Who Is to Blame for Lead Paint in Toys? Bush and You

[NOTE: I also posted this article on www.dailykos.com. If you like it, please go to it here and recommend it, comment on it, etc. Thanks.]

It has been a bad year for Chinese imports. Not for the Chinese, mind you. Through August, China enjoyed a nearly $164 billion trade surplus with the U.S. in 2007, well ahead of last year's figures at that time. No, it was a bad year for Americans with Chinese imports. Highlights included the recall of 1.5 million Chinese-manufactured toys (for starters) when it was discovered they contained dangerous lead paint, and the earlier pet deaths linked to tainted dog food made in China. These incidents shined a light on what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration called "manufacturing control issues" in China.

Beyond the Chinese themselves, over whom we have little control, who is responsible for these blunders? To me, there are two clear culprits: the Bush Administration and You. Yes, You. I'll explain later.

As for the Bush administration, the news of the last few days has focused on efforts by the Democrats in Congress to beef up funding for the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to help address issues related to consumer safety. President Bush, of course, is opposing the measure. He says the Democrats are politicizing the issue. How? By trying to help make the problem better? That's more than Bush is doing, especially since his lack of oversight is partially to blame for this mess in the first place. "The Democrats are playing politics" has become Bush's go-to defense line with any domestic problem, just as "the Democrats are hurting the troops" is his default attack on criticisms of his disastrous Iraq policy. It's so transparent, it's amazing it still works.

It's not the Democrats who are politicizing this issue. Rather, Bush is inserting his businesses-should-be-unregulated-and-allowed-to-run-amok views into the matter, allowing his right-wing ideology (which is not adhered to by the majority of Americans, I'm sure) to interfere with efforts to protect American consumers.

You see, this legislation is just another example of the failure of Bush's policy on government oversight of businesses, which is essentially to appoint a member of an industry, who wants to help the industry make more money and has no interest in protecting Americans, to oversee the regulation of that industry. It is the proverbial coyote guarding the hen house. Bush has done it with energy, pollution and mining, just to name a handful of examples, and it extends to the CPSC.

That's right, the Democrats in Congress are trying to give more money and power to the CPSC to help prevent problems like lead paint ending up in children's toys, and who is opposing it? Believe it or not, the acting chairwoman of the CPSC, Nancy Nord. Yes, Nord is trying to kill the legislation to better fund her own agency. Makes no sense, right? Ah, but it does. It's right in line with the Bush administration's core belief that any government regulation is bad government regulation. Nord's position before coming to the CPSC was as the Director of Federal Affairs for Kodak. The guy Nord replaced at the CPSC, Hal Stratton, before coming to the commission started the Rio Grande Foundation, whose mission statement says it believes in "the importance of individual freedom, limited government, and economic opportunity." It's like asking a master bank robber to write the federal laws on armed robbery. How do you think he would come down on tax breaks to banks for hiring armed guards? Profits trump safety every time for this administration.

Obviously, legislative battles and policy wranglings aren't as sexy as fires in California and South Carolina, so you have to believe too many people will listen to the president's protestations that the Democrats are playing politics and take him at his word. But, that leads us to the second party responsible for the China-imports mess: You.

As you may recall, last year, Time named You as its Person of the Year. Sure, Time meant the selection to reflect the proliferation of the reliance on user-generated online communities like YouTube and MySpace to solve problems, but the empowerment issue is the same. It's up to You to decide what is important to You. In the context of the battle over the new legislation, it's up to You to get the real story, to investigate how the Bush administration has acted to virtually eliminate government oversight of industries by appointing industry-puppets to regulatory posts. And it's up to You to figure out that while Your kids are playing with toys slathered in lead paint, Your executive branch is acting to prevent additional oversight of the parties that put the lead paint into Your children's hands.

But the issue is so much bigger than one policy battle. Why do we have toys and dog food and so many other products coming to us from China in the first place? Because You have decided in the last ten years or so that You want to pay as little as possible for as much as possible, damn the consequences. You want your $49 DVD players and $12 shirts and, yes, $10 toys, but You don't want to think about the consequences for those cheap prices. You have decided that the cheap consumer goods are more important than our economy (all the American manufacturing jobs lost overseas), our security (our consumer needs, including oil, drive our relations with countries who provide us with what we need), and our character (the Wal-Martization of America's small towns and suburbs, and the death of mom-and-pop stores, comes directly from the drive for the cheapest goods possible). You have made a choice. You have decided to prioritize Your values in this way. So, You are living with the results. If You think that the toys and the dog food are the end of this story rather than the beginning, You are wrong.

Sure, Bush's policy on government regulation of industries hurts average Americans. It happens in multiple sectors, and it happens again and again. But, ultimately, he is allowed to do it, because the American people let him get away with it, either through choice or sloth (and neither is any better than the other). It is also the consumer culture the American people have chosen to follow that opens the door for all kinds of problems, the lead paint in toys being the least of it.

If Americans could kick our crack-like addition to oil, the effect on our foreign policy would be momentous. But let's be serious here. Americans have shown that we have no interest in sacrificing for the sake of our country's future. Not by paying more taxes, and not by changing how we live our day-to-day lives, including what we're willing to put up with to keep our access to cheap consumer goods.

As they expression goes, you reap what you sow, and right now, Americans are reaping a lot of garbage, from lead paint in toys, to the Global Warming crisis, to a war in Iraq and its devastating effects, both at home and abroad. The current American crop is as toxic as the toys imported into the country from China. And You are to blame. So, don't You think it's time that You do something about it?

A Rod Shows His True Colors: Shades of Green

"When they say it's not about money, that means it's all about money."
- The late George Young, long-time general manager of the New York Giants (NFL)

Yankee fans spent 2007 trying to convince themselves Alex Rodriguez had changed. But yesterday, A Rod showed that he has always been the same guy, an ego-driven, money-hungry player completely lacking in respect for the sport that has made him a very rich man.

In 2007, Yankee Universe chose to put aside A Rod's two-for-15, zero RBI performance in the 2005 American League Division Series and one-for-14, zero RBI mark in the 2006 A.L.D.S. (with the Yankees going out in the first round each time) and treated him like a Yankee hero. Flashbulbs popped every at-bat that he went for home run number 500 (and it was a lot of at-bats, because in typical fashion, A Rod had trouble handling the pressure, taking nine games to reach the mark after clubbing his 499th dinger). Number 13 jerseys were ubiquitous in the crowd at Yankee Stadium. A Rod's successes were greeted with standing ovations, and his failures were, for the first time, met with silence (that is, he wasn't booed).

Yankee fans were told numerous times last off-season: "Be nice to this guy, and he'll play better. And, he'll stay." As simple as this request seemed on the surface, the Bomber faithful understand that being a true Yankee entails more than hitting a lot of home runs. Rather, it comes down to adopting a team concept, putting ego (and personal statistics) aside for the sake of winning, and coming through in big moments, when the pressure is on. In other words, Yankee fans were asked to treat A Rod like he had accomplished something, even though, by these criteria, he had done nothing. Supporters were asked to act like he was a Yankee great, even though he had done nothing to warrant inclusion with Paul O'Neill, Bernie Williams and Tino Martinez (let alone Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle) as key cogs in championship clubs.

But the New York supporters sucked it up and pretended that A Rod had actually done something, in the hopes that wishful thinking would make it true.

And what did Yankee Universe get for their blind faith? They were swindled like marks of a master con man. I'm not just talking about A Rod not showing up in the post-season again in 2007 (four for 15, 1 RBI), because on the list of culprits responsible for the loss to the Indians, you would find, in order, Chien-Ming Wang (you can't have your ace lit up twice in four games and expect to win), Derek Jeter (too many momentum killing double plays and strikeouts in key situations) and the Lake Erie midges that swarmed Joba Chamberlain in the eighth inning of Game 2. A Rod was hardly the number one goat, but then again, his agent, Scott Boras, keeps telling us how special A Rod is. But special players rise to the occasion in the big games. Reggie Jackson, David Ortiz, Joe Carter, and Bernie Williams don't come close to A Rod's career numbers, but all four lifted their teams in October. A Rod, on the other hand, was just another baffled Yankee hitter against the Indians. (To put things in perspective, Melky Cabrera, who batted .188 in the 2007 post-season, matched A Rod's one home run and doubled A Rod's series RBI output, two to one.)

Again, though, Yankee fans were not necessarily fleeced because of what A Rod did (or didn't do) in four October games against the Indians. Rather, A Rod showed his true colors when, during Game 4 of the World Series, with the Red Sox about to clinch a championship, he had Boras (a man who would trade a year of happiness for an extra nickel) announce that he was opting out of the final three years of his Yankee contract and becoming a free agent.

Now, don't get me wrong: Players have every right to take advantage of whatever options are available to them, and to make as much money as they can in the limited years that they get to ply their trade. But you can't have it both ways. Some players look to maximize every dollar they can earn, making the value judgment that raking in the most money is symbolically (or actually) the most important pursuit of their careers. Others want to get rich, too, but they also want to win and, even more crucially, they want to be a part of something. They want to be a member of a team that competes to win. They understand that to be successful, personal goals have to come second to team goals. A Rod had every right to try and go for the highest possible number of dollars, but in doing so, he has to relinquish any claim to caring about anything else.

By opting out of his contract a full ten days before he had to, and by making the announcement during the marquee event of his sport, A Rod demonstrated exactly what his value system entailed. That is, A Rod is first, last, and always about one thing: A Rod. He is an ego run amok. How often do you hear teams looking for players with that quality?

After all, the Yankees had made it clear that they would be willing to offer A Rod an extension that would be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million a year for five years (beyond the three years at $27 million already left on his record-breaking ten-year, $252 million contract). Knowing Boras's sleazeball ways (just ask the Dodgers and his handling of J.D. Drew's opt-out last year), A Rod would not be on his way out of New York if there wasn't a team out there whispering that it would offer more.

Again, A Rod has every right to try and do better than an eight-year, $240 million offer (on top of the approximately $180 million he has already made from the contract he opted out of). But that means he is the guy that puts a few extra million above all else. Former Giants General Manager George Young was right when he famously uttered the quote that started this piece. A Rod can say whatever he wants about the uncertainty surrounding the Yankees, from a new manager to pending free agents to the Steinbrenner sons asserting themselves in the front office, but it's a load of bull. He's going for every penny he can get, like a ten-year old sprawled on the floor gathering coins from a crashed piggy bank.

A Rod's actions speak louder than his words. After spending an entire season talking about how much he wanted to stay in New York, and after being embraced by Yankee fans like never before, he didn't even bother to wait for the ten-day period to expire. He didn't give the Yankees a chance to pitch him an extension. He knew that the Yankees had said, in no uncertain terms, that if he opted out of his contract, which would result in the Yankees losing the $21 million the Texas Rangers had agreed to pay the Yankees to subsidize A Rod's contract as part of the 2004 deal that brought A Rod to New York, it made no financial sense for the Yankees to pursue him in free agency. So, he knew that by taking this action, he was saying goodbye to the Yankees, or taking a huge risk on the belief of his agent that the Yankees were bluffing.

In effect, A Rod showed, yet again, that he is a me-first baseball player, one who fundamentally doesn't understand the concept of being part of a team. Nowhere is that clearer than in his decision to try and upstage his sport's biggest moment, the last game of the World Series. Again, it wasn't about baseball or the Yankees, but about A Rod himself. And how fitting that he placed himself above the game on the same day he didn't bother to show up to accept the Henry Aaron Award from Aaron himself. A Rod couldn't have sent a stronger message that he has no respect for the game if he had bought a billboard at Coors Field for last night's game.

Where do the Yankees go from here? I think that from a long-term perspective, they are much better off not being tied down by an eight-year, more than $200 million commitment to a player with a questionable make-up that has never shown that he can be a force in the post-season. But it would be truly unfair to A Rod's regular season numbers to deny that losing him will have an impact in the short term, mainly next year. After all, to get to the post-season, you need to have enough hitting to win, especially when you plan on relying on a lot of untested young arms in the starting rotation. The Yankees were missing a big right-handed bat this year, so with the loss of A Rod, now they need two. And as much as Yankee bashers would have you think the Bombers can just buy whatever they want, it's not true. There are not a lot of dependable right-handed bats on the trade and free agency markets right now.

So long as the team doesn't panic and give away too much of their young pitching to replace the hole A Rod has left in the lineup, I think the long-term effect of A Rod's departure will be positive. With a new manager and A Rod gone, the Yankees can build an environment with the types of players that help you win. They can try and build the next era of championships.

If I was Brian Cashman, my first move would be to try and get Joe Crede from the Chicago White Sox to play third base. The White Sox would like to move Crede, since he is due to make more than $5 million in 2008, and they have the inexpensive second-year player Josh Fields waiting in the wings to take over. Crede had injuries in 2007 that limited him to 47 games, but in 2006 he blossomed, hitting .286 with 30 home runs and 94 runs batted in. He is a good fielder and has a good reputation as a team guy. And, most of all, he has demonstrated his ability to flourish on the big stage, hitting .294 with two home runs in the 2005 World Series and .368 with two homers and seven runs batted in in the 2005 American League Championship Series. Sure, Crede's regular season numbers are quite a tumble from A Rod's 2007 accomplishments, but, unlike A Rod, Crede has demonstrated that he knows what it takes to win big games, and he won't hurt the chemistry of the locker room. It would be a step in the right direction in demonstrating that winning goes beyond putting up numbers that make fantasy league owners drool.

You see, I believe it's no coincidence that A Rod has failed on the big stage time and time again. Despite the one-on-one, pitcher-versus-batter battles of baseball, the sport is still, at heart, a team game. The teams that win tend to play the right way. They get good pitching, timely hitting, and avoid the kind of mistakes that sink games. It doesn't necessarily take big sluggers to win the World Series.

Don't believe me? Between 1996 and 2000, during which the Yankees won the World Series four of five years, the heart of the order averaged the following seasons:

Paul O'Neill
.302 batting average, 20.2 home runs, 106.8 runs batted in

Bernie Williams
.324 batting average, 26.2 home runs, 107 runs batted in

Tino Martinez
.278 batting average, 28.2 home runs, 115.4 runs batted in

These guys posted very good numbers, yes, but none of them even sniffed the level of A Rod's 2007 season (.314, 54, 156). And yet, while those guys won four rings, A Rod only got out of the first round with the Yankees once in four years. I think it's interesting that Martinez's best year in that era (.296, 44 home runs, 141 runs batted in) came in 1997, when the Yankees lost in the first round to the Indians. In fact, between 1996 and 2000, no Yankee player won a league MVP award. The lesson isn't that you can't win with a guy having a monster year. That's just silly. But what these numbers do tell you is that you don't need a guy putting up huge MVP numbers to win the World Series.

In fact, winning in the regular season and succeeding in the playoffs are two very different propositions. During the regular season, batters can fatten up on bad pitching and bad teams to pump up their statistics. There is no shame in that. You have to beat the bad teams to make it to the post-season, and not every batter can make mediocre pitchers consistently pay the price for their mistakes. Rather, cashing in on bad pitches is what makes guys like A Rod able to put up monster numbers like he did last season. But in the playoffs, you rarely get to face a pitcher that is less than good. The skill as a hitter then becomes finding a way to succeed against good pitching, whether that means working a walk, slapping a single the other way, or thinking your way through an at-bat and being able to put yourself in a position to hit a ball hard. That very skill is one that A Rod has not mastered, and, more importantly, he has shown no indication that it is an ability he will ever have.

Simply put, again, winning in the post-season is about good pitching, timely hitting and avoiding mistakes. While during the regular season A Rod demonstrated a nearly unparallelled ability to succeed, he has not demonstrated the ability to solve good pitching, hit in the clutch, or make good decisions in the post-season. It's that simple.

So farewell, A Rod. Let your post-season struggles, me-first attitude that infects a locker room and year-round self-obsession become some other team's troubles (how perfect would it be for A Rod to replace Barry Bonds in San Francisco?). If the Yankees are smart, they will acknowledge A Rod's impressive regular season accomplishments and move on, building a team that succeeds in October. That is one thing A Rod has not been able to accomplish so far. George Young's quote goes both ways. For the Yankees, it's about the money; the money they no longer have to waste on a toxic player with one run batted in in his last 44 playoff at-bats, and who is zero for his last 18 in the post-season with runners in scoring position.

Best of all Yankee fans can go back to waiting for players to earn their status as greats before being prematurely coronated. They were burned once by A Rod. It will be hard to get them to fall for another false idol anytime soon.

“Grey’s” and “Earl” Change, but Is It for the Better?

[NOTE: The following article will also appear as my regular television column for WILDsound.]

There is a well-known website, Jump the Shark, whose sole reason for existence is to measure when television shows start to go bad. It exists because shows almost always do, eventually, go bad. It’s hard to sustain the quality of a program over the long haul. Really hard. Like, trying to get Donald Trump to shut up hard. It’s rare for a television show to avoid a decline, and it’s even rarer to find one that does so without making any major changes to its core cast and concept. (“Scrubs” springs to mind as a current offering that has managed to dodge the bullet.)

What’s worse is that there is no formula to follow to guarantee a drop-off in quality. Sticking to the show’s tried-and-true premise and making a radical change have both produced successes and failures. This is clearly a case-by-case issue.

In an October 19 New York Times article, Edward Wyatt pointed out that “Prison Break” and “House” have both taken their characters on different courses this season but have achieved conflicting results (“House” is a hit, while the ratings for “Prison Break” have plummeted). To me, no two shows have undergone more interesting overhauls this season than “Grey’s Anatomy” and “My Name Is Earl.” (Coincidentally, both shows feature blonde actresses who won last year’s Emmy for Best Supporting Actress, Jamie Pressly in the comedy category for “Earl” and Katherine Heigl in the dramatic category for “Grey’s.”)

In the case of “Grey’s,” this season’s changes were not entirely driven by the show’s writers. When ABC fired Isaiah Washington over the summer, series creator Shonda Rimes was left to pick up the pieces of losing one of her central characters, along with one of her primary story lines (Washington’s Dr. Preston Burke’s romance with intern Dr. Cristina Yang, played by Sandra Oh).

Rimes had already taken a chance earlier and spun off another main character, Dr. Addison Montgomery (Kate Walsh), into a new show (“Private Practice”). She was also faced with the problem of accounting for the professional progression of the show’s doctors (the interns couldn’t be interns forever), essentially forcing her to shake up the medical dynamics on the show.

For the most part, the injection of new blood has been good for “Grey’s.” By the end of last year’s third season, the plots and dynamics had gotten stale. The will-they-won’t-they waltz of whiny, self-centered intern Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) and hangdog, brooding neurosurgeon, Dr. Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), had settled firmly into “Who gives a flying, uh, damn anymore?” territory. Same with the repetitive, opposite’s-attract head-butting of Burke and Cristina. And I’m not sure anyone ever cared about the highly improbable love triangle between put-upon nerd Dr. George O’Malley (T.R. Knight), emotionally unstable Dr. Izzie Stevens (Heigl) and bullying orthopedic surgeon Dr. Callie Torres (Sara Ramirez).

In general, the characters had become so self-involved and so increasingly unlikable that any sense of identification or empathy was lost, returning only briefly when a tragic patient emerged to tug at our heartstrings. And when you care more about the guest stars’ characters than the leads, well, the shark and the jumping ramp are clearly in sight.

So what happened this year? Well, we still have the love triangle and the weekly Meredith-Derek dance, but some new elements have enlivened the increasingly moribund Seattle Grace hallways and elevators. The interns are now residents (except for George, who flunked his exams and has to repeat the year), opening up a whole new dynamic: Cristina wants to be the heir apparent to the “Nazi” nickname given to Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson), refusing to learn her interns’ names, instead addressing them by number; Izzy struggles to get the respect of her charges who have heard about her killing her patient/boyfriend Denny; Dr. Alex Karev (Justin Chambers) is forced to relate to a new group of people (never a good thing for him), including Norman, an intern old enough to be his grandfather (Edward Herrmann, far more jovial than his stern turn as the family patriarch on “Gilmore Girls”); and Meredith has to be a teacher, not easy for the me-first doctor who still has plenty of her own issues to address, and even more difficult when it involves supervising her long-lost half-sister, Dr. Lexie Grey (Chyler Leigh), someone she would be much happier ignoring completely.

But as an audience, I don’t think we can agree with Meredith’s take on Lexie. Lexie is nicer and far more self-aware than Meredith, which makes us root for her in a way we could never pull for ice princess Meredith. Like Meredith, Lexie recently lost her mother (“Grey’s” parents have the life expectancy of Chernobyl survivors), but unlike Meredith, Lexie lost a parent with whom she was close. And yet, Lexie’s fortitude in soldiering on is something Meredith, who seems to get waylaid by the slightest setback, can learn from.

Shaking up “Grey’s” represented a huge risk, since the show has a huge audience on the night with the highest profile (Thursdays) and demands the highest commercial rates of any scripted program. But the gamble seems to have paid off, at least in the short term. Lexie, Norman and the changed medical dynamics give us something else to concentrate on other than the show’s elements that had grown tired and off-putting.

The changes on “Grey’s” have acted like a defibrillator shock to the show, jerking it to life. The patient is still in guarded condition, but at least it has a heart beat, along with a chance to survive and thrive.

Meanwhile, over at “My Name Is Earl,” the new direction has been undertaken wholly voluntarily. There have been no cast changes, and the core characters remain intact: reformed petty criminal Earl Hickey (Jason Lee); his child-like brother, Randy (Ethan Suplee); his trailer trash ex-wife, Joy (Pressley); Joy’s good-hearted witness-protection-program refugee husband, Darnell (Eddie Steeples); and the gang’s friend Catalina (Nadine Velazquez), a motel maid and exotic dancer who just may be the smartest one in the bunch.

In the show’s pilot, Earl finds karma thanks to winning the lottery, getting hit by a car, and watching Carson Daly (believe it or not). He decides to reform his life by making a list of everything he did wrong and trying to make up for his misdeeds. For the first two seasons, each episode was structured the exact same way: Earl chooses an item from his list and, with Randy in tow, sets out to fix the chaos he had wrought. In nearly every episode, he would find that things are not as easy to make right as he thought they would be, and, since he lives in such a small town, Joy, Darnell, Catalina, and a host of other recurring characters would figure into the problem. But, in the end, Earl would find a way to make things right, ending each episode by crossing the item off of his list.

Then, in last season’s finale, everything changed. Earl decided to take the rap at Joy’s trial (she stole a store’s truck after they wouldn’t let her return a television, but, oops, unbeknownst to her, the truck had an employee in the back at the time) so she can avoid a “third strike” that would send her to prison for life, taking her away from her two kids. It seemed unlikely that Earl would spend much time behind bars, since it would be hard for him to cross items off of his list while he was incarcerated. And yet, as the new season began, that is exactly what executive producer Greg Garcia has decided to do.

The third season of “Earl” has completely reinvented the premise of the show. Earl is in jail. Still. While in jail, he is powerless to work on his list. So, for the first time, the episodes are built around premises completely unrelated to Earl’s list (although, even in prison, he can’t escape figures from his past ... again, it’s a small town). Instead, the characters all have to deal with issues related to Earl’s incarceration, with Earl trying to survive, Randy suffering from severe separation anxiety (that he addresses by becoming a guard at the prison), and Joy wrestling with her guilt (although, last week she is relieved to find out that by tricking Earl into marrying her years ago, she saved him from participating in a big robbery that would have landed him in jail for a long time).

Instead of being bound to Earl’s list, plots have revolved around more adventurous ideas, like Earl trying to make peace between two rival gang leaders in an effort to cut time off of his sentence (turns out the gang leaders are in love, and the fights are a chance for them to get close), and a truly surreal exploration of the imaginations of the main characters (all fueled by Earl’s writer’s block in a prison creative writing class).

Garcia’s decision to blow up the show and start over again was risky. While “Earl” is hardly a hit on the “Grey’s Anatomy” level, it is a solid performer and part of NBC’s critically-revered, demographically desirable Thursday night lineup of single-camera, half-hour comedies. And since it is not a ratings juggernaut, any alienation of the show’s fan base could have swift and irreparable repercussions. Was it worth it? So far, the shake-up has been a big success.

You see, “Earl” was always my least favorite program of the two-hour NBC comedy block. I found “The Office,” “30 Rock” and “Scrubs” to be far more interesting and unpredictable. As I noted earlier, every episode of “Earl” followed the same track, but its saving grace was that the jokes were sharp and the actors were solid, so while the show was a formula, it was an entertaining one. It also didn’t hurt that Garcia made great use of guest stars, making ingenious choices like casting Norm McDonald in the role of the son of a character earlier played by Burt Reynolds (you may recall that McDonald often spoofed Reynolds on “Saturday Night Live”).

But no matter what else Garcia did right, the formula was bound to wear thin eventually. He took a solid risk by weaning the audience off of the list-item-per-episode format of the first two seasons. In doing so, it freed Garcia from having to make a list of his own misdeeds one day that begins with: “Ran my show into the ground by clinging to a formula too long.”