"MEDIUM" ZONK!S - NEITHER RARE NOR WELL-DONE

"So who do you think's a hotter psychic?
Patricia Arquette, Jennifer Love Hewitt, or you?"
Dean, to Sam,
'Supernatural'

Ooooh! Here's a challenge! A 2-in-1 Zonk! to splain away.

A good pop culture reference should only provide enough information... information... information so that the audience gets the joke. But it shouldn't beat the audience over the head to get the point across.

Tain't funny if you splain it.

So in their lack of specifics, such Zonk!s hopefully give me as a Televisiologist plenty of room to wiggle out a reason why a TV show should be mentioned within another TV show AS a TV show, instead of being accepted as part of the same universe.

In this case, Dean was referring to the two network series that deal with women who believe in spooks. (They do, they do, they do, they DO believe in spooks!)

Patricia Arquette stars in 'Medium' on NBC, and Jennifer Love Hewitt is 'The Ghost Whisperer' on CBS.

But to have added in that trivia would have killed the pace of the joke-insult Dean was lobbing at his brother Sam.

(Actually it's kind of disturbing that a guy would even consider the "hotness" of his own brother, even if it was funny to compare him with two women.)

So the lack of specifics is my salvation. It's for the audience's sake at home that we know Dean is referring to two TV shows. But within the framework of his own Reality, who knows what Dean was talking about? Perhaps there's a fictional movie which stars both women as psychics. One's a blonde. One's a brunette. They're both hot.

And they fight crime!

Maybe the televersions of Ms. Arquette and Ms. Love Hewitt operate rival tele-psychic hotlines.........

It's open to anybody's guess - er, interpretation. But so long as the actual TV shows of 'Medium' and 'The Ghost Whisperer' were not mentioned, I'd say we were free and clear to find any other splainin that feels comfortable.

And as a disciple of the Reclining Spud, I always go for what's comfortable.

BCnU!
Tele-Toby