Tales of the Loop and Los Alamos
The Amazon series Tales of the Loop calls out as a quiet and offbeat TV series. A short one at that, with only 8 episodes. It reminded me of Los Alamos. The town where the atomic bomb was built in World War 2. I worked there in 1988 and thought it was such a strange place. A small town had grown up around the National Lab. There was a high school and shops. A park. Boasting a pond called by some Ashley Pond Pond. It was named after a person called Ashley Pond. No bull.
The TV series was set in the 1980s. You can tell from the cars and the clothes. And from clues like the town’s theatre showing Missing, a movie made in 1982. And also from the inside shows of people’s houses. One such house had a Brady Bunch style staircase to the upper level. Several characters use personal computers. Clunky Microsoft DOS machines. And of course the fat TVs made of vacuum tubes. I visited a few such houses in Los Alamos. The scenes in the series so reminded me of what is now 32 years ago (!!!).
The series put a government lab in the town. It was the biggest enterprise around. Just like Los Alamos. Serious scientific and engineering types went to work at the Loop every day. When I was at Los Alamos, I heard snide comparisons of it to the Stepford Wives. The Loop did various fantastical things under a veneer of science. Not unlike Los Alamos. In both towns, a strict edict of secrecy meant that outside the labs, only whispers circulated of what actually the government did.
All the weird events of the series hark back to it being a doppelganger of another real town of terrible secrets and world changing events. Several episodes are about identity and change or not changing. Of people. But also of the passage of time and generational shifts. “Blink of an eye” was said a few times by characters to refer to decades passing. I found it piognant because it caused me to look back over 30 years to the last time I knew Los Alamos.
I do not know if the writers of the series based it on Los Alamos. Probably not. But I would like to think so.
May we get another season!
