SUNDAY SCARIES: Saints, Sinners, and the Rest of Us
Today is the Feast of St. Francis, eight hundred years after he died. Churches all over the country will spend the morning blessing people’s dogs and cats in his name (across the river at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, they’ve walked a camel, a yak, a kangaroo and a python up the aisle).
For most CEOs (“Christmas and Easter Only Christians”, that is) we know him from frescoes and stained glass depictions with the gold halo and the birds. It seemed like a fitting topic this week, when some modern day saints and sinners were immortalized in other ways, with one shining thing standing in for everything else about them.
1. The Legendary Rich Silverstein
This week Rich Silverstein, who is 77, announced he’s stepping down after forty-three years at the agency he started with Jeff Goodby, and his parting words were “It has always been about the people, and it always will be.” The agency sent him off with 1-507-GPT-RICH, a phone line where an AI voice trained on decades of his interviews will critique your idea, your brief or even your typeface the way he would.
That phone line has a lot to live up to. Rich and Jeff met in Hal Riney’s San Francisco office and opened their own place with Andy Berlin on April 15, 1983, and they’ve long been the standard I measure my own work against. For many years my favorite ad of all time was theirs. Shot by Michael Bay, it features a man with a homemade Alexander Hamilton assassination museum who bites into a mouthful of peanut butter and then can’t say “Aaron Burr” to win the DJ radio quiz about who shot Hamilton.
As legend has it, the focus groups kept saying that the only time anybody thought about buying milk was when they’d run out of it, and Goodby wrote “got milk?” as a placeholder for the pitch meeting. Rich insisted the line needed “a look,” and he set it in Phenix American, a condensed display face Morris Fuller Benton drew for American Type Founders in 1935, nearly sixty years before anyone put it on a milk carton. It’s a flawless TV spot and perfectly demonstrated how they saw things differently.
The rest of Rich’s highlight reel is a mix of memories from my teens and some of the best ideas ever made for marketing.
For Nike SB they treated tennis players and joggers the way cops treat skateboarders, stopping them and writing them tickets for playing.
For SEGA, Rich wanted something as frantic as the kids playing the games, so he gave an animation team three seconds of airtime and told them to make the most expensive ad they could fit inside it.
For Logitech’s Revue, a box that connected your computer to your TV, they played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and cast Kevin Bacon as both himself and his own superfan.
For Budweiser they gave us Louie and Frankie, the chameleons who showed up at the 1998 Super Bowl to resent the frogs, and then “Weird Without Beer,” which ran every cliché of a beer commercial (the guys after work, the dumb masculine banter) with something like an ear of corn where the beer should be, so you thought about the beer the whole time without ever seeing it.
And in 2019 they brought Salvador Dalí back from the dead as a deepfake at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, where he greets visitors in his own voice, which turned out to be practice for the phone line, and the version of Rich our business wanted to hold on to was the one that answers it.
Takeaway: We’re so short on Rich Silversteins these days that when one finally walks out the door, we keep his voice on the line.
(Sources: Campaign, September 30, 2026; MediaPost, September 30, 2026; Ad Age, October 1, 2026; SF Standard, September 29, 2026; Fonts In Use; MasterClass; Adweek; Dezeen, May 24, 2019)
2. The Notorious Chris Hansen
For about twenty years, Chris Hansen has been a man and a meme at the same time. The show that made him, To Catch a Predator, was about grown men showing up at a house to meet a child, which is about as unfunny as television gets. But, like Maury revealing the real dad and the fights starting on Jerry Springer, somewhere along the way the culture started watching for the spectacle and not the criminal horror.
We kept the line “why don’t you have a seat” for a few million reaction videos and got bored of the real predators (and those who weren’t proven to have done anything like a prosecutor in Texas who shot himself in 2006 when cameras and SWAT came to his door).
Last weekend A24 released Primetime, with Robert Pattinson playing Hansen, and the director, Lance Oppenheim, says the whole idea started with a $30 Cameo Hansen recorded for him years ago, and he’s been unusually candid about what he made: “It almost felt like we were adapting the Internet’s version of Chris Hansen rather than the real Chris Hansen.”
Hansen has been on both sides of that kind of camera. In 2011 a tabloid caught him on hidden camera with a woman who wasn’t his wife, and in 2019 police in Stamford, Connecticut arrested him over $13,000 in bounced checks, a case that was later dismissed.
When Primetime opened, he called it “complete fiction,” and bought thirty-second spots on 3,500 screens that run before the movie for its entire first month, where he walks into a kitchen, tells the audience to have a seat, and sends them to his own streaming service, “where the real work continues every day.” (Which is about as close as anyone will come to one of the original predators from TCAP buying an ad to run during the commercial breaks of their own episode.)
Takeaway: We took a man who spent years confronting predators on camera and kept the catchphrase, because a meme is a lot easier to laugh at than what the show was about.
(Sources: Fox News, September 29, 2026; NBC News, January 2019; WTNH, 2019; Columbia Journalism Review, 2007; CinemaBlend, September 17, 2026; Columbia Journalism Review, September 30, 2026; Complex, September 28, 2026)
3. The Infamous Elizabeth Holmes
Most people already know Elizabeth Holmes as Amanda Seyfried in a black turtleneck, a performance that won Seyfried an Emmy for The Dropout, and on Thursday the New York Film Festival screened You Can See Everything, a documentary the same Lance Oppenheim made with Nathan Fielder (Oppenheim had a busy year).
For the movie, the two of them moved in with Holmes and her partner for 34 days leading up to her reporting to federal prison to start an eleven-year sentence for defrauding investors.
Like a doppelganger run in, Seyfried actually turns up in the film, which puts the actress and the woman she played on the same screen. Fielder has spent his whole career rehearsing real life on camera, and he still came out of it unsure what he’d seen. “She seems so genuine at times,” he said on Friday. “But then I’m like, ‘no’… I know she’s a liar.” It opens in theaters October 16, and people will line up for it, as well they should. It’s a remarkable achievement in discomfort.
Takeaway: Elizabeth Holmes is serving eleven years in federal prison, and her commitment to her bright-eyed innocence throughout the film will go down in history as the most awkward delusion ever captured on film.
(Sources: Variety, October 2, 2026; A24; Television Academy, 2022)
4. The Veteran King With His Castles
LeBron James is 41, starting his twenty-fourth season, and playing for the 76ers on a two-year deal for about $8 million, the veteran’s minimum. At media day on Monday he closed his first press conference with “I didn’t leave my family to lose in the second round.”
On Tuesday, after his first practice, he got into a helicopter and flew to New York, and when he was asked where he’d be living, he said, “Multiple residences.” PhillyVoice did the math on a charter at about $6,000 each way for every home game and practice, and it comes to roughly $804,000 a year, about a fifth of what he makes this season, for the privilege of not sleeping in Philadelphia.
Philly has been here before. Wilt Chamberlain lived in New York for most of his time as a Sixer and wrote later, “They had always resented my living in New York… they thought it was an insult to Philadelphia.”
This is the city that booed Santa Claus at an Eagles game in 1968, and they’re fine being disliked by even the stars who it’s paying to play for them.
Takeaway: My mayor’s still Muslim, my bagel’s still Jewish, the Pope’s on our side, Knicks in five!
(Sources: Philadelphia Inquirer, July 27 and September 28, 2026; PhillyVoice, July 2026; Yahoo Sports, October 2, 2026; Heavy, September 29, 2026)
This Week’s Red Thread: Under the Halo
St. Francis was not born a saint with birds everywhere. He was actually a spoiled rich kid. The son of the wealthiest cloth merchant in Assisi, his first biographer called him “not a hoarder of money but a squanderer.” He wanted to be a knight, went to war against Perugia, and spent a year as a POW. He stripped off his clothes in front of the bishop, handed them back to his father, and gave away everything he owned.
In his own words, near the end of his life: “While I was in sin, it seemed very bitter to me to see lepers. And the Lord Himself led me among them.” By the end he was nearly blind, and when a doctor came to burn his temples with a hot iron, he talked to the iron first: “Brother Fire… be courteous to me in this hour.” On the evening of October 3, 1226, at about 44, he asked to be laid on the bare ground under a borrowed cloth, and died there.
In my opinion, he seems like the weirdest and most uncomfortable person you could have met in thirteenth-century Italy. But eight hundred years later he’s a fresco, halo, a bird and a stone figure on a birdbath, which is what we tend to do with saints. Their real life story is not the same one on the stained glass windows.
Before the chimney and the reindeer, my own namesake, St. Nicholas was a Turkish bishop who, as the stories claim, tossed bags of gold through a poor man’s window so the man wouldn’t have to sell his daughters into sexual slavery, and who brought three boys back to life after a butcher had killed them and pickled them in a barrel. (Merry Xmas!!)
Francis got the same cleanup. Forty years after he died, his own order picked one official biography and ordered the rest destroyed. The halo was added after he was gone, and what it does best is let everybody stop looking at the lepers, the hot iron and the bare ground.
Rich Silverstein once explained his half of the partnership in three words, “I see things,” and there’s something funny and a little wonderful about the fact that what will keep teaching people to see things differently, now that he’s moving on, is a voice on the other end of a phone.
— NB