When is America gonna wake the Hell up when it comes to this issue?
Was Lucille Ball Lucy Ricardo? Did Don Ameche invent the telephone? Was Doris Day little miss innocent? Was John Wayne a military veteran? Was Glenn Close a psychopathic jilted mistress of a married man?
If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, you are clearly living in an alternate Universe. but you are not alone: an acquaintance of mine used to head the programming division for one of the major networks. When I met him and we got to talking about soap operas, I mentioned that when I was a kid and the plots and stars were much less glamorous than they came to be later, people used to go up to the actors and warn them that their spouse was having an affair with the next door neighbor, or the doctor, or the milkman; or that the son was sneaking cigarettes out of the house with his friends. The fellow replied to me, "What do you mean USED to? They STILL do."
So it seems that so many people thought that Bill Cosby WAS Cliff Huxtable or that his almost-funny humor on his record albums was reflective of his inner being rather than all of these being carefully scripted-for-the-masses works of less-than-art.
A former patient of mine told me about 25 years ago than she had at one time been Bill's fiancee here in Philadelphia and he was still calling her when he came to town for referrals for hookups, as they call them these days, with friends or acquaintances of hers. My entire office staff at the time was witness to her statements which she used to make in the waiting room in front of other patients. At the time I believed her, she was not an insignificant individual in her own right, but she was deliberately and somewhat inappropriately confessing all of this in public for some deep-seated reason. She claimed to have no regrets for not marrying him, BTW.
So when I hear that so-and-so is a "role model", I just shake my head in disbelief that people fall so easily for the persona which is so meticulously crafted for the masses and not understand that in most cases, they have not a single clue as to the true psyche of the "star" in question.
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the half hour to Boston thing. 
One of my friends is into that show. I'll have to check it out.
I guess life sucks so bad, people look to TV shows to make sense, to be all tidily resolved at the end. Very few things in our stress-filled lives are resolved in 30 or 60 minutes, so a TV show can give a sense of completion and satisfaction one rarely achieves ( unless you watch the Walking Dead or Game of Thrones 
)
And of course, cartoons teach us to accept the physics that allows for Roadrunner to get flattened by an ACME Company anvil and stand up 2 seconds later and say "meep meep" and zip away.
I suppose sitcoms and TV shows are like grown-up cartoons for some people, where reality is suspended for a story.
Too bad we humans are so gullible that some become convinced that suspended reality - or a larger-than-life, benevolent, morally pure TV persona - can be maintained in real life.
The greatest appeal for most CSI type shows is the character development, for me.
I can let the idiot stuff fly by, mostly.
Mostly.....
