David Hinckley's reviewed "Saving Carrick" in this morning's New York Daily News. While he was generally positive, he raised couple of issues that are worth talking about. And what better place than here?

"What ["Saving Carrick"] doesn't address directly, " David writes, "is how a situation like this impacts a home that doesn't have two parents who can afford to spend thousands of dollars on rehab programs. When hope can be a thin, fraying thread even for the Forbes family in Hastings-on-Hudson, imagine how it looks in the South Bronx?"

Tackling the South Bronx is, of course, more than Dateline could possibly pack into an hour. The book Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, as I've written elsewhere, addresses those issues with compelling clarity. It took author Adrian Nicole LeBlanc fourteen years to trace the impact of a pattern of drug abuse and violence on one extended family.

Even so, we certainly hope that "Saving Carrick" conveys one of our major points better than David would indicate. It's extremely difficult for middle class parents to pay for all of these services. Insurance coverage is a travesty for substance abuse and mental health. We have, several times, taken premature distributions on our retirement IRAs to pay medical expenses. Many other people are mortgaged to the hilt, or have lost everything, to pay for a loved-one's care.

David also writes that the show "will resonate with every family that has been in their situation." That's a lot of families but, as Deirdre pointed out when she called on her way to work, we did the show "not for people who can identify with us but for people who need to identify with us."

David sat next to me when he joined the Daily News from a paper in New Jersey in the early 1980s. I admired him from the get-go. We didn't have a lot in common, although we were doing similar jobs at the time — copyediting features and making sure that the pages got pasted up correctly in the composing room.

The difference between us could be observed around 1 p.m., when I'd be dousing two or three or four double bourbons in a joint like Louie's East, Ferdi's or Costello's while David was industriously working on a story for the paper on his own time. Over the years he has become one of the city's most incisive, prolific and eclectic writers — testimony, if not to the sober life, then to a man who knows what he wants and does it well.