NBC (Saturdays, 8 P.M. ET)
D+
This sitcom starring Cosbyite Malcolm Jamal Warner as a graduate student in Manhattan is trapped in a dilemma. When it focuses on Warner as the mentor to a bunch of young kids at the Harlem community center where he works, the show is dull and morally didactic. When it loosens up to pose Warner as an innocent facing big-city perils or pursuing romance, it must contend with the fact that the star has precious little comic ability.
So this stuck-in-the-mud comedy slogs along, never able to establish a firm identity or generate laughs. Recently the show introduced Jessica Stone as Warner's Southern classmate. Bringing aboard a major character in mid-season is always an implicit admission that a show isn't working. A big part of the problem is artificial writing, as when one of Warner's wards swears him to secrecy and then jestingly confides, "I shot a man in Reno." Yeah, right. Like an 8-year-old in Harlem would be quoting from old Johnny Cash songs. Probably just couldn't think of an appropriate Buck Owens lyric.
CBS (Sun., Nov. 8, 8 P.M. ET)
B-
Hey, all you cats and chicks, come fly with me. Here's the miniseries devoted to the man who ranks right behind Elvis as the most celebrated popular singer of this century. Broadway veteran Philip Casnoff (see story, page 107) stars as young and 0l' Blue Eyes, following his arc from little wharf rat, singing for pennies in his mother's Hoboken saloon, to entertainment legend.
Things start slowly with a hokey depiction of the antipasto years when Frank was the only person who believed in his talent. As the decades roll by, both the action and the music improve. (Australian Tom Burlinson provides the voice for the young singer in live performances, and later, Frank Sinatra Jr. chips in a few vocals. But, for the most part, Sinatra's own recordings are used. This is the first mini to spawn a double CD sound track, a valuable retrospective of Sinatra's catalog.) The real fun doesn't begin until the '50s and '60s, the boozy Vegas and Palm Springs era. The most delicious scene presents the entire Rat Pack (Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, et al.) in a casino steam room with then Sen. John F. Kennedy—although as Sinatra notes, while introducing JFK to Sammy Davis Jr., "Around here, we call him chickie baby."
Besides Frank, no character has any real presence, except for his preternaturally loyal press agents and three of his wives. (Gina Gershon plays Nancy, Marcia Gay Harden is Ava Gardner, and Nina Siemaszko is Mia Farrow. The action stops before his 1976 marriage lo Barbara Marx.) That's because in the end, this is less a biography than a serial romance.
To keep the project in the realm of nonfiction, executive producer Tina Sinatra has preserved enough scenes that present her father as an arrogant, womanizing bully. But the flaws are offset by the mini's lingering over every setback and indignity he ever endured. The script even includes a 1950 suicide attempt, prompted by a lull in his popularity and another stormy chapter in his relationship with Gardner.
Casnoff manages to carry off a physical resemblance to Sinatra only for a short period on the second night (the mini concludes on Tuesday with Sinatra's first comeback, in 1974). But the actor gives a game arid enjoyable performance throughout.
The whole thing is cheesier than a deep-dish lasagna, but the headliner alone makes it worth the price of admission.
ABC (Sun., Nov. 8, 9 P.M. ET)
B-
High school football is such an all consuming passion in Texas that even election to the cheerleading squad can become a life-and-death issue—literally, in the case of this fact-based film set in the town of Channel-view, near Houston.
Lesley Ann Warren plays Wanda Holloway (PEOPLE, Sept. 23, 1991), an ungainly, insecure woman living vicariously through her daughter (Olivia Burnette). She grooms and trains the girl from an early age for the local high school's prestigious pep squad. But nothing seems to work out for Wanda, while her neighbor Verna Heath (Tess Harper) and Verna's daughter. Amber (Lauren Woodland), keep succeeding at every competition. Eventually, Holloway comes to see Heath as the cause of her frustration, imagining a concerted plot to thwart her dreams. She contacts her unsavory former brother-in-law (William Forsythe) to hire a hit man to kill Amber, but settles on the more economical plan of shooting Verna, hoping that the death of the mother will make the daughter too distraught to try out for the high school squad. But in real life the brother-in-law was wearing a wire during their negotiations, and Holloway was convicted of solicitation for capital murder. She is now free on bond awaiting a second trial.
Though the film completely runs out of steam by the time of Holloway's arrest and trial, up until then this is a sad little tale of obsession, made involving and psychologically authentic by a good cast.
NBC (Mon., Nov. 9, 9 P.M. ET)
C-
In another fact-based film, Shelley Long plays Eileen Franklin, a mother of two who suddenly begins to have horrifying childhood flashbacks of violence and sexual abuse, long-buried memories that lead eventually to her testimony in court that 20 years earlier her father had raped and murdered her 8-year-old best friend (PEOPLE, Nov. 4, 1991).
The impact of this provocative story is blunted by hammy acting. Long's inability to connect with the rest of the cast or her own character makes her unconvincing as parent, wife and, finally, as victim. Matters aren't helped by a bombastic, bucking-for-Bartlett's script. Before the trial, the prosecutor (Faith Daniels look-alike Helen Shaver) tells Long. "Eileen, I am here to support you in ever) way, but I cannot sit on that stand for you. It's your words the jury has to hear, your pain they have to feel, your courage they have to see."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
