Word: piloting
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Grosse Pointe (the WB, Fridays starting Sept. 22, 8:30 p.m. E.T.) is a sitcom a clef: a behind-the-scenes satire of a teen soap that more than slightly resembles 90210. The pilot spares no one: not Star, whose clone on Pointe is a smarmy phony; not Shannen Doherty, whose reign of terror on the 90210 set is replicated eerily by Hunter Fallow (Irene Molloy). Nicely cast and smartly paced, it's a sassy, catty riot...
...will never see it. At least, not exactly as Star meant you to. For the original pilot was also unsparing of 90210 star Tori Spelling, Aaron's daughter. Her pitch-perfect analogue is Marcy Sternfeld (Lindsay Sloane), a dramatically challenged actress who's had career help from various surgical upgrades and a big-shot "uncle" in the TV biz. The pilot wounded Tori's dad--who just happens to produce the WB's top-rated series, 7th Heaven--and the network sent Star back to the drawing board to make nice...
...changes--in a few, but crucial scenes--don't spare Tori so much as Daddy. Gone from the pilot is Marcy's uncle--and along with him, a layer of show-biz complexity and tension. But remaining is Sloane's Marcy/Tori, a brilliant comic creation down to her slightest tic, squeak and emotion-punctuating chest thrust. Marcy is really Pointe's most likable character, a good-hearted dim bulb made a nervous wreck by gossip and the stress of looking impossibly good. (A bulimia scene, also cut, was a cruel but apt picture of the flip side...
...long as they don't turn out to have criminal records, they'll be able to apply for permanent residency in a year. Even Cuba's official newspaper, Granma, now acknowledges that what Havana first claimed was a hijacking was, in fact, an escape plan hatched by the pilot...
...training. Today's medical or surgical residencies are like years on end of Marine boot camp, where the values of the group are instilled at the expense of the values brought to the experience by each individual entering it. In the presence of teachers who exemplify the fighter-pilot mentality of success in the face of mortal danger, the idealism and even the humanity become imperiled. Too often, they are leached out in the long indoctrination. The best become like their teachers: they worship at the shrine of scientific objectivity, and they wrap themselves in a mantle of depersonalization that...