Promotional Items of the Damned

Given how oppressively hot it has been the past week or so in Los Angeles, it’s curious how TNT has been sending out promotional items that have all but melted by the time they reach their recipients’ doors.

For tonight’s episode of “The Closer,� in which Brenda (Kyra Sedgwick) turns 40, TNT mailed out a box filled with confetti – ugh, more junk to clean up – and, way down at the bottom, a little smashed Hostess cupcake (referencing Brenda’s ongoing junk-food battle). Of course, the box had been sitting in the sun for who knows how long before I found it, so the cupcake looked like a baggie filled with brown ooze; I’ll spare you any further, more graphic description. Had Brenda seen this, she’d lose her taste for such snacks.

Perhaps even worse was today’s offering, promoting “Battleground,� the clever first installment of “Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King� (debuting Wednesday, July 12), in which William Hurt plays a hit man who finds himself bedeviled by those tiny little green Army men who come to life with far more murderous intentions than the ones in “Toy Story.� For this, I received some Gummi Army Guys, or at least that’s what the bag insisted was inside – all I could see was a gooey green mass, the soldiers within having welded themselves to one another in a most unsavory cluster of glop. Even now, hours later, the rubbery fellas have yet to extricate themselves from one another. Maybe this is TNT’s way of keeping my own appetite in check.