And they called it Supernatural

Coming off the buzz of a Seahawks win, and the 'sad panda' face of Peyton Manning (ANY reaction shot from the game...), I discovered that Phillip Seymore Hoffman had died of a drug overdose in New York.

I wasn't really able to process this news directly. I've liked the man's work from his relative early days, but I really haven't seen anything he'd done since that Mission Impossible movie (which I didn't see...).  

So why post about it? Aside from content filler then?

Well, it turns out that Jared Padelicki, or however he spells it, responded to tweets about the "sad" death that it wasn't sad at all. It was stupid.

Now, I pretty much OD'd on Supernatural (Padelicki is the tall one) over the course of a year, but bombed out around season seven, leaving me a year or two behind. I've got no real praise for the general writing or acting... even continuity. I mean 'The Charger' was destroyed and rebuilt some two or three times, but apparently still has a green army man stuck in a door handle from when the 'boys' were 7?  

On the other hand, it is a fun show, and some of the metatextural episodes fall into the category of 'great television' that I normally reserve for Darmok at Tanagra level shit... rare birds indeed, though for entirely different reasons than Darmok.  You know: Episodes were the 'boys' get dimensionally shuffled to a world where they are actors named Jared and (um... whats his face...) in a show called Supernatural, and one of them is married to the actress that played a demon on the show for a couple of seasons? 

It seems like a very simple idea for a TV show, but nobody had ever done it before, and the ways the actors and even the director/crew poked fun at themselves and Hollywood shows a certain amount of character that sadly seems to be lacking. 

Which brings me back to the tweet.  Jared is getting flack for saying something that is objectively true. Chances are some publicist somewhere will force him to abjectly apologize for his insensitivity. I rather hope not. 

In fact, though I'm not really a twitter user, I may just log into my account to tweet him some support.

A forty six year old man of immense talent, fame and wealth dying of a drug overdose in his apartment is, in fact, incredibly stupid.  That Hoffman had previously attempted to help Heath Ledger deal with his drug problems, and watched his friend and fellow actor die only reinforces just how stupid Hoffman's death really was. 

I'm sick of a public life where people can't even tell the basic truth.  Should we cross the street and duck our heads as we pass the halls of power?  Will our children rat out their parents at the behest of school teachers? 

Actually: That second one sounds creepily plausible these days. 

So: congratulations to the Progressives. At last you have found a way to bring all the misery and horror of the soviet system to America without needing to resort to bloody warfare in the streets. 

Somehow, that doesn't make it worth it. 

And so I stand with Jared.