YMMV / Connections

• Moment of Awesome: Burke pulls off an astonishing feat of timing a monologue on a rocket launch to coincide with an actual rocket launch in 1978. And it wasn’t just any launch. It was the launch of Voyager 2, which would visit all the planets of the Outer Solar System. Burke had only one chance to time this shot, as it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness the rocket's launch; if he messed up the timing even slightly, the shot would have been ruined, with no way to fix it (since such techniques didn't exist at the time). Instead, Burke timed it perfectly, resulting in one of the most amazing shots in TV history.
• Older Than They Think : Connections used the Hoe-Down suite from Aaron Copland's Rodeo as the background music in episode 8 when Burke was discussing the "great beef race" to deliver refrigerated beef to New Orleans. Most American viewers will recognize the music as the score to the extremely well-known "Beef: It's What's For Dinner" advertising campaign, but Connections tied the music to beef nearly 15 years before the ads appeared.
• Vindicated by History : Too many to name.
  • Probably the biggest was at the end of The Day the Universe Changed when he shows a microchip and discussed how advances in computers and telecommunications could link the world together, something that you are using right this second.
  • Alternately, his repeated statements in the original Connections about how with a sufficiently powerful computer, a company, government, or other organisation could analyse arbitrary amounts of data about an arbitrary number of people and figure out the one thing that was most likely to affect their decision about something or other, and act on that knowledge. That's right, James Burke predicted Big Data. In 1978.
  • In the very first episode of The Day the Universe Changed, he makes an almost offhand comment about how the advent of the microchip could allow the advent of full telecommuting, and then asks questions about the impact that would have on the city, public transportation, property values, support workers, and auto workers, and whether people would go stir-crazy working alone (or, perhaps worse, with their spouse in the next room). Come the COVID-19 Pandemic, which forced mass telecommuting on the whole white-collar workforce, we found out. (Some things fared better than others; some questions remain very much open.)