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Happy to see this from CBS, generally considered to be the Too Old for Cool Network, TBH. Doesn’t seem that extravagant a pledge to just let people with disabilities audition, but hey, it’s a start. I’ve been happy to see people with disabilities on the CBS shows my husband I watch—including Daryl Mitchell on NCIS New Orleans, as mentioned in the article above, and on NCIS, Marilee Talkington and Katie LeClerc. Hoping for more of both people with disabilities playing characters with disabilities and people with disabilities playing characters for which disability is not part of the plot.

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My DWTS Rooting Interest

While I’m enjoying a number of the contestants on this season of Dancing with the Stars, I’m feeling some old-person solidarity with Kate Flannery, best known as Meredith from The Office, who is doing really quite a terrific job with new pro Pasha. I never watched The Office much (no offense, there are very few shows I’ve followed faithfully post-kids), so I had limited awareness of her before she started dancing across my TV screen, but I’m completely delighted by how well she’s doing in both the performance aspect and the “knows what show she’s on and digging the experience” aspect. I don’t know if she has enough of a voting block to take this all the way to a mirrorball, but I’ll be part of that block for as long as she lasts. I’d love to have a woman close to my age (she’s 55, I’m 60) actually win this thing, or at least make it to the finals. 

For more of my #DWTS thoughts, follow our Round 2s on the Parenting Roundabout Podcast, including today’s on Disney Night.

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For Aging Podcast Listeners

(I know you’re out there, ‘cause I’m one.)

In recent weeks on The Parenting Roundabout Podcast, we’ve been sneaking some talk about aging into our episodes in addition to the parenting of teens and young adults. It’s on my mind since I turned 60 in June, y’know? Enjoy our talk of phantom aches and pains and colon kits and the newfangled ways kids do things on the following episodes:

• Weird and Mysterious Injuries • How to Mortify Your Children • Weddings Past, Present, and Future • Our Kids and Their Virtual Lives • Talking with Mimi and Stacy of Living the Second Act • IP Theft, Aimless Emails, and Other Online Annoyances • The Indignities of Aging • Fake Life Deadlines

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Nostalgic for Episodes That End

My husband has been on a 70s-TV binge, watching episode after episode of Mannix and Cannon and 77 Sunset Strip on some cable station that’s all about the oldies. It’s easy to laugh about some of the clothing, hairstyles and TV tropes of the time, but there’s one thing about those old detective dramas that I miss today: episodes that end.

Oh, sure, there might be the occasional two-part episode or season-ending cliffhangers, but in general, a case opens and closes and goes away. That sort of definitiveness seems to have fallen out of favor in the modern-day version, as episodic TV seems jealous enough of the continuing storylines of streaming dramas to always add some sort of overarching drama to the daily detection. And oh, how I wish they wouldn’t.

Can’t there still be a place for easy TV that you can watch while multitasking, enjoy figuring out a story’s ending before the episode gets there, and not have to deal with a constant sense of dread because of some big bad operating in the background to make our heroes lives miserable? Can’t they just solve the dang crime and go home and be happy?

Maybe I’ll just clear my DVR of those contemporary versions and return to the 70s with my spouse. There’s something to be said about shows that know how to be over.

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So okay, we didn’t watch “Game of Thrones,” this season or ever. But there are plenty of things that turned up on the Emmy nomination list this year that we’ve talked about on the Parenting Roundabout podcast. From Fosse/Verdon to Bradley Whitford, find all our episodes related in some way to 2019 nominees at http://www.parentingroundaboutpodcast.com/round2.html.

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My Kind of Binge-Watching

Some folks binge the latest hot-topic TV shows to make sure they’re always able to participate in conversations on what everybody’s talking about. Me? I’m always on the lookout for shows I can watch while multitasking and then happily leave the TV on while they flow over me, one after the other.

This past weekend, my binge-watch of choice was Somebody Feed Phil, the Netflix series on which TV writer and producer Phil Rosenthal, creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, goes around the world eating things and being very, very happy about it. The show is beautiful to look at, both in its scenery of the various locations and its close-ups of food both hâute cuisine and homey. But Rosenthal keeps up such an entertaining patter that if my eyes wander from the TV screen to the computer screen, I can still enjoy the episode and follow along.

I visited five or six cities with the show and look forward to having it as a backdrop to future multitasking weekends. Happy to hear it got renewed for another Netflix season. If you’re in the market for something to have on when you want to have something on, check it out.

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Audiobook Pros and Cons

I like the idea of audiobooks so much. I imagine myself lounging on the couch, headphones in ears, allowing writing on all sorts of interesting topics to flow directly through the cords into my brain. No more straining my aging eyes on print. Just a direct hit of language, there for the listening.

I joined Audible because of that vision, and I guess I’m mostly happy with it, if I don’t think directly of what it’s costing me every month. But I have to admit that squinting at words is not the only age-related deterrent to my reading these days; I also fall asleep pretty much immediately when lounging on the couch. This is a minor problem when you drop your book and lose your place; it’s a major problem when your audiobook just keeps droning on and on long after you’ve stopped hearing it. What was that timestamp I fell asleep at again?

I guess there’s a snooze feature to minimize the damage of sleep-listening, but I’m never planning to sleep while listening, and if I somehow stay awake, I don’t want the thing stopping. Perhaps I need to sit somewhere less comfortable when listening, but that’s not gonna happen. More likely, I’m going to have to train myself to hit that stop button just before nodding off. Good luck with that, me!

The other problem I’m finding with audiobooks, and I’m not proud to admit this, is that ... well ... sometimes I like to peek ahead in books and make sure everything’s going to be OK when the plot gets fraught. It’s a bad habit that audiobooks makes impossible, and I should be glad about that, but I do kinda wish Audible would add a spoiler link that can jump ahead to that part you’d be flipping for and then jump you back. Think about that, Audible. C’mon. And maybe a loud noise every now and then for us dozers.

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How We Do (Minor) Disasters Today

Recently, I was at my local Barnes & Noble, checking out a friend’s book on the New Releases table, when there was a loud and scary crash. At first, I thought one of the store’s skylights had fallen in, such was the glass-breaking sound of it. Or maybe a bookshelf had been knocked over somehow? Everyone in the store froze for a moment, giving each other that Did you just hear that? WTF? look.

And then, of course, we grabbed our phones.

It soon became apparent that something had happened over by the cash registers, though not easy to see just what, other than a large amount of debris. A customer, wondering if there was, like, a cashier under all that rubble, called out, “Somebody call 911!” And every other phone-clutching customer in the area looked at the others and thought ... Should it be me? Should I call? Or is someone else ... Surely the store manager ... I dialed, but thought better of it before there was an answer. The police came shortly thereafter without me.

We were all still standing around, wondering whether it was proper to go look and take pictures when there might be someone injured and we might be in the way, when a store employee got on the microphone and ordered us to exit the store. At last, something to do! Apparently, we were really all just awaiting instructions.

From outside the store, it was clear what had happened: a car had missed a parking-lot turn and plowed through the display window behind the cash-register area. I stood outside for a little while in a light rain, watching people lining up to snap a picture of the car and cursing myself for having removed Twitter from my phone in a futile attempt to limit my social-media minutes. This is what we have Twitter on our phones FOR! The random newsworthy happening!

After a little bit, loitering started to feel wrong. I hadn’t heard anything about whether someone was injured or worse, and ... is it cool to be photographing something that could be more than a minor disaster? Is it cool to be loitering, waiting to hear something about it? Is it cool to hope that they’ll start letting folks back in so you can get a latte?

I decided I would take the high road and head for my car, passing a freaked-out-looking store employee telling someone about the incident on his phone, and another customer with whom I exchanged “Well, you don’t see that every day!” exclamations. I drove to the supermarket on the other side of the mall, which contains a mini-Starbucks, and finally got my latte. The lady in front of me in line was regaling the cashier with the story of the Barnes & Noble crash, and I chipped in my limited insights. I then sat at a table and fired up Facebook and Twitter on my laptop to do my somewhat belated job of spreading the news.

And apparently that is a citizen’s job nowadays, because every news report I found on the incident, that day and the next, was based on Tweets from one of those customers standing out in the rain with their phones, snapping the car. Early reports were pretty much just, “Check out this Tweet, y’all!” Later reports had a word or two from the police chief, but still those Twitter-sourced pictures.

It was kind of exciting being on the scene, first in the know, I’ll admit, especially since I was never in any danger. It was one of those odd intense communal experiences with strangers that we have now and then. But it did leave me feeling that we need some sort of etiquette for this kind of thing, some rules of comportment. If there are 100 people with cell phones, who calls 911? What are the respectful rules for photo-taking and social-media spreading? Is the rise of citizen reporting good or potentially hazardous? And should we all have Twitter on our phones, just in case?

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When you see a character with a disability on a TV show, it’s unfortunately more the rule than the exception that the performer playing that part is not disabled. It’s something I regularly grumble about and sometimes rant about (in blog posts that the former About.com appears to have mercifully stricken from the record).

So when I watched an NCIS episode this week with a blind character, and I went to IMDb to find out more about the actress who played her, I was already formulating the rant that I was going to share in this very space. Are there really no actresses with vision impairments who could play this part? Really?

But what do you know? They actually cast a blind person to play a blind person! The article linked above suggests that this “may mark the first time a legally blind actress is playing a legally blind character.” Which ... I mean, hooray for the milestone, but what took so @#$% long? Especially for guest spots on shows, where you don’t have the “but the character might have a dream in one episode where they’re not disabled so clearly we have to cast a non-disabled actor” factor, this should be commonplace.

Congrats to Talkington and kudos to the NCIS casting people. Hoping for lots of non-cynical IMDb searches to come.

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The Bad Place: Customer Service Division

The writers at The Good Place seem to have no end of ideas for creative torments that hit hapless humans in their weakest places, so they probably don’t need suggestions from frustrated folks in this life. But I sure felt like I was dealing with someone at Bad Place HQ the other day when I tried to extract my son’s W2 from the online repository devised by his employer, Aramark, or perhaps by Shaun and Bad Janet.  

I’ll break it down into its fiendish five steps:

1. Require a ton of log-in information. Employer number. Employee ID. PIN number. Birthdate. Last four digits of social-security number. Address. Phone number. Page after page of stuff.

2. Throw up an error message at the end that says “Your information could not be verified,” with an e-mail address and a phone number to contact for assistance.

3. An appeal to the e-mail address results in a form e-mail saying they can’t do anything by e-mail but here’s a .pdf about the website. Go there.

4. A call to the phone number results in a message that says go to the website or call this other phone number and choose menu item 4 and then menu item 4.

5. A call to the second phone number gets another recorded message but no menu items at all. Eventually, however, there is an option to speak to a human. Hooray! Said human takes all the information originally given on the website and then says, “Can’t verify your information. Call this number.” Which is the phone number from step 2. Rinse and repeat.

So we have a phone number that directs you to another phone number that directs you to the first phone number. We have lots of recommendations to go to the website after one has already been through all the steps on the website and been rejected. And we have demons laughing like hell somewhere in Bad Place HQ.

It doesn’t help that the job the W2 before isn’t in an office with an HR department to beg mercy from, but a seasonal gig cleaning a football stadium during games and concerts. I’m not sure there even IS an HR department. Or that we have a phone number for his manager. Or if his manager is there in the off-season. Would be nice if this tax-form outlet actually gave out tax forms.

This is my second experience with a phone loop of this type. The first time, I was able to just stop doing business with the customer-service disaster artists. This time ... a W2 is kind of a necessary thing, you know? I appreciate the protection against identity theft, I guess, but there’s got to be SOME way off the hamster wheel for an honest person just wanting to get a tax document, doesn’t there? Hello? Hellooooooo?

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Five Suggestions for Fixing “Dancing with the Stars”

Honestly, I’m not sure Dancing with the Stars is all that broken. It is what it is, a reality show that you can excel at by dancing well but also by being entertaining and/or having a lot of fans vote for you. I am generally willing to embrace it under those terms, since I’m mostly just looking for something pretty to crash on the couch in front of. But like a judge nitpicking an enjoyable but flawed dance number, I can certainly identify some missteps that make the show from time to time less enjoyable, less comprehensible, and more randomly outraging. Rather than just throw up a paddle and be done with it, I’ll suggest five easy steps for a big improvement. Work on it, show!

1. Give judges’ critiques only to the people who are actually "dancing with the stars." If there are problems with the choreography, that's on the pro, and there's no reason for the star to stand there taking that. And if there's a problem with the dancing and performance of the star, that's on the pro too — his or her job is specifically to give help and guidance in that area. Keeping comments strictly judge-to-pro should end all the over-the-top praise, meaningless platitudes, and overly sharp criticism of a star who has to stand there smiling or else, and leave lots of time for actual substantive comments that will both inform the audience and guide the pro. Stick that poor star in a soundproof booth.

2. Send people home on this week’s scores, not last week’s. Obviously, ABC no longer wants to give Dancing with the Stars a Tuesday time slot for a results show on a regular basis. But using last week’s scores and votes for this week’s elimination just ain’t working. Since you barely have time to give folks a proper send-off in these overstuffed episodes anyway, why not save it for a Facebook live show or other online video offering on Tuesdays? You can give those eliminated a chance to make a speech and have a last dance and everything, and you can always play it as a segment of the show the next Monday for those who missed it.

3. Give the viewer voting some transparency. The judges have to hold up paddles with their scores for people to cheer or throw shade on. But the popular vote that’s theoretically at least as influential in who stays or goes is entirely shadowy. It’s not even particularly clear that all of each week’s “in jeopardy” couples are, in fact, at the bottom. If you’re going to make this thing part dance contest and part popularity contest, let’s see some numbers, or bar graphs, or something to show who’s getting the vote and who’s not. 

4. Create a handicap system for your ringers. It certainly adds to the entertainment value of Dancing with the Stars to start out with some stars who can, you know, dance. But it’s really not fair to pit a two-left-feet contestant against one who’s a professional dancer in all but job title. And it’s not fair for that all-but-professional-dancer contestant who signed on in good faith to get the wrath of fans who think this should be Dancing with the Never-Danced-Before-We-Swear Stars. Acknowledge that problem and find a way to address it, whether through a scoring handicap or differing expectations or pro-am versions of the mirrorball trophy. There should be some way to level the playing field a little bit.

5. Teach us something about dance. The judges sometimes throw out ballroom terms or judge a dance harshly for not having enough proper elements, but how do we know? Videos on each of the dances, with pros showing us the proper moves and telling us what they’re called and why they’re important, can help viewers be informed judges themselves. If there’s no time for this on the actual show, put them online and mention on the show where folks can find them. You’ve got two hours a week and an interested audience. Get us hooked on ballroom! (And also explain to us what the actual heck jazz and contemporary are and why we should care.)

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Fall TV, Old-School

So among the things I am old enough to remember is when getting the fall preview issue of the compact little TV Guide Magazine was a huge deal. I’d sit poring over it for hours, reading about every new show, examining the grid to figure out what would win and lose my time-slot contests. This was in those long-ago days, children, when there was no recording anything and you had to pick one and lose one, like TV Survivor or something.

The start of a new TV season was exciting to me then, and the TV Guide Fall Preview Issue was a tangible harbinger of it. Nowadays ... does TV Guide even still exist? I ditched it when it changed to larger flatter size and you could look up what was on just as well on your TV or computer. And so now, I guess I can go to the Fall Preview web page of the TVGuide.com site and look over the offerings, but it’s just not the same. I don’t miss magazines much, but I miss THAT small fat issue, and the me who adored it.

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20 Things to Write “20 Things” Lists About

20 Reasons Why That Thing You Love Is Stupid

20 Reasons Why That Thing I Love Is Stupid But I Love It Anyway

20 Things People Used to Love, Can You Believe It?

20 Funny GIFs from That Show You Love

20 Things People Less Cool Than Us Think Are Cool, LOL

20 Embarrassing Things People Actually Put Up on YouTube WTF?

20 Trends I Totally Approve Of

20 Trends I Can't Believe People Are Buying, Can You?

20 Photos of Celebrities Wearing Things You Wouldn't Be Caught Dead In

20 Things That Are Overrated

20 Things That Are Underrated

20 Ways You're Parenting Wrong

20 Adorable Animal Photos

20 Hilarious Animal Photos

20 Photos of Little Kids Being Either Adorable or Hilarious

20 Movies I Can Thread Together With Sort of a Kind of a Theme

20 Entertainment Products I Like/Hate Just to Be Contrary

20 Food Items I Would Like to Put in My Belly Right Now

20 Food Items I’m Disgusted That Anyone Eats Ever Anywhere

20 Random Things I Scrounged Off the Internet Because My 20-Blog-Post-a-Day Quota Ain't Gonna Write Itself

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You Don’t Know Me

I’ve noticed a new trend in telemarketing and door-to-door selling that has, oh my gosh people, got to stop. On the phone, it goes like this:

ME: Hello?

FOLKSY MIDWESTERN VOICE: Mrs. Mauro? I’m so glad to finally talk to you! You folks are harder to get a hold of than a greased pig!

Or some such. Probably not a pig, but you get the idea. Caller is trying to bond with a little joke about how busy we all are these days. Except ... we also have caller ID these days. And voice mail. And the ability to forward calls from one phone number to another. In fact, these days, in addition to being busy, we are NEVER UN-CALLABLE. Our calls follow us like, well, piglets follow a sow. So right off the bat, RIGHT OFF THE BAT, you’re lying to me, and inviting to me to conspire folksily together in a lie. And ... what? Why? How is this supposed to make me want to buy what you’re selling?

Last time I called someone out on this, she seemed genuinely hurt and said, “I’m just trying to make a little joke,” and I’m sorry, lady, I know you have a crap job and someone has handed you a ridiculous script that you have to read, and it’s not your fault, but ... whoever thinks this is a good idea, please rethink. It. is. not.

Nor is it a good idea for the college-age kid trying to scrape up a buck by going door-to-door getting referrals for a roofer to start the conversation with, “I’ve been talking with your neighbors, and they all say you’re the best cook in the neighborhood, and so I just wanted to stop by and see what’s for dinner?” In addition to pretending to scam a dinner invitation being a stupid way to pitch ... dude, I gotta tell ya, I don’t live in that kind of neighborhood. My neighbors barely talk to me. They have no idea what kind of cook I am, and in fact, I’m no kind of cook at all — my husband does the cooking at our house. Your opening pitch is just all kinds of wrong, and I am already closing my door in your face.

And again — College Kid did not make that s@#$ up. He got a script. And it’s a bad script. And it’s not his fault. There’s obviously some sort of trend in marketing toward faux familiarity. It’s hard for me to believe that works on ANYONE, because there are so many variables in our lives. Even if you hit one proud home chef or one person who’s hard to get on the phone, you’re going to tick off so, so many folks in the process. Just stop, people. State your business in a straightforward and respectful way. I still won’t buy from you, but at least we’ll all keep our dignity.

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Fall Preview: “This Is Us”

[I watched a whole pack of fall TV trailers a while back for a Parenting Roundabout Podcast Round 2 episode, and I’ll be sharing my entirely uninformed opinions at greater length here.]

I’ll give it to the creators of the This Is Us trailer: that is one efficient tear-producing machine right there. The combination of music and feels absolutely does its job of making viewers want to see it (both the trailer, which has over 7 million views, and the show) without giving any real idea of WTF this show is going to be about. I’ve heard it compared to Parenthood, in that it’s a warm dramedy focused on relationships, and I’ve heard it compared to Lost, in that there’s a big twist at the end of episode 1 revealing surprising interrelationships.

Now, I’m not one of those who retroactively hated Lost because the ending was a disappointment. I wasn’t disappointed by the ending, but even if I was, that whole “give me those years of my life back” argument seems to me like demanding your money back because the final bit of track on the roller coaster is straight and flat. Me, I enjoyed the heck out of the ride.

Parenthood, on the other hand, was something that should have been right up my alley but I could never get into it, whether it was the show or just my life and inability to commit to an hour a week right then. That may be the case now too, come to think of it. The hour-long shows I keep up with are mostly ones my husband and I watch together. He does a better job keeping up with his faves that I will not watch (violent and disturbing procedurals, eek) than I do with things I like that he will not watch (warm dramas and comedies, yuck).

So now, a Parenthood-y drama with a Lost-y twist. For sure I’ll watch the first episode to see what the twist is, and because it has actors I like, and because I’m pretty sure that trailer will stalk me if I don’t. But I sure hope there’s some there there.

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Our Rio opening ceremony live-tweet. Made the whole lengthy thing really pretty fun. (Though it mostly made me miss London re-enacting the Industrial Revolution.)

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I’m pretty sure “Castle” as we’ve known it is leaving “Castle,” too, and it’s had a good long run, so that’s fine. I’m mostly there for Nathan Fillion anyway, and liked the Kate Beckett character way more in the early days. But at the same time ... I’d have minded Beckett leaving a lot less if they’d never brought she and Castle together as a couple, and really a lot less if they hadn’t spent the last season or two contriving reasons to keep them apart. The only way I could make it through this whole ridiculous “I have to pretend to be broken up with you to keep you safe” plot line this season is knowing it would eventually be over and they’d get back together, and if the endgame is instead going to be her death or disappearance ... maybe I’m leaving “Castle,” too. If they can spin off something that looks like the light funny detective show I originally fell for, I’ll give it a look.