Competency confession

Most companies when they advertise try to cover up their incompetencies. This is seemingly not true for CVS Pharmacy – or perhaps they are trying, but they are merely monstrously incompetent at doing so.

They have an ad running (it ran on last night’s Saved; no, I don’t know why I’m still watching it) in which a pharmacist talks about someone who had picked up their prescription at the pharmacy, then called and said that the bottle said to take half a pill a day, and with his Parkinson’s, he couldn’t cut the pills. So the kindly pharmacist visited the man in his home to cut his pills for him. Nice, right?

Except which piece of information didn’t they have when they gave him the prescription? They should be reviewing his other prescriptions for potentially harmful interactions… which means that they should know he’s taking Parkinson’s drugs. They should have reviewed his dosage with him… which means they should have seen that there was pill cutting required. If there was going to be this sort of problem, it should have been detected before the patient left the counter, rather than counting on him going home and not deciding to take one pill every other day instead (to mention one possible reaction when someone finds they can’t take the medicine as prescribed.)

You know, it’s possible that I’m wrong about what should be expected in this situation. Doesn’t matter. The ad still leaves the impression of incompetence, which someone should have picked up on before it saw air.

Supreme Court Dwarves

Reuters is making a deal of the fact that more Americans were able to name two of Snow White’s Dwarves than two Supreme Court Justices. Now, part of that is likely that the dwarves haven’t changed every decade, allowing us to go off of early memories. But the real problem? The dwarves’ names are more memorable. I mean, “Breyer”? “Bader-Ginsburg”?
Time to rename them! Goodbye to all those stodgy names. Hello to Grouchy, Robey, Winky, Twisty, Twisty-Wannabe, Baldy, Scratchy, Chicky, and Your Honor.

(And for an article titled “Current events dwarfed by pop culture”, what’s the point of noting that more people know Homer Simpson’s son than the ancient Homer’s epic poems? “Oh no! Americans are better versed in their own culture than in that of the ancient Greeks!”)

Review: Kidnapped

Sometimes, a piece of fiction echoes something in another piece of fiction in certain unimportant surface ways that you cannot tell if it’s a tribute to the original, if the creator of the similar work has problems being creative and isn’t smart enough to realize that the echo will be noticed, or if they simply hadn’t been exposed to the original and coincidentally echoed it uncomfortably.

The creators of Kidnapped, an NBC Wednesday night drama slated for fall, are either big Veronica Mars fans or they haven’t seen the show. Y’see, the first season of Veronica Mars was about this very rich family, the Kanes, with two school-aged kids, a boy and a girl, one of whom is first seen floating in the pool and turns out to be a crime victim. Kidnapped is about this very rich family, the Kanes, with two school-aged kids, a boy and a girl, one of whom is first seen floating in the pool and turns out to be a crime victim.

Not that Kidnapped will be mistaken for Veronica Mars. VM is, at its core, about its wit.
The new series is about being intense. Every moment, every feeling, intense. For example, there’s the explanation of the Kanes have a bodyguard for their kids: “A couple years ago there was a hostile takeover. We had death threats.” Wow, that’s one hostile takeover!

There are some good performers involved here. Timothy Hutton isn’t given that much to do, but Dana Delaney looks concerned, Mikelti Williamson (of Boomtown) looks focused, and Delroy Lindo looks smart and attentive… all are playing to their strengths. There are things going on here, and there will be plot complexities as we get to understand who is behind the kidnapping, why, and what must be done to catch them and get the kid back. This is one of those big long storyline shows, and it’s not clear to me whether the entire series is this kidnapping, or just this season (I actually suspect the latter, seeing how the ad images put the kidnapper-hunter folks in the foreground and the parents in the background, suggesting who the real continuing stars are.)

It is made clear early on that the kidnap plot will be done in an over-the-top style, but within that context it seems smoothly made. If it lacks anything to appeal to the 24 fans (who I think ought to check this out; me, I dropped 24 afer the first episode of season 2) it’s the central character to empathize with; you might understand and appreciate the kidnapping specialist and Delroy Lindo’s about-to-retire FBI officer, but you don’t feel like you’re in their shoes.

And of course there’s the other concern – even if it is a one-season-per-crime show, there’s no guarantee that we’ll see the end of the season. Most shows don’t make it that long. But if we avoid all such shows because of that, then there’s no chance that any of them will make it through, and we’ll never get the DVD sets that can be safely enjoyed.

There are a number of such shows coming this season. They can’t all succeed. They could all be failures. But this one, I reckon it at least has a chance.

An ad to reconsider

Just saw the Sierra Mist ad they’ve been running for months now, in which Kathy Griffin working as airport security tries to confiscate some other sitcom leftover actor’s Sierra Mist. I wonder if its hit them yet that this ad has been rendered meaningless (or at least requiring a very different interpretation.)

Was there no sex before music?

One of the advantages of being lazy is that sometimes, before you get around to doing something you meant to do, someone else ahs done it for you. Such is the case with this post trashing the recent coverage of the “listening to sexy music leads teen to having sex” report. What the study found was that teens who listened to sex-themed music as younger teens were more likely to be having sex in their teens. What the study claimed and the media were eager to report was that listening to sexy music caused the teens to have sex.
But stop a moment and think: what if there were no causation? What would we expect then? Are some folks apt to be more interested in sex than others? Yup. Are those folks both likely to be having sex earlier and more interested in sexual-themed entertainment? Yup.
But assuming causation does serve the political goals of many.
(Link via Lyle, who is right — one of these days he really does have to blog about Licensable Bear^TM.)

Studio 60 – oh yeah

I just watched the pilot of the new NBC Aaron Sorkin/Thomas Schlamme hourlong Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. It’s set backstage at a thinly-veiled Saturday Night Live, when Lorne Michaels (or whatever they call the Judd Hirsch character) has an on-air meltdown. Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford play the writer/director team brought in to replace him… and one of them has a drug history. (Oh, did I mention that this was from the experienced Sorkin/Schlamme writer/director team, one of whom has a drug history?)

The pilot is filled with people having sharp and witty conversations while walking somewhere, which really is the primary material of Sorkin TV. (I sometimes think of writing a parody called Aaron Sorkin’s In Hell, which is nothing but people exchanging witty banter as they walk through endless hallways.) The real question is whether it will have enough serious plot to carry the weight. There are a couple of danger signs, notably a cartoonishly-drawn antagonistic studio exec played by Stephen Webber… but all in all, this was so much fun to watch that even if the underpinnings are hollow, it will take a while to become not worth watching. Definitely try this one.

The cast is large and respectable and acquits themselves well. I can’t help but assume, however, that getting a respectable cast was quite easy for this show. When word got out that there was a new Sorkin show in the works, I’m betting that just about everyone who was respectable and available was trying to find there way in on this. There’s nothing like getting the best dialog in Hollywood on a show that is likely to be a hit, and apt to be respected even if it isn’t. Some have’ faced the problems of dealing with a Sorkin production, but even that has to be worth it (at least to those who haven’t already lived through it — and as the participation of Bradley Whitford shows, even to those who have.)
Quick TV nerd note: Felicity Huffman is in the pilot playing herself as the guest host of the show-within-the-show. Ed Asner plays a studio executive. I suspect it may not be an accident that they launched this series with actors from the two highly-respected behind-the-scenes-at-a-TV-show series.

How Nat is stupid: The show is set in L.A. This is practical on two fronts. It gives them some excuse for claiming it’s not actually SNL. Probably more importantly, it means that the show and the studio execs are in the same city, allowing for conflict. But I thought I saw a problem with this set-up. The real SNL is performed on the east coast, broadcast list to the east coast, and is tape-delayed for other time zones, so it shows at 11 PM in the west as well as in the east. “But,” I thought, “if you’re on the west coast, then you’re showing it live here as a late night show, which means either it’s broadcast live here at 8 PM and shown at 11 in the east… and 8 is too early for a show like this. Or it’s broadcast live here at 11, and tape delayed to the next day in the east, and that too sounds unworkable.” Stiupid me. Once I took the time to think, I realized that obvious: it’s never broadcast live in the west. They perform it at 8 PM here, show it live in the east (where it’s 11), and tape-delay it until 11 here. The episode actually makes more sense once you realize this; the people who are at dinners while the show is filming aren’t having organized meals in the middle of the night, it’s 8 PM.

Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering: no, I did not get somehow on some Hollywood insider list to see this. NBC arranged for Netflix to make a DVD of the episode available to their customers. They actually promote it as two disks, one with Studio 60 and one with the pilot of the series Kidnapped, but when the disk arrives you find it actually has both shows on it. Haven’t watched Kidnapped yet; will review it when I do.

What a deal

Saw an ad today for Time/Warner high-speed Internet, with “free self-installation”.

We don’t do any work, and we don’t charge you for it! How generous!

Two moons too few!

It’s a mistake to try to review something before you actually see it. So that little thought in the back of my head that my review for the new ABC Family light hour-long Three Moons Over Milford should refer to it as being for 14-year-old girls? That I’ll just have to set aside.

Besides, this show isn’t for 14-year-old girls. It may be targeted at them and their moms, (a young teen girl, a hunky teen boy, and a struggling effectively-single mom being the key characters), but there’s no meat given to the girl, no investment from her point of view. Instead, it focuses on the mom, who is struggling to deal with her family in a world that is in the closing days.

The moon has been broken into three by an asteroid and is due to fall to earth, although no one is certain when… just that when it does, humanity shan’t survive. Ths, freed from their burden of a future, people feel freer to be vaguely goofy. It’s not anarchy, it’s not goofy in interesting ways, it’s just people either chasing their dreams or no longer feeling constrained not to be quirky. And if they aren’t made interesting by it, they also aren’t made lovable. This seems like a show meant to be fluffed up by the charmingly goofy residents of the town, a la Northern Exposure, Ed, or Gilmore Girls. But that doesn’t happen. And the mom, whom we’re supposed to identify with (I presume) is yes, beset by an abandoning husband and problematic kids, but her problems don’t make her likable (nor does some of her business dealings; without going into details, she is trying to hide relevant information from the stockholders of a business she is a major owner of, with the help of folks at the company. Them’s federal crimes, folks!)

Not smoothly of. The coming attractions show a couple of interesting guest stars over the course of the coming season (Ed Begley Jr., Richard Kind), but those won’t draw me back to this. Not recommended to you no matter how old a girl you are.

Pacific Coast Highway

The Pacific Coast Highway (known locally as “the PCH”) has been showing up a lot lately in the news, primarily in relation to Mel Gibson. I do want to make something clear: the important part of the name of this road is not “highway”, which will suggest to many people a long straight stretch of road. No, the operative term is “coast”; this follows the Pacific coast pretty closely, and thus is an often-narrow-laned road of frequent turns. I’m not saying that there are roads that you should be driving along inebriated at 80 MPH, but if there were to be some, this would certainly not be on the list.

Weeeeeds

I’ve just worked my way through the first six episodes of Weeds, the Showtime series about a suburban momwho deals pot. At its heart, it’s seems intended to be about the need for individuality within the deadening conformity of suburbia… which is a tired route, and it’s not impressively one. The casting, particularly of women, is quite respectable, the production is smooth, there’s nice touches and nice lines, but at the core it seems to come from people who haven’t really been where they’re writing about. It’s unconvincing about its understanding of the suburbs, of pot dealing, of the details in life (I just watched a scene where they were exchanging batteries between three devices which would actually each take a different size of battery), and most importantly, of human beings. It’s watchable, it’s not horrible, but it’s not impressive.

Oh, I should be writing more in depth, but other than saying “I always like watching Mary Louise Parker, but I won’t be netflixing disk 2 any time soon,” I don’t feel like doing so.