December, 2012 will go down as the month that Leslie Mann and Judd Apatow broke down the final barriers of intimacy in an already reality TV-obsessed world.
Mann and her two daughters star as thinly-veiled versions of themselves in Apatow's new film, This Is 40, with Paul Rudd standing in for the writer/producer as the family's patriarch. A film focused on the physical and emotional tribulations of hitting middle age, the posters and trailers alone indicate the story's depth of scatological revelation: constipation, hemorrhoids, sagging breasts and existential crises. And as if to further prepare Americans for the film's spare-no-detail nature, Mann spent much of her time on Friday's Tonight Show discussing her family's various ailments.
Sick the day before the show, Mann took along a camera as she received treatment; the audience got to watch her have blood drawn, among other things. She then discussed her dissatisfaction with stretch marks on her backside (contrasted with an impressive bikini photo on the cover of Vanity Fair), following that up with a detailed description of how she injured a toe.
To top it off, Mann spent several minutes describing the massive phlegm flow that Apatow produces (then both swallows and ejects) each morning.
In a world of scripted chat show interviews, this one certainly stood out.
