From the Twenty-Five Cent Cable TeeVee Critic’s Corner: .

I missed most of George and Tammy, but the parts I saw were mesmerizing primarily because of Michael Shannon’s performance as George Jones. He was incredible.

Living in Bakersfield for awhile helped. I KNEW people like these.

They, too, drove big Cadillac El Dorados, usually yellow, with a hood long enough to land a Navy F-18 on. You’re tempted to laugh at them—Okies!—until you look at their hands and the damage cotton bolls have done them. Like many of Tammy and George’s generation, they dealt with the hand life dealt them by drinking and smoking, or with painkillers—an addiction that makes heroin look like Ovaltine— and they go out with breathing tubes in their noses and skin like paper, these people who once did the most demanding kind of field work, in cotton or in potatoes.

Their lives were measured then, when they were younger, by how much row was left to harvest in a farm field. When they looked up to see, the heat shimmered at the field’s edge.

Cotton scarred their hands, blister on blister and blood on the white fluff. For potatoes, they wore a spud belt that towed a gunny sack behind them that easily weighed fifty or sixty pounds when it was filled. Work like that would have reduced me to weeping within fifteen minutes. Work like that bent their spines forever.

The oeople who loved George and Tammy were among the people who built America, even as the work they did tore them down.

I watched the final episode last night and it was a tale, as fraught with dysfunction as the relationship was, about two people who never really stopped loving each other. They just couldn’t BE together.

And the music was wonderful: Shannon covered Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and Jessica Chastain did a version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” that would’ve melted anybody’s heart except, of course, for Vladimir Putin’s, who’s missing his.

I wouldn’t even have watched those parts except for my hero, Ken Burns, whose miniseries on country music was, to me, a masterpiece. [So are Baseball, Jazz, and The Civil War.]

We got Netflix primarily because of Babylon Berlin, dropped it, but may have to re-up. I, like 68% of America, am hooked on Wednesday Addams’s high school dance scene.

The actress, Jenna Ortega, is stunning, and, like our niece Emmy, also stunning, a graduate of the Tisch School of Drama at NYU. She choreographed the sequence herself. She also, for reasons I haven’t divined yet, shows off some cool martial arts moves (you GO, Michelle Yeoh!) on three bullies dressed as Pilgrims.

It all looks very cool, and, by the way, I’ve never gotten over my crush on Carolyn Jones, Morticia in the 1960s Addams Family series. Elizabeth hasn’t recovered from the death of Raul Julia, sublimely charming as Gomez Addams in the 1991 film.

Here is Wednesday on the dance floor.