 Baseball season is nearing an end, which means that so, too, is my chance to watch TV commercials. I’m not much of a television watcher (well, I watch a lot of TV, but mostly on DVD), and about the only time I get a chance to see mainstream commercials is before a feature at a movie theatre, or during baseball season. That’s just fine with me; the things rarely live up to the standards of either high art or low camp, so I don’t feel like I’m missing much. Imagine, then, my surprise when a commercial for Traveler’s Insurance cropped up during a Red Sox-Cleveland playoff game featuring one of my all-time favorite character actors: this week’s That Guy!, Richard Edson. It’s actually a pretty good bit of casting, for a commercial – who better to embody Risk, the very personification of bad luck, than the laconic, hangdog Edson? His long, weary face (almost always sporting a mustache of one kind or another) and perpetual look of a wheedling cajoler has made me a longtime fan of his infrequent movie roles; he’s not the most prolific actor out there, but he tends to steal the show whenever he shows up.
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