The Men of a Certain Age pilot, health care reform, and miscellaneous other links
To my relief, TNT and Hulu did, before a week was up, both have links to the pilot of Men of a Certain Age, so it looks as if I (lacking cable) will be able to watch this on the web after all. Here are a couple more reviews.
My own thoughts when watching the pilot: We begin seeing each of the three friends waking up. Ray Romano, who as Joe is the star, is the only one of the three actors I haven’t seen before (yes, I totally missed Everybody Loves Raymond), so I clicked into engagement when it got to Andre Braugher’s Owen character getting shot by a toy gun wielded by his son in a Hulk costume. Owen’s the married guy, family man, hapless saleman working in his father’s car dealership, and, in the pilot anyway, the sweetest of the characters. But what catches my eye in the wake up scene is shirtless Andre Braugher in a pose calculated to minimize sex appeal – wow, impressive, that took some doing. Shirtless Scott Bakula, as Terry, gets a somewhat sexier pose in his wake up scene, since, while you get to see Owen slumped in a way that emphasizes his stomach, Terry’s simply shown with his chest peeking out the top of the covers. This suits the characters, since Terry’s the shallow single aspiring actor and ladies man, to Owen’s settled, out of shape family man, and at first I wonder if this framing will carry through the whole pilot, but, actually, no, they’re all, even Terry, dressed and portrayed as something of middle-aged slobs; Terry may be the object of his friends’ jealousy, but he comes across as fading ladies man playing out his last sparks of sex appeal rather than a glamour guy (since I last saw Bakula as your basic dashing Star Trek series space captain, this is a change).
In fact, the pilot, designed to set up everyone’s problems, winds up showing the three as decidedly challenged by midlife: fading career dreams, fading health, and problems from Joe’s gambling addiction to Owen’s diabetic seizure. A couple of reviews I’ve read have remarked on the sad sack quality of the characters in the pilot, and hastened to assure us that
Granted, the extent of that luck is not completely apparent in tonight’s fine but slightly overemphatic premiere, which overdoes the sad-sackishness of its three main characters: Romano’s store owner, Andre Braugher’s salesman and Scott Bakula’s actor. But give it a few weeks and you’ll see that these three middle-aged friends are not losers. They’re ordinary men who face defeat and victory with warmth and considerable humor, as you’d expect from a show created by Romano and fellow Raymond veteran Mike Royce.
I like them, though, already, even in their “sad-sackish” beginning; the characters all feel real, and their relationships, with each other, Joe’s with his kids, Owen’s with his father, wife, and kids, all interest me. So, though I hope they do get some victories to go with their defeats, I find them appealing even in defeat.
Joel, meanwhile, is immersing himself in Netflix Law and Order: Criminal Intent episodes.
Health care reform link:
Sheri and Allan Rivlin on New CNN Poll Shows Support for Public Option but Not Health Care Reform.
The worst statistic in the poll is the 22% that believe they or their family would be better off if Health Care Reform passes. Nearly half believe reform will help some people just not them. That less than 1 in 4 believe this effort is good for their family represents a colossal failure of reform proponents to design a plan that helps people and then explains what it will do for a typical family.
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Voters are not that well informed though. An overwhelming 79% believe the Senate Bill will add to the deficit even though the Congressional Budget Office has stated that it would actually shrink the deficit, as President Obama has promised it would.
In some ways, I’m exactly the sort of person who should be in the “health care reform will help some people but not me” group. Aside from the one year when I’d fallen off my parents’ health care insurance but not yet managed either a job that included insurance or enough money to buy it on my own, I’ve consistently managed to have medical insurance through work. The only time I was laid off (during a recession, in the fourth layoff for the company I was then working for, along with my entire work group), I got a severance package that included covering my COBRA for a few months, and had a job well before that time was up. The health care reform package proposed, aiming not to unsettle people like me who are already insured, leaves our packages mostly as they are.
And, in fact, bleeding heart liberal that I am, I’d be willing to favor health care reform simply because it helps some people who aren’t me. But I also think it helps me. Here’s why:
- Rescission: Even those of us who do have reasonably good health insurance may be only one serious illness away from financial disaster, due to the practice of rescission. Get sick enough, and your insurance may drop you. Both the Senate and House versions of current health care reform legislation eliminate this practice.
- Preexisting conditions: My husband has one. Several, in fact. He’s essentially uninsurable on the private market. Because I’ve been able to stay employed at jobs that provide us both with insurance, we’ve managed. But the economy has its ups and downs, and even the best of us can’t be sure we’ll never hit a spell of unemployment that takes us beyond COBRA. The health care reform legislation would eliminate the preexisting condition trap. And here I’ll note that even if you, personally, don’t yet have a preexisting condition, there’s a good chance that you or your spouse will develop one at some point before you’re 65 (and you can’t go on Medicare till you’re 65).
- Job flexibility: Since my husband does have a preexisting condition, and since covering him through my employer is my only economically viable option, I need to stick with the most secure jobs I can find. Not only can’t I do something like starting my own business, I’m even, these days, cautious about joining startups I’d happily have taken a chance on when I was young, and didn’t have to worry about preexisting conditions; even with emergency savings, I just can’t chance the risk to Joel’s health care. Health care reform would allow me more options to get insurance through exchanges (and without that preexisting condition trap).
- Reportedly, there are some things in current proposed legislation that would bend the cost curve. You can find an explanation in this article. Unfortunately, this is one place where my lack of knowledge of economics (my economic education ended with reading The Worldly Philosophers in high school) hurts me. I see different people arguing different things about how well legislation would bend the cost curve, and don’t have a clear idea of who’s right. I suspect that the answer is, not as much as we might like, but some. So I’m not prepared to say I’ll actually derive significant benefit from these cost curve bending provisions. But they’re experiments that might actually work, and, if they do, I’ll benefit.
Mostly, I simply think that the provisions against rescission and preexisting conditions, and the addition of health insurance exchanges for those who don’t get insurance through employment don’t just help the people who now lack health insurance; they fill in gaps for the rest of us, in the event that we for one reason or another lose our ability to get insurance through our employers.
Miscellaneous links that have nothing to do either with TV or with health care reform:
Robin M. on why she’s proud of her son’s second grade teacher and her trips to Afghanistan.
The Nature Conservancy reports on the Copenhagen Climate Change conference.
If An Economy Recovers and No One Cheers It, Does It Make a Sound?
The “silent epidemic” of child hunger.
Megan McArdle on the Euro and Greece’s debt problem.
Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention.
On Friday afternoon, Google made the biggest change that has ever happened in search engines, and the world largely yawned. Maybe Google timed its announcement that it was personalizing everyone’s search results just right, so few would notice. Maybe no one really understood how significant the change was. Whatever the reason, it was a huge development and deserves much more attention than it has received so far….