Punch List

What Punch List is about

A note, written in pencil, twelve lines long. The second step of the porch. The screen door. The dripping tap in the bathroom. Anyone who writes a list like that has been looking away for a long time. The woman writing it is a widow, lives in a small town in Georgia, and her house looks the way she feels: paint peeling, windows sticking, the garden growing whatever it likes. In spring a handyman moves in next door, renting, on his own. She walks over, presses the note into his hand and says he can start whenever he likes. He starts the next morning.

Item by item he works through the list, and with every job ticked off something changes in the house and in her. She gets up earlier in the mornings. She finds the green dress again, the one that has hung at the back of the wardrobe for years. At Job Six she brings him lemonade, at job seven she stays until he is done. The sister-in-law comes to visit, sees the dress, sees the man on the ladder and puts two and two together. From then on it is not just the house up for debate, but what the neighbours are saying and what she herself wants.

Episode 1 is called The Second Step and shows you the list, the porch and the first handshake, which both of them hold a moment too long. Nothing happens. Not yet. The series simmers slowly, as the Romance category promises, and sits under Hired Help at the same time, because he works for her and she pays him. What happens at Job Twelve, whether the list is enough or she writes a new one, we are not telling. Spring in Georgia lasts long enough.