• March 09, 1992
• Vol. 37
• No. 9

Picks and Pans Main: Tube

Viewer's Choice

By David Hiltbrand

It took Elizabeth Taylor making her first appearance ever on The Tonight Show last week for the realization finally to sink in: We are soon going to lose one of the most durable and enjoyable institutions in television history. In odd black leather attire that made her look as if she were on her way to a Hell's Angels beer bash, La Liz trained those killer baby violets on Johnny and announced that she didn't have a blessed thing to plug; she just wanted to thank him for more than 30 years of brilliant entertainment. She is but the first in a procession of big names, including Burt Reynolds, Bob Hope, Dolly Parton, Steve Martin and Michael J. Fox, who are jockeying to be seated at the right hand of the King of Late Night and pay tribute before he retires May 22. "Over the years," says Tonight's executive producer Fred De Cordova, "we would call and say, 'We know you have a picture. We'd like you to come onto Mr. Carson's show.' Now we're getting calls like Patrick Swayze saying, 'Leave room for me.' " For the producer, "the only disappointment" was Cary Grant, who politely declined yet again, telling De Cordova, "That is not my business. I read the lines people write for me." Grant aside, climbing on Johnny's farewell wagon has become the biggest status trip in Hollywood. Said Johnny in a recent monologue: "We may get Elvis on yet."

NBC (Saturdays, 8:30 P.M. ET)

C+

The newest sitcom from Norman (All in the Family) Lear is a blithely bitter political satire.

John (Dynasty) Forsythe plays William Powers, a dim if well-manicured four-term Senator from New England. Holland (Bosom Buddies) Taylor plays his arrogant, image-obsessed wife. Eve Gordon plays the Senator's ruthlessly efficient chief of staff—so efficient she is also his hotsy-totsy mistress. Peter MacNicol plays his manic: press secretary, to whom everything is a crisis. Valerie Mahaffey plays Forsythe's insecure daughter and David Pierce his catatonically depressed son-in-law. Finally there's Robin Bartlett, Forsythe's trashy, gum-snapping illegitimate daughter.

The characters, all pretty horrid, come equipped with easy-to-read stigmata: Mahaffey is anorexic and keeps passing out; Pierce is suicidal and has to shoot his cuffs to hide his wrist bandages; Forsythe, whenever he's caught off-base, does a Reagan-esque head waggle that makes him look like a bobble-head doll; worst, Bartlett has a New Jersey accent. The writing is knee-jerk cynical ("Now, don't you ever dream about chucking it all—the lies, the deceit?" the Senator asks his mistress. "You mean give up politics?" she responds), and the whole cast wildly overacts. Still, it's a lot sharper than Walter and Emily, the creaky sitcom it replaces.

NBC (Sun., Mar. 8, 9 P.M. ET)

D

In this overbaked melodrama, a doctor in Atlanta (Jenny Robertson) is convinced that her mother's murderer (Ted Marcoux), paroled after 19 years in prison, is shadowing her.

In the flashbacks that lead up to the murder at a Georgia resort hotel, Joanna (Growing Pains) Kerns is tough and sexy as Robertson's mom. The scenes in which mother and teenage daughter battle each other for the attentions of Marcoux's scarred, laconic Vietnam vet are terribly stagey and seem to have been ripped from a bad Tennessee Williams play.

The problem is that as we get to know the characters and what happens to them, the suspense of the contemporary scenes is completely undercut. It's only March, but I'm willing to bet that this movie has the most implausible climax you'll see all year.

CBS (Sun., Mar. 8, 9 P.M. ET)

B

Here's the benign version of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Tom Skerritt plays a Texas man who hires an attractive young widow (Marg Helgenberger) to help his wheelchair-bound wife (Lesley Ann Warren), who suffers from multiple sclerosis. The wife grows to like her, the husband even more so. Only the couple's teenage daughter (Robyn Lively) resents the new presence in their life.

Helgenberger shines in a provocatively written role. Her free-spirited post-hippie dutifully listens to head-banger music ("I try to keep up on new music. I mean, heavy metal is the hardest, but it just seems like you gotta stay current, right?") and drives an old VW bus that she names after a character from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

This story of an affair and its aftermath is not all that eventful—even with the complication of Warren's illness. What makes it touching is that it's happening to people who seem so nice and so real.

>ANIMAL KINGDOM

AS IF ON THEIR WAY TO NOAH'S ARK, A PAIR OF ENJOYABLE WILDLIFE documentaries march out Sunday evening (March 8). E.G. Marshall narrates Realm of the Serpent (ABC, 7 P.M. ET), part of the network's intermittent World of Discovery series. It's an often scholarly study of man's age-old fear of, and fascination with, snakes. Of course, this being TV, the emphasis is on big, nasty customers: pythons, anacondas, cobras and rattlers. Oh, my! Nature presents Dolphins: Close Encounters (PBS, 8 P.M. ET), which looks at our ongoing efforts to understand and communicate with these intelligent, ocean-going mammals. It includes a debate about whether all those programs in which people swim with or hand-feed dolphins are in fact damaging to these friendly creatures. In one experiment, dolphins avidly watch a TV showing footage of their trainer working at an adjoining pen in order to prove that they can differentiate images from reality and thus are capable of abstract thought. Seeing them glued to the set is rather droll. Wonder what they'd make of Regis and Kathie Lee?