Austin360 blogs > TV Blog > Archives > 2004 > August > 23
Monday, August 23, 2004
Jane, we hardly knew ye …
Television is such an intimate medium … beams right into our living rooms and bedrooms, cozies right up to us like a member of the family.
So, we think we know the people in the box we see every day. We assume David Letterman is a wiseguy and Katie Couric is sweet as cotton candy. Martin Sheen is presidential, and Dennis Franz is a temper tantrum waiting to happen.
Once in a while our assumptions blow up, and we realize that folks on TV are not really our close friends. We don’t know them the way we think we do.
Last week’s revelations by former “Today” and “Dateline” anchor Jane Pauley caught us by surprise. This scrubbed and wholesome woman with the perfect career, perfect husband (“Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau) and perfect children had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2001.
How could someone so healthy-looking actually be sick?
Right before our eyes, she was battling manic depression, and we didn’t even suspect. Always calm and cool on the air, she fought her demons secretly, even after being hospitalized in the spring of 2001.
“My tides were fluctuating — back and forth — sometimes so fast they seemed to be spinning,” Pauley reveals in her new memoir, “Skywriting: A Life out of the Blue,” which hits bookstores Tuesday.
In excerpts published in People magazine, Pauley says her disorder was triggered by a rare reaction to drugs she was taking for hives. The drugs also caused her to gain weight, which viewers probably did notice as she began to expand on “Dateline.”
I noticed but assumed the 53-year-old Pauley was having that mid-life bloat that a lot of women in their 50s have. It just made her more the Everywoman we’ve always assumed her to be.
Actually, the revelation of bipolar disorder does make her more like us. She’s not perfect; she’s a real person. Television is her job. We’re not her friends. Would any of us announce our personal or health problems at our workplace, except maybe to close friends? Of course not.
After treatment, including taking lithium, Pauley says she’s gotten her condition under control. She’s making publicity rounds this week, promoting not only her book but her new daytime talk show, which debuts Aug. 30.
I hope Pauley revealed her condition because she wanted to, not because she felt she owed viewers this inside information. She doesn’t owe us anything. Like everybody else on TV, she has a right to a private life.
If Couric is crabby in real life, we shouldn’t care. If Letterman is really a sweetheart of a guy at home, we shouldn’t be surprised.
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