AND THAT PLACE IS...

A Sage for Our Time (ADAM BRYANT, 3/23/08, NY Times)

In an episode from the third season, he and his on-screen wife, played by Cheryl Hines, are dining out with another couple. Just as the check arrives, Mr. David’s friend bolts to the restroom, putting none-too-subtle pressure on Mr. David to pick up the tab. “You don’t think I know about that bathroom trick?” he yells later. “I invented that bathroom trick!”

In most episodes, Mr. David can be counted on to utter something that nobody else would ever dare say. Lloyd Braun, a former ABC executive and a friend of Mr. David’s, has described him as having “honesty Tourette’s.”

Mr. David plays this to the hilt on his show, particularly during frank talks with his wife about their relationship (the kind of scenes that the Patersons and their predecessors in Albany, the Spitzers, might have found particularly compelling).

In the same episode as the “Bathroom Trick,” for example, he discusses with Ms. Hines what they should do in light of a tip they get that Los Angeles might be the target of a terrorist attack in the next few days. His wife feels they should stay in town to attend a long-planned fund-raiser by their friends. Mr. David is not so sure, and suggests he could instead go golfing in Pebble Beach until the threat passes. But Ms. Hines has more romantic notions of their final moments on earth.

“It just seems like if we’re going to go, we should go together,” she says.

“Not necessarily,” Mr. David counters. “Almost seems a little selfish that you would want both of us to perish.”

Political incorrectness can have its place.

...comedy or conservative thought, but I repeat myself.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 16, 2008 10:14 AM