the crossover chicago needs

 Television keeps rebooting things that already ended properly. Meanwhile, one of the most structurally inevitable crossovers in TV history has never happened:

Married... with Children and Shameless.

They share a city. They share a worldview. They share a spiritual allergy to self-improvement.

And here’s the key: Married…with Children never had a real finale. It didn’t conclude. It just stopped in 1997. The Bundys were left wandering Chicago continuity without narrative supervision. Shameless ended — and in doing so, it killed Frank Gallagher.

Chicago now has a vacancy.

And Chicago does not tolerate a vacuum in dysfunction.

What Happened to the Bundys

The Bundy house survived decades. What it could not survive was property tax reassessment and a variable-rate mortgage Bud once described as “strategically aggressive liquidity optimization.”

Al described it differently.

“We didn’t lose the house. The house lost us. It couldn’t handle the pressure.”

Bud Bundy, improbably successful in crypto-security compliance, convinced his parents to extract equity. Then the market shifted. Then taxes rose. Then Al ignored mail.

“I don’t open envelopes,” Al explains. “That’s how they get you.”

Peggy refused to “downsize into moral surrender.” Kelly assumed escrow was a person. Bud called it “temporary dislocation.” Al called it:

“Living proof that America hates a man who once scored four touchdowns in a single game.”

Bud purchased a distressed two-flat on the South Side as a “cash-flow property with urban upside.” Al’s review:

“So we downgraded from a house we couldn’t afford to a neighborhood that can’t afford us.”

Bud also acquires the commercial note on the building housing the Alibi. Al finds this out the hard way.

“So my son doesn’t own the bar,” Al says. “He just owns the panic attached to it.”

The Gallaghers, Post-Frank

Frank Gallagher is gone. The Gallagher house still stands — stubborn, dented, defiant.

Fiona Gallagher returns to stabilize paperwork and destabilize herself. Lip is sober and tense. Ian and Mickey are married and combustible. Debbie is running three side hustles and one emotional deficit. Liam is the only adult within a five-mile radius.

Bud shows up to inspect his investment.

Al comes along. Al surveys the block.

“I like it. It’s like our old neighborhood — but honest about it.”

Inside the Gallagher house, Al studies the chaos.

“This isn’t neglect. This is efficiency. Why clean something you’re just going to disappoint again?”

Within weeks, Al has adopted Frank’s old stool at the Alibi.

“Relax,” Al tells the regulars. “I’m not replacing the guy. I’m just here to lower expectations.”

Fiona and Bud

Fiona meets Bud in his upgraded form: tailored suits, controlled tone, generational resentment. They bond over paternal disappointment. Al finds out.

“You’re dating my son?” Al says to Fiona. “That’s like trading in a broken appliance for a refurbished one.”

Kelly discovers the affair and arrives on the South Side in full influencer mode. She launches a lifestyle stream titled “Suburban Goddess Goes Urban.”

Al watches one episode.

“You know, Peg, if stupidity were electricity, we could power this block.”

Debbie immediately monetizes Kelly’s following. Lip distrusts Bud’s money. Al distrusts Bud’s existence.

“I raised him to be a failure. Now he’s a success. Where did I go wrong?”

Peggy Finds Her Climate

Peggy Bundy thrives. The Gallagher block runs on entropy, unpaid utilities, and creative denial. Peggy calls it “community.” She and Mickey bond instantly.

Peggy to Al:

“I finally found people who understand that housework is a social construct.”

Al replies:

“So is marriage. And yet here we are.”

Marcy and Carl: The Cougar Doctrine

Marcy D'Arcy meets Carl Gallagher. Carl is younger. Uniformed. Confident in the vague way authority sometimes is. Marcy frames it as mentorship. It escalates.

Jefferson objects. Marcy informs him she is “evolving.”

Al weighs in:

“Marcy trading in Jefferson for Carl? I guess she finally decided to date someone with arrest authority instead of just arrest potential.”

Carl, navigating midlife suburban ambition, asks Al for advice. Al considers this.

“Son, if a woman tells you she sees potential in you, run. Potential is what women see when they don’t like the current model.”

Liam writes a school essay titled Late Capitalism and the Migration of Sitcom Predators.

The Central Conflict

Bud restructures the Alibi’s lease. Al explodes.

“I don’t need a landlord. I need a liver.”

Bud pitches a neighborhood redevelopment scheme involving digital escrow and tax incentives. Al’s summary:

“So the plan is we fix everything by charging ourselves more?”

The deal unravels. Fiona nearly leaves again. Marcy files paperwork. Carl investigates a complaint that circles back to Bud. Kelly livestreams the collapse. Peggy orders takeout.

The Gallagher house remains theirs. The Alibi survives. The Bundys remain displaced. Al returns to his stool.

“You know what the difference is between me and Frank Gallagher?”
He takes a sip.
“Timing.”

Why This Isn’t Nostalgia

In the 1990s, the Bundys were exaggerated stagnation.

In the 2010s, the Gallaghers were exposed precarity.

In the 2020s, those aren’t different genres.

They’re neighbors.

Married…with Children never got a finale. Shameless lost its patriarch.

Chicago still has room for one more man sitting where responsibility should be.

Al Bundy walked so Frank Gallagher could fall down the stairs.

Now somebody has to keep the stool warm.

you always remember your first subway map

Last year the subway system introduced a new map — or perhaps it had already begun phasing it in before 2025 and I only noticed when the old one had mostly disappeared.

That old one — the map that replaced the 1972 Vignelli diagram — had been with us since 1979. Designed by Michael Hertz Associates, it became simply the subway map. It lasted more than forty-five years.

And yet, to me, the definitive New York subway map is still the Vignelli map.

Which is odd.

Because it was only in use for seven years.

Abstraction

The Vignelli map was beautiful — provided you already knew where you were going.

If you knew you needed the F to West 4th Street, it was perfect. The design was schematic, rational, almost electrical. Lines ran at 45- or 90-degree angles. The subway looked like a circuit board. It felt solvable.

It treated the subway as a system.

It did not treat New York as a city.

Distances were abstract. Central Park was a tidy shape. Boroughs were compressed or widened. Landmarks were mostly absent. If you were trying to understand where things actually were in relation to each other above ground, the map could mislead you.

I learned that the hard way.

Woodside and the Popsicle Sticks

Still during the Vignelli era, I decided I needed to go to an art supply store in Woodside to buy popsicle sticks for some craft project. I don’t remember how I figured it out, but I determined which stop on the 7 train was closest and concluded that it would be a short walk.

The map seemed to confirm this.

I got off the train and started walking.

And walking.

And walking.

Eventually I reached the store and bought my popsicle sticks, but the walk was much longer than I had anticipated. The map had flattened distance. Stations that appeared neatly spaced were not, in fact, equidistant in real life. And Queens, with its relatively sparse subway coverage compared to Manhattan, has a way of stretching space between stops.

The Vignelli map had made the trip look like a hop.

Reality was a hike.

It was a beautiful system diagram. It was not a pedestrian guide.

The Hertz Correction

The 1979 redesign tried to fix that. The Hertz map overlaid the subway lines onto something resembling actual geography. Shorelines curved. Subway lines curved. Parks looked like parks. You could approximate direction and distance.

It also introduced one of the system’s smartest ideas: trunk-line color coding through Midtown Manhattan.

The B, D and F were orange because they ran on the Sixth Avenue trunk.
The N, Q and R were yellow because they ran on Broadway.
The 1, 2 and 3 were red; the 4, 5, 6 green; the A, C, E blue.

The color didn’t belong to the letter. It belonged to the trunk.

Which meant the letters could change color.

The Q has not always been yellow. From 1988 to 2001, when it ran via Sixth Avenue, it was orange. The V —  which existed for just under a decade, from 2001 to 2010 — was orange for the same reason. The M used to be brown, part of the old Nassau Street trunk, before rerouting through Sixth Avenue turned it orange.

Even the Q’s name is historical shorthand. It descends from “QB” (“Brighton via Bridge”), alongside QT (“Brighton via Tunnel”) and QJ (“Brighton to Jamaica”). Historically, the Brighton Line in Brooklyn was the Q. I wish I could end this paragraph with the snarky observation that today’s Q doesn't go to Brighton anymore. But it does.

The W, despite what my memory occasionally insists, has always been yellow. Broadway. My recollections are not immune to rerouting.

The Loss of Purple

As a kid, I did not think in terms of trunk-line logic.

I thought in terms of identity. I thought of the F as my train.

The F used to be purple.

It was a beautiful purple. Distinct. Singular. Royal.

Then trunk-line standardization arrived and the F turned orange, joining the B and D. Meanwhile the E — which I irrationally regarded as a rival — remained blue (though a darker shade).

This felt like betrayal.

I understood that color now signified shared Manhattan infrastructure. But I also knew was that the F had lost something beautiful. The 7 train became purple, and it has remained so ever since.

Clutter and Compromise

The Hertz map’s weakness was the inverse of Vignelli’s. It tried to show everything. Geography. Water. Parks. Bus connections. Street grids. Transfers. It was useful — and sometimes cluttered.

The new map introduced in 2025 appears to be an attempt at compromise. It returns to schematic clarity — strong geometry, simplified layout — while preserving trunk-line color coding. Instead of a single thick orange band in Midtown, multiple orange services run in parallel. It is less geographic than Hertz, more geographic than Vignelli.

It tries to split the difference.

The First Map Is the Real Map

The Vignelli map lasted seven years. The Hertz map lasted more than forty-five.

And yet the Vignelli map is the one in my head.

It was the map in use when I first became fascinated with the subway — when tracing colored lines across boroughs and memorizing station names felt like decoding a secret system. It made the city look legible.

When I was young, I found it odd that the map wasn’t redesigned every few years. Why not refresh it like baseball cards? Why not issue new editions, with completely new designs?

It took adulthood to realize that redesigning infrastructure costs money. Stability matters. A transit map is not a collectible.

It is a working tool.

I’m not entirely convinced the system needed this latest redesign. But maps are arguments about what matters — clarity or fidelity, abstraction or realism, system or city.

In the end, the definitive subway map is the one you first learned to read — the one that made you believe the city could be understood.

Even if it occasionally left you walking much farther than expected for popsicle sticks in Woodside.

cinema history class: the thing from another world (1951)

The session: The Cold Can Kill Ya!
With plummeting temperatures, Keith shows us four movies with achingly cold settings

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: The Thing from Another World (1951)
Directed by Christian Nyby

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I knew of this movies existence, since Keith showed us the remake a year ago.

Plot:
A group of Air Force personnel and scientists at an Arctic base uncover a crashed spacecraft frozen in the ice. They soon realize the wreck carried a hostile alien life-form that feeds on blood and begins stalking the isolated outpost. As tensions rise between scientific curiosity and military caution, the group bands together to stop the creature before it can escape into the world.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
My watching The Thing from Another World and grading it was unfair to it, and I’ll own that up front. I had seen the remake (titled simply The Thing) at Keith’s about a year ago, and that made it hard not to spend this entire screening waiting for things that simply weren’t going to happen. The two films tell very different stories: the 1951 version is essentially “there is a big, scary alien loose, stalking the base and we need to stop it,” while the remake leans into a far more paranoid idea—an alien that imitates whatever it comes into contact with. As I watched, I kept expecting shape-shifting paranoia and molecular body horror, even finding myself wondering if the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "Aquiel," was inspired by the later film. Ironically, my understanding is that the remake is actually closer to the original short story than this movie is.

That mismatch probably cost the film a few points in my mental scorecard, because I did like it—just not as much as the remake. I want to believe that’s mostly about plot: the later version simply gives me more to chew on. But I also have to admit that I’m a product of my time, and early-1980s movie sensibilities feel more natural to me than early-1950s ones. Bobbo, being older and much more steeped in ’50s sci-fi, was clearly more in the movie’s wavelength than I was, which is exactly how these things tend to shake out.

A lot of the movie really works. The pacing is solid, the atmosphere is tense, and the setting does a lot of heavy lifting. That said, the human-looking vegetable alien—kept mostly in shadow for understandable reasons—was, at moments, a little hard not to chuckle at. There’s also a scene where the alien runs out of the base while on fire, and I genuinely found myself wondering whether this image somehow planted a seed that later bloomed into Flaming Carrot. I’m not saying it did. I’m just saying my brain went there.

One area where the movie really impressed me was in a couple of its quieter science-fiction ideas. The fact that shooting the vegetable creature doesn’t immediately kill it actually makes perfect sense: plants don’t have vital organs the way humans do, so bullets aren’t automatically fatal. If I went out to my front yard and fired a cannon at my oak tree, it would be damaged, sure, but not “dead” in any meaningful sense — whereas if the oak tree somehow returned fire, I would be extremely dead. Even creepier (and wonderfully so) is the scene where the scientist calmly shows off the tray of plants he's been growing. He explains that he started with little bits of the alien that fell off in one of the scuffles, and he’s feeding them human blood. That moment lands like proper science fiction: unsettling, logical in its own warped way, and far more disturbing than anything that jumps out from the shadows.

One thing that deserves real credit is how believable the human characters are. People argue, make bad decisions, push their own agendas, and react in ways that feel recognizably human rather than purely “movie logic.” That grounded behavior goes a long way toward selling the danger and gives the film a seriousness that still holds up.

And Joe wasn’t there. Had he been, he would have confidently declared this a ten, immediately, without hesitation, and then spent the next five minutes explaining why any objections were missing the point entirely. Because some tens are tennier than others. Or maybe not, since Bobbo gave it a ten, it would be hard to argue that Joe shouldn't.

cinema history class: dig your grave friend... sabata's coming

The session: Viva Sabata!
Four Movies featuring Sabata, a James Bond of the wild west

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4: Dig Your Grave Friend... Sabata is Coming (1971)
Directed by Gianfranco Parolini

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I know I've seen this before -- there were a couple scenes that I recognized. But I have no idea when or under what circumstances.

Plot:
A civil war soldier returns to his father's home, only to find the old man dead. Seeking revenge, he finds himself partnered with an unlikely ally and at odds with a beautiful and brilliant woman who doesn't quite know whom to trust. Together they navigate corrupt officials, hired guns, and shifting loyalties as old scores are settled and new ones are created.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

Let’s get this out of the way first: Dig Your Grave Friend… Sabata’s Coming is a Sabata film in name only.

There is a character named Sabata in the movie, but he’s a tertiary figure and about as far from the iconic Lee Van Cleef version as you can get. This Sabata is just a run-of-the-mill hired gun. Unlike Sabata, he’s a bad guy. Unlike Sabata, he has no clever gadgets or gimmicks. And unlike Sabata, he dies.

Joe said what we were all thinking: it’s obvious this movie was not developed as a Sabata film at all. The name was slapped onto it later to capitalize on the popularity of the character. Maybe they could have given Richard Harrison’s character, Steve, the Sabata name instead—that might have made it fit a little better structurally. But even then, it still wouldn’t really feel like a Sabata movie.

So rather than judge this as a failed or bogus entry in the Sabata saga, it makes more sense to look at it simply as a spaghetti western on its own terms.

And on those terms, it’s entertaining. Good in some ways. But not great by any means.

One thing the movie does surprisingly well is function as a kind of buddy film. Steve ends up paired with Leon, an unintended sidekick who helps him navigate an increasingly complicated situation. (It’s hard not to notice that Leon looks a lot like Ron Jeremy, once that thought enters your head.) The buddy dynamic works better than expected—Steve and Leon play off each other nicely, and their interactions give the movie a bit of momentum it might otherwise lack.

In fact, that relationship is probably the main reason the film works as well as it does. When it’s leaning on the interplay between those two characters, the movie feels lighter on its feet and more engaging.

Where it starts to falter is in its reliance on humor. Several of the barroom fight scenes tip over into outright slapstick, drifting into Three Stooges territory. It’s not that humor has no place in a spaghetti western—but here it’s sometimes pushed too far, undercutting any tension the scene might otherwise have had.

On the other hand, the film does occasionally tap into the kind of nastiness that spaghetti westerns are known for. There are moments of cruelty and grit that remind you this genre can still bite when it wants to. Those moments help keep the movie from becoming entirely frivolous.

This isn’t a deep film, and it doesn’t really offer anything new. But it is fun. As long as you’re not expecting Sabata—despite what the title insists—you can get some enjoyment out of it.

After thoroughly discussing what was wrong with the movie, Joe gave it a ten. But he acknowledged that, within the realm of tens, it’s an eight. Because some tens aren’t as tenny as others.

struggle was always the default

I’ve seen a lot of social media posts lately lamenting what’s presented as one of life’s great injustices: most people work for decades, often until around age 65, and only then—if they’re lucky—get to stop working and “enjoy life.” Some retire earlier, some later. Some never really retire at all, continuing to work well past traditional retirement age because they have no choice. This reality is often described not just as unfortunate, but as fundamentally wrong.

And increasingly, the blame is laid at the feet of “civilization.”

The argument seems to go something like this: modern society has imposed an unnatural burden on people, forcing them into decades of toil that humans were never meant to endure. I’ve even seen claims that humans are the only animals saddled with this bizarre notion of “work,” as if the very concept is an invention of spreadsheets, office parks, and capitalism.

But this strikes me as getting things almost exactly backwards.

Modern civilization—especially the specialization of labor that comes with it—has been one of the greatest improvements in human quality of life. Other animals don’t go to jobs in the way we do, but they absolutely still work. For animals in the wild, life is a constant, unrelenting struggle for survival. Food must be hunted or foraged. Shelter must be found or built. Predators must be avoided. Injuries can be fatal. Aging doesn’t come with a gold watch and a pension plan. There is no retirement in the wild.

The same was true for humans before civilization, and for much of early civilization as well. People gathered food. They hunted. They planted. They defended themselves. They worked simply to stay alive. Civilization didn’t invent work; it gradually made survival less brutal. The progress hasn’t been perfectly smooth or monotonic, but the long-term trend is unmistakable. Life today—certainly in America, and broadly across the developed world—is vastly better than life anywhere a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand or ten thousand years ago. We enjoy comforts our ancestors couldn’t have imagined.

The uncomfortable truth is that humans are animals, and our natural condition involves effort. Food does not arrive at the table without work. Shelter does not magically appear. Clothing, transportation, medicine, and infrastructure all require human labor somewhere along the chain. One of the great achievements of advanced civilization is that we now get more of these things with less total human effort than ever before—not that effort has disappeared entirely.

Some of the confusion may be fueled by science fiction. Franchises often portray futures in which humans have transcended mundane labor, freed at last to pursue self-actualization without economic necessity. It’s an appealing vision. But it’s also a fantasy—at least for now.

There are people who believe that artificial intelligence, advancing exponentially and perhaps even designing future versions of itself, will finally deliver that utopia. A world where all material needs are met and no one has to do work they don’t enjoy. I’m skeptical. Human nature hasn’t been repealed, and neither have scarcity, incentives, or power. But it’s an open question. We’ll see.