[...] if Winfrey had been planning her first afternoon show, as Couric has been doing for several months, it seems likely that she would have gone for a huge name - someone like Barbra Streisand or Jennifer Lopez, both of whom are on Couric's schedule later - or someone with an especially uplifting personal story, like Amy Copeland, Tuesday's guest, who lost her limbs to a flesh-eating bacteria. All well and good, up to a point, and that point was when the relatively pleasant but not especially revealing interview morphed into an infomercial with a clip from Simpson's new commercial for Weight Watchers. [...] just when we thought the shilling was over, Couric told her TV audience how they could join Simpson's weight-loss journey and receive two free weeks of Weight Watchers membership. [...] the women talked about the discovery that Crow has a benign brain tumor. Sure, it's a daytime talk show, and Couric wasn't grilling a woman who might become the next vice president of the U.S., but she's still a journalist, which is why it seemed odd not to ask the question. [...] though, survival in the daytime talk-show game depends on other assets: