Hello there. Hi!

Today’s post combines two of my favorite things: television and pneumatic tubes. If you’ve seen Futurama, been a long-time Tube Talk subscriber, or driven through a bank drive-thru in the 1980s, you know what pneumatic tubes are: pipes that push things — money, people, cryptic messages — via compressed air.

TV shows often like to throw in pneumatic tubes to signal that the place we see on screen is a little off, a warped version of our own reality. Sometimes they’re used to signal a kooky future, like in The Jetsons and the aforementioned Futurama. Other times they’re used to bolster a retro-science vibe. And still other times they’re there for pure comedic effect.

No matter what they’re used for, one thing is clear: Television loves the tubes. Here are my five favorite uses of this pneumatic technology on television (excluding Futurama, because of course that show is on the list).

In addition to having a pneumatic tube cameo, HBO Max’s Doom Patrol includes killer creatures that look like butts, Brendan Fraser as a brain in a bumbling robot body that drops F-bombs with every breath, and Matt Bomer vomiting up a grub the size of a small cat that he then treats as his child.

The show, which is based on the comics of the same name, also includes time travel shenanigans — a trend that seems to go hand-in-hand with pneumatic tube references. The tubes show up in the third season’s sixth episode, where Rita Farr (April Bowlby) time travels to 1914, loses her memory, and ends up working in the mailroom at the Bureau of Normalcy (which is, of course, utterly and totally normal).

I don’t want to share more about Rita’s circumstances here, because spoilers! But I will say that the series, which ran for four seasons from 2019 to 2023, is a weird and under-watched show. I recommend trying it out if you’re looking for something odd, funny, and endearing.

A lot has been said about ABC’s Lost. But not enough, in my opinion, about the Dharma Initiative’s embrace of pneumatic tube technology.

We first see it when Locke (Terry O’Quinn) and Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) break into the Pearl and watch an orientation video featuring the impeccable actor François Chau. In it, we find out that people in Pearl Station had to write detailed notes and, when their notebook was full, have the pneumatic tube in their lab siphon them off to some unknown location. That location becomes known later on in the series, when Jack (Matthew Fox) comes across a pile of unopened canisters on the island. All that work for the boss, for nothing! Are the tubes and their unopened canisters a parable for late-stage capitalism, or a way for the writers to messily tie up a plot point? You decide.

The 1990s sitcom Just Shoot Me! is the odd duck on this list. It doesn’t involve time travel, for one, though it does take place in the office of a prosperous print magazine, which feels equally impossible these days. In the episode “Slow Donnie”, however, pneumatic tubes play a key role. The show sees David Cross guest star as Donnie, the younger brother of Elliot (Enrico Colantoni). Donnie, it turns out, has been pretending for years that he is “slow minded” so he doesn’t have to work. Maya (Laura San Giacomo) finds out it’s all an act and tries to clue in Elliot. Her efforts fail, but then Donnie gets so frustrated about Jack (George Segal) trying to figure out how the newly discovered pneumatic tube system in the office walls work.

“Donnie says vacuum,” Cross says repeatedly and with growing annoyance as Jack thinks it works because of magnets or hot air rising. Donne gets so frustrated, in fact, that he breaks and yells at Jack, “air withdrawn from one side is replaced on the other side, and the airstream creates pressure, which allows the objects to propel through the freaking tubes!” He then adds halfheartedly, “I… love you tubes,” since he knows he’s caught.

Loki is a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) show that fiddles with time travel, specifically through the retrofuturistic Time Variance Authority. The TVA manages the various multiverses out there, and the first season saw a version of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) become entangled with the agency. In the second season, the god is glitching through time and space and he seeks out help from Ouroboros (Key Huy Quan), a TVA employee who works in a room… wait for it… full of tubes! Where do those tubes go? Who knows. What they send Ouroboros, however, are broken things that he then fixes. The two-season series is on the weird side of MCU fare, which I appreciate, though the storyline might be too confusing for its own good, and it also includes what are now the vestiges of the meta-narrative featuring the now-fired Jonathan Meyers.  

Like Doom Patrol, Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy is a comic book adaptation involving time travel and other weird things happening. The premise involves seven children with supernatural abilities being adopted by an oddball billionaire. Their upbringing wasn’t great, and without getting into it all, one of the children, Number Five (the billionaire gives them numbers not names), gets lost in the future and makes his way back after decades… still trapped in a child’s body.

Five is ruthless, grumpy, and in the first season comes head to head with The Handler, who runs the Temps Commission, the organization that manages the timeline. Here’s where the tubes come in: The Commission sends missives to its agents (aka assassins) through a pneumatic system that crosses time and space. We see the main system at the Commission, and also one of the endpoints when the assassins Hazel and Cha Cha get memos via a canister station in a motel minifridge. Pneumatic tubes, it seems, are the communication method of choice for organizations involved in time travel and/or nefarious deeds.