Cigna ad
Advance apologies: Today’s column is about an ad. But it’s a TV-centric ad built for longtime fans of TV, and in particular for fans of TV’s medical series.
The goal of the 30-second spot, by health insurance company Cigna, is to get people to see their real doctors for checkups. So it’s brought together five TV doctors to recommend office visits. One by one the actors pop up in hospital garb, to make fun of the fact that they know nothing about doctoring, that they only played one on TV.
The group: Alan Alda, who was Hawkeye on “M*A*S*H”; Lisa Edelstein, who was Cuddy on “House”; Donald Faison, who was Turk on “Scrubs”; Noah Wyle, who was Carter on “E.R.”; and Patrick Dempsey, who was McDreamy on “Grey’s Anatomy.”
It’s amusingly disorienting to see these folks all in one place, traveling through time and space and network boundaries to stand together.
The ad opens during surgery, with a nurse handing a scalpel to a masked doctor who turns out to be Alda. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” Alda says to us. “I’m just a TV doctor.”
Behind Alda, Dempsey pulls down his mask to add, “I never went to college.”
Faison, walking down a hallway in scrubs, says, “I don’t do blood.”
At the end, Alda says to all of them, “Doctor poses,” and the actors all put on the concerned, knowing, compassionate faces that TV doctors rely on.
Watch it here:
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.