Potter's allusion to The Wizard of Oz tells us immediately that this teleplay is going to be about a journey of awakening. The fantasies of a paranoid actor serve as a satire on the promise of television advertising and as a springboard for metaphysical speculation. Jack Black (the late Denholm Elliot) prefers his work in commercials-where family values are celebrated-to the 'filth' of television drama and the messy realities of his own life. "These twenty-second commercial inserts, as pure as the blue speckles in the detergent, remind him of the radiance of the religious sense of the world he had once glimpsed as a child," Potter has written. Now Black sees only a slimy, godless world in which he believes cameras are watching him and everyone else is reciting lines from a script. Black's faith in commercials represents for Potter "how the human dream for some concept of 'perfection,' some Zion or Eden or Golden City, will surface and take hold of whatever circumstances are at hand-no matter how ludicrous." Popular culture, as Potter shows us throughout his oeuvre, offers only a temporary respite from the tornado of life. Where it lets you down is usually worse than Kansas.