An Ode to Landlines, and Possibly a Farewell to Gabriel?!?

Also: Cruel Intentions is back, again.

Last week I wrote about Rivals, a banger — pun intended — of an ‘80s corporate/revenge soap on Hulu. But, and this is not a plot spoiler, I didn’t talk about the moment in the season finale where I actively let out a shout, aloud, alone. It was this:

“THAT’S OUR PHONE!” I shrieked. When my family moved into our house in 1983, if I remember correctly, it had all old beige rotary phones — one of which we kept because it was separately wired to the alarm — but we eventually replaced them all and I vividly remember us picking out this British Telecom Viscount, which we had in grey and bright green. Not only was this a delicious piece of work from those in charge of keeping the sets authentic, but it, was a huge nostalgia moment for me; in combination with the comments of this post, in which it came up that Kids Today are fascinated by cassettes, it cemented for me that corded landline phones are the technology of the past I wish we could bring back in full force.

I have always been very tac…