan?

I'm also not sure how knowing what building stood at 34th and 5th in 1810 helps you solve crimes (but I'll bet it does in this show).

"Consider that we don't always do the right thing, and sometimes we have terrible things happen to us or our loved ones."

And yet, if you forget those memories, you'll only make the same mistakes again.

Me, I've always been able to remember my failures better than any of my triumphs. This makes me a real downer to talk to, but at least my skills are much sought after.

Perhaps the curse of eternal mortal life is watching your loved ones age and die?

Besides, New York makes me want to shuffle off this mortal coil, too, and I only have to be there a few days out of the year.

Well, maybe the thought of eternal life without true love is the curse.

Overall i thought the show was okay if bland. The histoy geek in me enjoyed the history geekiness. And the notion that his knowledge is almost like a superpower is, well, a very positive message.

That's my $0.02.

"So living forever means working forever."

Compound interest over several hundred years has got to start adding up.

Married men don't live longer.

It just seems longer.

I saw the previews, but didn't bother with the series itself. It looked like a bad adaptation of an old storyline, and reading this review I get a feeling that its exactly what I thought it would be.

What's funny is that as others have pointed out, the story itself is an old one, and has been done before in books. I can even think of some RPG modules/scenarios which include characters who have somehow been taken out of time and live forever, trapped in a location or town until certain events occur, and most are because of curses.

And eternal life when others don't have it, would be a curse. Even if you were intelligent enough to make some good investments, it would be difficult to survive for year after year. You'd have to be careful about friends, because they'd age and you wouldn't. You'd have to develop a method to move your cash back to you after occasional fake deaths so that others didn't realize you were immortal. And after a while, what would be new? If you are limited to say 1 square mile, eventaully you'd have seen and done just about everything that could be done in the region.

So the series premise, even without the stupid solution to the curse "true love" makes the main character instantly weak and frustrating, rather than heroic. Add in the stupidity of having to find true love, when you have the limitations of being immortal, and the whole story is a complete joke.

Writers need to remember that heroic doesn't mean an extraordinary person doing extraordinary things all the time. Heroic is someone going out and doing their best against all odds when they know that their best might not be good enough.

"So to me, the real suspension of disbelief in this new series is not that a man could live for four hundred years, but rather, that he would have to live that long in misery."

You may be right for a few hundred years or so. Longer, I'm not so sure. Vernor Vinge, in "Marooned in Realtime", raises the possibility that technologically extended lifespans absent a corresponding cognitive ramp-up (superhumanity) will confer something of a curse on the receipient. Vinge raises the hypothesis that the brain, as a finite state machine, will start looping back on itself when existence extends well beyond its evolutionary lifespan. His character is described as "insectile" in behavior. Apart from Science Fiction, consider the protagonist in "Groundhog Day" or consider the Nazguls in LOTR.

...consider the protagonist in "Groundhog Day..."

Groundhog Day was a sufficiently different situation (having to relive the same day over and over) that it doesn't really seem applicable.

To be healthy and wealthy and live forever? Yeah, that would be a real bummer (if you're an idiot with no imagination.)

you apparently don't even suffer any pain

I wouldn't say that -- the heart attack looked pretty freakin' uncomfortable to me, and I believe he mentioned being shot hurt like a bastard.

I found New Amsterdam to be okay, but it didn't really grab me (and my mother felt the same way). I was pondering that this morning. What made it different from similar immortal-guy shows such as Forever Knight, Angel, Highlander, or Torchwood? I think what it is is heroism/destiny. The protagonists in the other four shows are heroes, involved in epic (albeit behind-the-scenes) conflicts. Nick Night and Angel are both fighting their vampiric natures along with supernatural threats. Duncan Macleod is involved in a worldwide, millennia-long contest largely against evil immortals. Jack Harkness has not only predatory aliens to deal with but some kind of 'everything changes' apocalypse to prepare for. And what is Amsterdam doing? He may be a cop, but that's pretty much just a sideline. Basically, he's trying to get a date. He's not a sentinel or a guardian or a champion, he's a guy on the make.

Caught much of the premiere. One old guy knows some of the protagonist's back-story (he gets a collectible table from it) and one senior citizen has that "don't I know you moment" - all of it makes me wonder, how can you stay in one city without everyone not recognizing you're not aging like the rest of us?
Then again, a guy carrying a badge gets shot and he ends up a 'John Doe' in the hospital?
Lots of willing suspension of disbelief needed here.

To be healthy and wealthy and live forever? Yeah, that would be a real bummer (if you're an idiot with no imagination.)

You're forgetting the living forever part. After a while, your imagination will falter and you'll be stuck for something to do. As a Highlander (the series) fan hence the name of course, and a writer, I've always enjoyed the immortality angle for a story. I am, however, immensely tired of the vampire stories to provide immortality. But even the characters in Highlander would become tired for stretches of time, burdened by their own immortality.

I think it would be hard after a few centuries to watch the people you love grow old and die and have to start over. That's a lot of grief to carry around. It would be hard to get close to people and be very lonely. I think the premise is right on.

My biggest problem with the show is how he kept walking aorund being all 'yeah, i'm 400 years old, Yeah, I was in WWII, Yeah, I don't age, what of it?" he would SO be institutionalized by now

"Compound interest over several hundred years has got to start adding up."

Only if there are others working. Imagine today if every single person on the planet simply invested money rather than go to work and produce goods. Your investments wouldn't be worth anything since they couldn't be used to purchase anything - there'd be nothing to purchase.

If *everyone* had the ability to live forever you'd have to work forever.

Who wants to live forever?

Robert Heinlein's character, Lazarus Long, has to deal with this problem of outliving multiple families, but he also has a group of similarly long-lived people (the Howard Families) with whom to share his long life.

Who wants to live forever?

Probably no one, but the question is irrelevant. The goal is not to live forever, but to live as long as one wants to live.

And what is Amsterdam doing? He may be a cop, but that's pretty much just a sideline. Basically, he's trying to get a date.

So that's why he became a cop? So he can "run a plate for a date"?

That, and avoid being sent to prison for offences that would get us mere peasants in trouble. Imagine being immortal and sentenced to life in prison for drug dealing or killing somebody.

Then again, a guy carrying a badge gets shot and he ends up a 'John Doe' in the hospital?

Yeah, that part really bugged me. And what happened to his gun? Nobody mentions it being brought in with him, but he's not fraught about his service weapon being missing, either.

There are two problems I see with this show:

- If the guy is confined to "New Amsterdam", what happens if his boss tells him to check out a lead in New Jersey or attend a training seminar in Hawaii?

- Even in New York you can't live 300 years w/o people noticing. The doorman at your apartment building will remember tales from his grandfather about what a lousy tipper you are and start wondering. Normally with these "immortal" tales the Immortal relocates to a new city or continent every 30-40 years and only returns using a new identity (and possibly plastic surgery).

It's an interesting theme, one I started exploring through the character Zsallia at the Methuselah's Daughter blog, then in more detail with Dean Esmay in our novel of the same title. A solitary immortal without other immortals to interact with is an unusual situation in most stories, so I give them credit for taking it on.

I liked the show (I have a forgiving nature when it comes to TV pilots), but I think Dean and I did a batter job with the concept ;)

In Zsallia's case, while she comes to see her immortality as a curse she never actually tries to kill herself. Unlike Amsterdam, she's got now clue how or why she's immortal and that's the crucial difference between the two.

The true love thing is pretty hackneyed, though. I need to be able to think up at least a tenuously plausible reason for something like that, and I can't. Maybe the shaman woman just wnated to give him the gift of actually finding love, even if it takes him a thousand years? Sorry, it doesn't work for me. but I'm willing to give them a few more episodes to flesh it all out.

"The true love thing is pretty hackneyed, though"

I dunno. It's kept How I Met Your Mother renewed through 3 seasons so far. If the scripts are otherwise good it may not matter.

A point made a couple times during the premier is that death is what gives value to life. It is finite, and therefore precious. If you have an infinite amount of time, then none of it has any particular worth. You can always get more. You can spend ten years playing tiddlywinks and not consider it "wasted," because you can get a hundred more years where that came from.

And the character can only infuse his life with value by finding love... well, that's a very nice twist.

Plus, the guy hasn't exactly wasted his time. We know he became an accomplished woodworker and jazz musician. I suspect we'll learn he put his time to good use.

Anyway, I don't think you can see this as futurist or sci-fi. Just a clever premise which may or may not turn out to be cleverly told.

Groundhog Day seems to suggest that the human spirit is perfectible over time, much like Edgar Cayce's reincarnation ideas.

Perhaps the protagonist in New Amsterdam wouldn't find life so wearying if he spent more of it pro-actively helping mankind instead of just cleaning up the mess afterward, as most detectives do.

Just a thought.

I seldom watch tv, but I was intrigued by the premise and so I watched it. It reminded me a little of an old Gerald Kersh SF story entitled "Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?" that I read many years ago. Details are fuzzy, but as I recall, the protagonist was a medieval soldier that suffered a mortal wound but recovered after being treated on the battlefield with some local concoction. The treatment granted not freedom from injury or pain, but the ability to eventually heal from any bodily damage. But he was stuck with his essential self - hundreds of years later he was still soldiering on in various armies.

As for the comments and maybe the writers intent about "find your true love and die", well. When I encounter dumbdoing like that I tend to rewrite in my head. In this case, I like to think what they're trying to get across is that if he succeeds, he will have a shot to become mortal and lead a normal life with his beloved...and eventually die like everyone else. Like an earlier commenter, I'm willing to give it a few episodes to see if they can develop the theme in an interesting way.

sounds to me like a ripoff of the Flying Dutchman and Lulu, both operas with the same premise. Nothing new at all.

sounds to me like a ripoff of the Flying Dutchman and Lulu, both operas with the same premise. Nothing new at all.

How many TV shows or movies can you come up with where very long life or immortality are shown as a blessing? This is not a new thing either. Things like Zardoz come to mind...

Hollywood just likes death.

Dale Amon asked "how many TV shows..."

In the 60s or early 70s, when I was a kid, there was "The Immortal," with Christopher George. The premise was that this guy was a mutant or biovariant who was immortal, and he was running from evil corporate and scientific types who wanted his blood for evil reasons.

Kind of amazing how even then Hollyweird types would bask in a life made comfortable by many corporations and endless armies of scientists and engineers, while depicting business and science types as unfailingly evil. The revenge of the English-major nerds?

After a while, your imagination will falter

Why? I've suffered depression for decades but this has not diminished my imagination. The longer I live, the more my imagination has to work with. Plus it is fed off the imagination of others. I simply don't buy the premise.

It is so common to hear people say that living forever would be boring. All I can think is 'what's wrong with these people?'

If *everyone* had the ability to live forever you'd have to work forever.

Totally illogical. Who said everyone has to make the exact same choices? Economic inequities and the time value of money would play the same roles they've always played. The main change of a longer life is the potential of making wiser choices. Some people would choose to let assets work for them, some would take other paths and even change directions from time to time.

My second thought is, so what if we all had work to do forever. Is work a bad thing? Does working prevent new changes and new choices?

"Note to screenwriters: stop ruining man-shows with sappy bullshit romance. You've lost male viewers time and again with this approach. Not everyone is a gay writer living in NY or LA."

And at least one female viewer. (Me. I admit I may be a weirdo.)

The reason the other shows like Torchwood, Forever Knight, and Highlander that another commenter mentioned work (well, to a degree, none of those shows is/were perfect) is because while love-conflicts aren't entirely ignored they aren't the central premise of the show -- instead, the central conflict is the fight between what may be called good and evil, which most people instinctively recognize as being more important than who we (or a story's characters) end up going to bed with. The idea of finding the ultimate sex partner (which is what the "true love" ideal boils down to) is outmoded, but it overtook Hollywood back sometime around the Seventies, when society was at it's most cynical and the whole idea of "good" and "evil" had supposedly been shown to be a sham.

That being said, I have no idea why romance movies like "Pretty Woman" do so well. Would it do as well if it were made these days? I don't know of any romance movie that has had a hot box office lately, and as for tv everyone seems to be into those "reality" shows, scifi good-&-evil serials like Battlestar Galactica, and the CSI shows; soaps seem to have fallen off the radar. Maybe there's hope for us yet.

Ken wrote: Why? I've suffered depression for decades but this has not diminished my imagination.

Yes, but decades versus centuries? You have no basis for your theory, but then again, neither do we. Do you ever get tired, or fatigued of knowing you're depressed? Imagine that amplified by a few hundred years of living with it.

It is a losing premise. The directing and production was great--Lasse Halstrom of My Life as a Dog--but who wants to watch a nihilist for an entire season walk through a pretty standard police procedural?

Also, the settlers did not purchase the land, according to the leftist Bible Halstrom mines, but the fat bastards came from across the sea and killed women ("did not leave their customs behind") and basically stole it.

"My Life as an Anti-American Vampire."

Feh.

Imagine that amplified

Why is it only the bad that is amplified? Do you see the presumption?

Suppose you and I tire of taking opposite sides of an issue. What prevents either of us from finding new people and new issues. My decades of depression feels like hundreds of years ;-) and being a pessimist has it's advantages, but optimism does too.

Some, even without immortality, find life too much to bear. I just don't see that as the ultimate eventuality of us all.

It would seem that death holds the winning argument simply because there is no turning back once it happens (disregarding various rebirth philosophies.) But I guess at my core I am still an optimist.

I do agree with those above that think the love angle is not well conceived. The writing of most shows these days leaves a lot to be desired.

Mac, the simplest counterargument is that now, most people die in a particularly unpleasant way, by growing older and having their bodies gradually fail in painful and humiliating ways. In comparison, with immortality, you basically live as long as you want. Even if you won't directly kill yourself, you can deliberately engage in high risk activity, like sky diving or firefighting (or both as a smoke jumper). Sure it's not as prompt as jumping out of a ten story window, but your number will come up sooner or later.

As I see it, the "you wouldn't really like it" argument is silly. Even if we did get terminally bored in a few centuries, that's still a lot more living than we currently do and we still have death.

Hey, what's with the teepees in 17th century Manhattan? Teepees? I'm referring to that cool time-lapse sequence that encapsulates the history of the Big Apple. With all the money they threw into special effects and historical research, couldn't they get the dwellings of the Manhattan Indians right?

"My biggest problem with the show is how he kept walking aorund being all 'yeah, i'm 400 years old, Yeah, I was in WWII, Yeah, I don't age, what of it?" he would SO be institutionalized by now"

This reminds me of Poul Anderson's 'The Boat of a Million Years," where one of the main immortal* characters notes that whenever he revealed his true age to someone, and convinces them, there's a great tendency for them to ask if he met Jesus...

But at that time, he was a Roman soldier, stationed far from the Holy Land, and couldn't tell them anything they didn't already know/believe.

* 'Immortal' in the sense of being indefinitely middle-aged and physically rather tougher and faster-healing than normal, but it was entirely possible for them to die by conventional means.

I remember an interview/discussion about George Burns as he was approaching his 100th birthday. He had outlived all his friends. Sure he could meet some new ones but the sense of having been passed by and left alone was palpable. Imagine that happening time after time as a new loved one grows old and dies while your left behind to start all over again.

I agree though that the story so far is not too gripping. I don't believe he is limited to New York since he mentioned losing his hearing at the Battle of the Soame(sp?)

'Running a plate for a date' would be bad enough, but pulling over an ambulance?! Did I somehow misunderstand that (second ep) scene? Did he seriously stop an ambulance that was on an emergency run just so he could question the driver? Could he not have simply followed it to the hospital and had his little chat there?

Ye freakin' gods, who writes this cr*p?

I remember an interview/discussion about George Burns as he was approaching his 100th birthday. He had outlived all his friends. Sure he could meet some new ones but the sense of having been passed by and left alone was palpable. Imagine that happening time after time as a new loved one grows old and dies while your left behind to start all over again.

How much of that was a result of simply being old, and feeling it, and it not being worth the investment, in time and emotion, in new relationships? I suspect that if he still looked and felt twenty, he'd have had a different attitude.

Amsterdam vs Corporal Cuckoo - Yes Hud remembers the same story I though of when I first saw New Amsterdam. The story about Corporal Cuckoo is that he was a soldier wounded in I think 1453 at the battle of Suze Pass(?) He was struck by a halberd. Fist time I heard that word. A halberd is a battle axe with a long handle. Sounds nasty. He was cured by a gypsy(?) who uses a mix of herbs, etc. she called "Digestive". He became immortal.
The narrator of the story meets corporal Cuckoo on a steamer and gets the story, but the corporal disappears by the end of the journey.
It must be 40 years since I read terrific little story, but I immediately remembered it on viewing New Amsterdam, such is quality; it endures.
Can't say the same for New Amsterdam. last night's episode was about "why men are so afraid of women they respond by raping them". Makes me want to barf. New Amsterdam us clearly written by young high school girls, or their faculty advisors in Gender studies.

Too Bad, it could have been a cool show.