What The L?

I don't know if you caught Judd Apatow's The Zen Diaries Of Garry Shandling, but it's worth checking out.  It's a four-hour documentary on Apatow's mentor, who was a talented a troubled man.

But I want to talk about the closed captioning.

One of the people they interviewed was Paul Willson, who acted on It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show. (He might be better known as one of the regulars on Cheers and one of the Bobs in Office Space.)

The closed captioning spelled his name "Wilson." An understandable mistake, I suppose, except he'd been identified onscreen as "Willson" about ten seconds earlier.  Does the CC typist not pay attention to the video?

Also, writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss, who worked on It's Garry Shandling's Show and later The Simpsons, talked about other Shandling people who moved to The Simpsons, including David Mirkin. They didn't give his first name, though, and the CC typist guessed the last name was spelled "Merkin."

I'm afraid a Merkin is quite something else.