Lucan

A big part of my Watch List journey has been learning about obscure and often mediocre shows that no one cares about anymore, tracking them down somehow, and watching them, just to see what they're about. Whether they're beloved hidden gems, cult classics, acquired tastes, or panned bargain bin fodder, I'm always on the hunt for oddities and footnotes to check out. 1977's Lucan is just such a series; a weird little one-off about a boy raised by wolves, captured and rehabilitated into human society, who ends up being in the wrong place at the wrong time to get framed for an accidental murder.

Efficiency be damned, I'd run and hop around on cars too if I was being chased.

The show only runs for a meager 11 episodes, which focus on Lucan's journey on the lam, going from small midwest town to small midwest town, looking for information about his biological parents while avoiding the one singular FBI agent relentlessly chasing him. It's a show with very little contiguous story, so it focuses hard on making each episode stand on its own. And in that regard, it's pretty alright. Really, it's not so much about Lucan himself as it is about the people he crosses paths with in his journey.

I couldn't think of a word to describe this emotion, the best I could come up with was "indignant surrender".

One thing I love about TV shows from the 70s is that they were born in an era of heavy political activism, and many show writers were making an active push to be more inclusive and socially conscious. While Lucan generally takes place in whitey-whiteville Minnesota, that doesn't stop it from having black sherriffs, talking about poverty struggles, asking if straight-edge (anti-hippie) people really care at all, and helping Native Americans fight the system they've been forced to live under. It's refreshingly honest storytelling, and doesn't act like it's "colorblind" (a word they do use in the show, but it's intended meaning was different then than it is today).

Telling stories where the main character isn't really the main character of each episode is becoming a lost art, I feel.

That said, there's nothing particularly grand or profound at work here. After all, there's only so much you can do in a single season with a low budget. And I don't mean that in a negative way. This is one of those "you get what you pay for" shows, and sometimes it's nice to dial it back and watch a non-blockbuster for a change. The show is still plenty serviceable and I quite enjoyed watching Kevin Brophy scare away people and animals with his weird wild-eyed stare and scare chord.

You can just hear the Korg synth playing a warbly minor key chord in the background.

Now looking ahead, I really want to take a step out of time and watch more of these little one-offs, from the 70s specifically. I was born in the late 80s, right on the cusp of computer networking completely rewiring our entire societal structure, but my parents were children of the 70s, so I still grew up in the wake of that. And it's so surreal getting to peer back into that time, a time that I'm *almost* familiar with, like a universe only one layer away from my own memories. A world disconnected from the internet, just before the evils of Reaganomics destroyed the modern economy, a world where it was still possible to simply hop on a bus and disappear for a while to live your own life if you wanted to. There's something very alluring about that kind of world that really fascinates me, and I want to find more shows that immerse me in it.

Why did villains ever stop using dynamite to threaten people?

Anyway, what was I saying? Yeah, Lucan. Enjoyable show. Very laid-back, and worth a watch if you're curious, or an oddities collector like me. It was somewhat recently re-released on DVD, which is how I got my hands on it, so that's probably the best (...only???) way to check it out in 2023 if you're interested.

I'll be looking out for more weird little one-offs like this in the future!