Hopkins? Engvall? I was surprised.

By Anne Louise Bannon

Okay, I know this is up a little later than I intended.  We’re still working out some glitches in the whole process here at Your Family Viewer.  But this is a special Thursday, and not only am I going to touch on a couple shows, I’m going to talk a little about ground rules (it’s a parenting thing, okay?), and a contest.  Yippee.

As I pulled together potential shows for today’s post, I was figuring that I’d be writing all sorts of warm fuzzy notes for The Bill Engvall Show, which airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. (ET) on TBS, and maybe mentioning the ABC News series Hopkins, premiering tonight (June 26) at 10 p.m. in passing.

This is because I really like The Bill Engvall Show.  It’s mostly funny.  The parents act like parents, and Bill Pearson (Bill Engvall) is a loving father who acts with appropriate authority, as opposed to most of the dads on TV who act like clueless idiots.  Okay, Pearson is sometimes clueless, but in the end, he usually has his head on straight.  And the show is mostly family safe (there are references to healthy marital relations) and family friendly.

But in tonight’s episode (about the Pearsons’ wedding anniversary and gift-giving), I was really bothered by the all the comments comparing Bill to a girl in a negative way.  “You scream like a girl,” his daughter complains at one point.  A masculine bracelet makes Bill look like a “pretty girl.”  Odd.  We don’t complain about women acting or looking like little boys in the same casually derisive way.  So maybe there’s some room for some attitude adjustment there.  That, and I’d love to see Bill do some dusting around the house and his daughter hitting the books while the boys chop veggies.

So on to Hopkins, another look at the famous Johns Hopkins medical center and the caregivers there, this time with an emphasis on the stories of the doctors and the effects their work has on them, which I really liked.  It’s not all that family-friendly – kids 12 and up should like it, especially those with medical aspirations.  Hopkins also falls in that serious gray area, safety-wise.  For example, one of the doctors profiled in the six-part series is a woman urologist, which means she’s looking at male private parts all day.  It’s handled about tastefully as you can with this subject – you can see the patient and Dr. Karen Boyle, but not what she’s actually working with.  And Dr. Boyle is very clinical about things like sexual activity – but she’s talking to a couple who is trying have a baby after his vasectomy has been reversed.  In other words, it’s appropriate to the context of what she’s doing, which is healing people.

Does that even need to be on TV?  It’s hard to say – there are folks out there who want to have kids after a vasectomy and would appreciate that information.  Urology is an important specialty to a lot of men and it’s interesting and good to see a woman working in that field, especially when so many of us have had to deal with male gynocologists.

The surgery scenes are tough to watch, especially the drilling sounds during the brain surgeries.  But, dang, Dr. Alfredo Qinones-Hinjosa is an incredible inspiration.  One other final caution, the show can get intense and in one of the later episodes, a family is going to have to make the heart-wrenching to take their young daughter off life support after a pool accident.

Sunday (6/29), at 8 p.m., you’ve got your pick of repeats of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (ABC) and Everybody Hates Chris (The CW) – two shows which make me glad I’ve got a DVR.  And there’s a new Million Dollar Password (CBS).  Watch carefully.  Host Regis Philbin lies.  The game is word definition, not word association.  You can associate just about anything with the word lime, but it’s always going to be a fruit.

Ground rules.  For obvious reasons, I have decided to moderate comments.  If we’re about family television and media here, it’s only fair that we try to keep it relatively family-safe, and you know how some folks are.  I’m all for disagreement – heck, I posted a comment from someone who vociferously disagreed with me about the value of Camp Rock.  But personal attacks will not get posted.  Civility is the order of the day, and if you can say I don’t agree with you, your comment goes up.  You say you think I’m evil, it won’t.  You want to be rude and mean-spirited, get your own blog.  They’re free.

Finally, our contest.  Yeah, I’m going to do a monthly YourFamilyViewer.com TV trivia contest.  The last Thursday of the month, I’ll post a question.  Everybody who sends the right answer to info@yourfamilyviewer.com, gets their name in the hat and I’ll have my husband pull a winner.  Oh, and make sure you include your e-mail address in your entry, or I can’t get in touch with you to send you your prize.

This month’s prize is a set of surgical scrubs from the Hopkins series.  And in honor of Hopkins and my upcoming natal day, this month’s question is (fire up your IMDB.com): Name the actor who played Marcus Welby, M.D.  Hint, he was a father who knew best.  The connection to my natal day – the exterior the show used for the hospital where Dr. Welby worked was the hospital where I was born.

And to my dear friend and sweetest guy on the planet, Mr. Programming Insider, Marc Berman – a big neener, neener.  I give prizes out.  You just list names and put up cheesy title song lyrics.  Okay, you do it daily though.  And Marc is a very dear friend and genuinely cool dude who’s been doing the trivia thing for some time and, yes, I stole the idea from him.

That’s all ’til Monday morning.