Alliterative "Doctor" of children's literature / WED 9-15-21 / Collaborative principle in improv comedy / Exclamation of shock spelled in a modern way / Old rug in a courtroom / Garfield's romantic interest in the comics

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Never warmed up to this one. If you describe the theme, maybe it sounds OK, but solving it was mostly unpleasant. The "?" clues were bizarre to me. There's no rhyme or reason to them. There's no pattern to the wordplay or phrasing. It's just "let's try to mask the answer a little, just to add some other level to the puzzle." Are the clues supposed to be another example of a "fake"? Like a "fake-out"? Like, "haha, you thought we were talking about pancake batter, but really it's an eyelash batter ... say TOUCHÉ now!" I dunno. The whole cluing logic was lost on me. And the DENTAL CROWN clue wasn't even a fake, really. Not sure it even needed a "?". The cluing phrases aren't good misdirection. They don't sound like actual things at all. [Socket replacement?] makes me think of ... nothing. [Old rug in a courtroom?] is just nonsense. It's like you had a potentially great revealer (HEADFAKE) and then didn't know what to do with it exactly and so ended up with this. Constructors, please take my HEADFAKE Revealer Challenge and make a better HEADFAKE-themed puzzle. I believe it's out there, the Platonic Ideal of the HEADFAKE puzzle. But this one just doesn't have the zip and zing and thoughtfulness it should. And the fill was truly grating in many places, from the "just 'cause it's in your enormous wordlist doesn't make it good"PIECEWISE to the "that's not an exclamation, that's a chemical formula, at best"WOAH, to the always unwelcome ETAIL sitting alongside the far more unwelcome NONPC (which somehow manages to be worse than UNPC, which is itself a bogus term used by bigots who mistakenly believe they are free-speech warriors whose truth-telling the libs just can't handle!). AS IF I CARE is original but it's also just not what people say. "SEE IF I CARE!" would be a Great phrase. "LIKE I CARE" is definitely in-the-language. AS IF I CARE ... sigh, sure, maybe some people say that, but when two better phrases come to mind, maybe your phrase isn't really the one you should be going with. 

"Let's see what's behind DOOR *NUMBER* ONE" is how I remember the phrasing (from back when I occasionally watched that show, which was when I was a child, which feels like the show's intended audience, but what do I know). The most puzzling answer of all, though, was COARSE. How ... how is the answer here not HOARSE (53A: Roughly speaking?)!?!?!?! I don't associate COARSE with "speaking" at all, but HOARSE, wow perfect. The phrase "roughly speaking" suggests approximation, but you turn it around via the "?" clue and give us an answer that means "speaking roughly," great! But that answer should be HOARSE, which literally means "(of a person's voice) sounding rough or harsh" (Google/Oxford Languages) (my emph.). COARSE is wrong here. Bad. Flat-out ... just no.

I was stunned to learn that Doctor DE SOTO was famous enough to warrant crossword inclusion (62A: Alliterative "Doctor" of children's literature).  Pleasantly stunned. When DOOLITTLE obviously wasn't going to fit, I was stuck, but when DE SOTO came into view, I was reminded of reading that book to my daughter a lot when *she* was a child. I'd forgotten that Doctor DE SOTO was a William Steig creation. Man, that guy couldn't miss. Hey, why is "Doctor" in quotation marks in this clue? That mouse is a Doctor of Vulpine Dentistry, show him some respect! Anyway, to sum up, Doctor DE SOTO, D.V.D., good, the rest of this puzzle, pass. Thanks for listening, bye.