* * *

At some point, I understood every joke in every episode. Just Shoot Me! no longer held that aspirational lure, that slight, great scent of the inappropriate. (“We really shouldn’t be letting you watch this,” my mom would sometimes say to a younger me after a particularly risqué episode, a comment that only enhanced the show’s effects.) But I watched it and loved it anyway all through middle school and high school, and then packed the DVDs in the college boxes whose contents would, I imagined, communicate to anyone who entered my set-up dorm room my exact and extensive cultural knowledge.

I like Just Shoot Me!, now, in a different way than I like anything else. Maybe everyone gets to like one thing this way, one piece of the world that collided with him or her at the precise right time and formed an uncomplicated connection. This like is liking distilled to its essence. I don’t like the show for its importance or cultural relevance, its ability to carry me through conversations. I don’t like it as a continuous presence; it has been a long time since I’ve seen an episode. I don’t even like it as an under-recognized classic. In high school, at the lunch table, I argued on occasion for its superiority to Seinfeld but was never serious; it has probably slipped into the mass-memory slot it deserves, where even in an era of heavy pop-culture nostalgia it doesn’t receive any Internet slide shows or 12 Things You Didn’t Know…

No, the liking comes from this: I know that, if I were to happen upon an old episode right now, away from Kansas City and my family and the bulbous white kitchen TV, it would make me laugh and feel good. It is as simple, and as rare, as that. Just Shoot Me! got to me before I understood it, a mess of allusion and innuendo just beyond my reach, and stayed around—in my living room and kitchen, in the half-hour between when I came home and split again to join friends in pursuit of illicit beer—until I understood it entirely. It is the one cultural product at which I will not and cannot direct criticism. It encoded itself on me, and an episode now leads to a laugh as plainly as a gulp of water produces an ahh.

* * *

For the rest of the summer and into the fall following my mom’s shoulder surgeries, we watched more religiously than we ever had before. We watched five nights a week, after eating the takeout my dad had picked up on his way home or some of the friend-gifted lasagna that stuffed our freezer. When we couldn’t find a rerun, we popped in a DVD—the set had been a Christmas present, purportedly from and to someone, but immediately became communal property—and watched three or four episodes in a row.

On its surface, this was an act of familial kindness and generosity, a laughter is the best medicine support group. We wanted to get her mind off things, and Just Shoot Me!, judging by the soft snores we’d detect at the first Tide or Chevy pitch, did the trick. Really, though, our aim was no different than that of any other family getting together to stare at a screen. We wanted, for a half-hour or a string of them, to get familiarity and surprise in the right proportions, to watch these miraculous people who fit perfectly into their faces, their clothes, their jobs, and themselves, who rubbed each other the wrong way, wonderfully, until they didn’t anymore, until the closing credits signaled the magical sitcom reset that would let things start over the next time. We were not as tired as my mom, but we were tired enough, and it was warm, and we wanted to spend more time with something we’d already spent too much time with, something that we already knew too well.

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