'Ordinary Joe' and the Paradox of Variation
The moral case for recognizing the possibilities in your life
Hello, dear readers! This is the beginning of a new feature here at T.V. - Guest Posts! The inaugural entry comes courtesy of , who has been writing for almost 20 years in various forms from blogging to novels and screenwriting. He is the author of the Substack publication, which focuses on exploring the moral and ethical concepts involved in bringing TV and other mediums to life. His post is about the television series Ordinary Joe, which ran on NBC from September 2021 until January before getting canceled after 13 episodes.
I had not heard of this Sliding Doors-esque series until I read Andrew’s article but am now interested in checking it out, especially as I regularly wonder about what my life is like in parallel timelines.
The series, sadly, does not appear to be available on streaming at the moment, but can be purchased via digital retailers such as Amazon and Itunes.
At what point did your life change forever?
That moment when you could've had so many different things happen, but it didn't. Instead you made a choice and your life went from there. Maybe you had plans for your future but someone came along and told you something you weren't expecting. It could've been your best friend or your girlfriend or boyfriend at the time. It could've been your father or your mother. Maybe each of them had something to say to you but only one of them managed it for whatever reason. This moment could've stopped your best friend or girlfriend from telling you something you really should've known. As a result, you'll never know the truth or maybe you will learn it many years later instead.
When this happens, you start to wonder about the other possibilities. If your girlfriend had to tell you that she was pregnant but instead she saw you with someone else and chose not to say anything. Could you have chosen to be a father and been happy with a family? You might not ever know. Because she didn't, she may have made different choices about whether to keep the baby or not. Or maybe that person she saw you with gave you the confidence to pursue your dreams of becoming a musician and you became rich and famous. Would you have preferred that life instead? There's no way for you to know. Or maybe neither of those two situations happened. Instead your mother talked to you and you chose to follow in your father's footsteps of becoming a cop. Could you have been happy living that kind of life?
Each is at least possible, but you will never know about the choices you didn't make. The lives you could've lead if only you'd known the other possibilities in your life. All of which were there in that very important moment in your life. You just didn't know about them and so your life went the way you did. But those choices were still there. In fact, they might end up becoming clear later on through some kind of chance meeting between you and your old girlfriend who didn't tell you about her pregnancy at the time.
Ordinary Joe is fundamentally about the other possibilities you could be living. For Joe Kimbreau, as played by James Wolk, that important moment his life changed was his college graduation. At that moment, his life could've gone is so many different directions. Largely thanks to the choices he made and the choices of others, his life went certain ways. He has no idea how it would've gone. Yet we do because we see who he could've been. The moment where his girlfriend told him she was pregnant and how he chose to become a father and husband. Or the moment another woman approached him and because of that his girlfriend didn't say anything, but as a result he became a famous rockstar. And the moment he chose instead to become a cop.
More than that, we see how his life played out as a result. The way in which his choices made his life different. But also the way in which he learns about what could've been.
It's a fascinating process and you should do yourself a favour and explore the possibilities by checking out Ordinary Joe as soon as you can.
But what do you think?
Have you seen or heard of Ordinary Joe? Do you ever wonder about moments in your life that could’ve gone differently? How would it have changed things? Please,
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