Story for the Week
I was at my dad’s recently, and he was watching an episode of Law & Order from March 1992. I wasn’t really paying attention to the episode because I was fixing something on his computer, but I turned around to look at the TV when I heard a very familiar voice. I immediately paused the show and called Corinne into the room. She was annoyed 🙄 until her mouth dropped open 😲 when she realized that the actress I pointed out was 23-year-old Chandra Wilson, who we know and love as Dr. Miranda Bailey on Grey’s Anatomy. Chandra has only one earlier acting credit listed on IMDB.com, so even if Law & Order wasn’t her second ever acting job, it was definitely early in her career.
Over the last few years, as I’ve introduced Corinne to a number of shows and movies I watched 20 and 30 years ago, I point out actors that she only knows from more recent roles. When we watched Justice League and Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, she recognized Jeremy Irons as the voice of Scar from The Lion King. When we watched In & Out, she recognized Joan Cusack as the voice of Jessie in all of the Toy Story movies. She was also a little surprised when she discovered that Mandy Moore, who plays Rebecca on This is Us, was also the voice of Rapunzel in Tangled. (I haven’t yet shown her the video for Elton John’s “Original Sin.” I think that might just blow her mind.)
We’ve also been re-watching Friends on HBO Max. Now that Corinne is older, she actually understands it more (and sometimes that horrifies her 🤣). We’ve been to The Friends Experience in Chicago twice, and we plan to watch Friends: The Reunion when it airs this week. We’ve also determined that, despite its continued popularity, Friends would likely never get made as a new show today. Joey is a womanizer, Monica is regularly fat-shamed because of her past, Rachel gets called slutty…. Honestly, there’s something to dislike about all of the characters.
In an episode we just watched yesterday, Phoebe speaks to a director about Joey, who claimed he was fluent in French for the audition, and she tells the director in French that Joey is her little brother and asks the director to humor him because he’s “a little retarded.” No one uses that word to describe the developmentally disabled anymore, and Corinne tells me it’s actually called “the R slur” and said Phoebe would be “cancelled.”
We’re almost halfway through the last season, so we really just saw the episodes with Charlie, played by Aisha Tyler. When Corinne saw her, she said, “Wait. Wasn’t she on Criminal Minds?” Why yes, yes she was. Friends hosted a number of well-known guest stars throughout its 10 seasons—Tom Selleck, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Reese Witherspoon, Christina Applegate, Danny DeVito, Paul Rudd, Alec Baldwin, Morgan Fairchild, Kathleen Turner, Susan Sarandon to name a few—all of them famous in their own right by the time they were on the show. But as we’ve watched the seasons back, I’m shocked at the number of people I forgot about who were just getting started as actors when they made appearances on Friends, much like the cast themselves.
Paget Brewster was a relative unknown prior to her six-episode stint as Kathy, before she became Emily Prentiss on Criminal Minds. Emily Procter guested on one episode before she became Calleigh Duquesne on CSI: Miami or Ainsley Hayes on West Wing. Corinne couldn’t believe it when we watched the episode where Rachel gets pulled over driving without a license in Monica’s car, and the cop who pulled her over was none other than Mark Consuelos, who she knows from Riverdale.
Speaking of Riverdale, there’s also Cole Sprouse, who played Ross’s son Ben for much of the series before moving on to The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and Riverdale. One of the last episodes we watched was when Joey does a guest spot on The $10,000 Pyramid, and one of the contestants was played by Gregory Jbara whose current gig is Garrett Moore, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information and unofficial Chief of Staff to Police Commissioner Frank Reagan on Blue Bloods. Steve Zahn, Leah Remini, Rebecca Romijn, Kristin Davis all guested on Friends before they went on to bigger parts that made them famous.
And since we’re talking guest spots, let’s finish where we started with Grey’s Anatomy. In an episode where Ross and Chandler go to a college reunion, a girl they made a pact never to date (which Chandler broke) is played by Dr. Meredith Grey herself, aka Ellen Pompeo.
So, as the saying goes, there are never small parts. And it’s clear that I watch too much TV. 😁
One of my favorite genres of TV is crime dramas. I’ve read plenty of books that I would watch as movies. This one would make a great episode of Criminal Minds. It was also a debut thriller by an author who I hope will go on to write many, many more.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
4 Stars for Guess Who by Chris McGeorge
411 pages
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Publication Date: September 18, 2018
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Hanover Square Press in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher’s Description
The rules are simple.
But the game is not.
At eleven years old, Morgan Sheppard solved the murder of a teacher when everyone else believed it to be a suicide. The publicity surrounding the case laid the foundation for his reputation as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes. He parlayed that fame into a gig as TV’s “resident detective,” solving the more typical tawdry daytime talk show mysteries like “Who is the father?” and “Is he cheating?”
Until, that is, Sheppard wakes up handcuffed to a bed in an unfamiliar hotel room. Around him, five strangers are slowly waking up, as well. Soon they discover a corpse in the bathtub and Sheppard is challenged to put his deductive skills to the test. One of the people in the room is the killer. He has three hours to solve the murder. If he doesn’t find the killer, they all will die.
************
Guess Who by Chris McGeorge is the intriguing story of Morgan Sheppard, the lead character in a true detective show who paved his way to adult fame when he solved a murder at age 11. When the story begins, Morgan wakes up in a hotel room with five strangers, and he is handcuffed to the bed. His task, which is NOT part of a TV show, is to determine which one of the strangers is a killer.
This book made me think of Criminal Minds, and I’m a huge fan of that show. A victim wakes up in a strange place, not knowing what’s happening or how he got there and has to figure out how to escape. I liked the flashbacks to give the reader hints along the way about how we got to the present day, although a timeframe might have been better instead of just starting the chapter with “Before….” For a while, I didn’t think we would get to the villain’s trigger (in Criminal Minds, there is always a trigger), but we got there and it was totally believable.
I really enjoyed this. The only reason I knocked it down a star is because it felt a little too drawn out in places. I would have liked to see less of the futile attempts to escape and more of the group dynamic among the people in the room. All in all, a great recommended read.
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