The Faces Of Face Blindness

I'd love to think that this week's epidemic of TV face blindness is due to the fact that producers on both Hannibal and Arrested Development have as hard a time getting through their old New Yorkers as, um, I do. At one point in my life, I literally had a full year's worth of issues backlogged -- I promise I am not exaggerating -- and I got through them all, thanks to skippable articles like pop music reviews or profiles of athletes. Maybe these TV writers just got around to this article by Oliver Sacks about prosopagnosia and grasped the dramatic and comedic possibilities. If so, I'm psyched for them that they still have Lawrence Wright's big Scientology article to look forward to. It's a corker!

In reality, face blindness must be very inconvenient when it's not actually scary and unsettling. (I'll never know, since if there's a diametric opposite of face blindness -- face hyper-recognition -- I have it; it's how I recognized a sketch comedian I'd seen on TV one time more than a decade ago when I saw him at the gym last week. What up, Michael Blieden!) But when Chris Diamantopoulos's Marky Bark has it in the new fourth season of Arrested Development, it's played for laughs. Who could be a worse rebound guy for Lindsay (Portia De Rossi), one of the vainest and most self-centered characters in TV history, who not only can't tell she's pretty but needs her to reintroduce herself every time she's back in his company?

And while it probably doesn't happen too often that a person experiencing face blindness among a battery of symptoms of Cotard's Syndrome would find herself in a situation where an extremely creative murderer who's aware of your condition would exploit it to frame you for the extremely creative murder he's just committed, that is the exact fate of Georgina (Ellen Muth) is unlucky enough to suffer in the latest Hannibal. As if seeing every human head like this wasn't bad enough.

SWEET DREAMS!