Fox (Fri., April 3, 8 P.M. ET)
C
On the day he is slated to go to the electric chair, an infamous serial killer (Bruce Davison) takes a tabloid TV personality (Joanna Cassidy) hostage and vows to stage a live televised execution—not his own.
The film, shot in video vérité style, starts off sharply with writer-director Patrick Duncan jabbing at the degeneration of TV news into sensationalism. After taping a provocative teaser for her show outside the prison walls with a flock of execution vultures waving placards behind her, Cassidy walks away from the camera muttering, "Maybe that'll keep their sweaty little hands off the remote control."
Serious flaws soon emerge. Principal among them is the fact that, as a brutal killer, Davison is totally miscast. There's not a shred of human indecency in the guy.
NBC (Sundays, 8 P.M. ET)
C+
In this series influenced by the sci-fi film Blade Runner, grizzled Bobby Mann (David Andrews, doing his best Jack Nicholson imitation) is a plainclothes cop in the near future who is teamed with an experimental cyborg (Yancy Butler). So she's unemotional and her voice is a little uninflected. So what? This beautiful one-woman SWAT squad can jack directly into a computer. Let's see Angie Dickinson try that. Anyway, repelled as well as fascinated, Mann takes her under his wing.
The futuristic elements are presented piecemeal, as they usually are on TV. For instance, Andrews gets to drive around in a bristling humvee vehicle, but all the cars he passes on the road look as if they rolled off a used-car lot in Pasadena last week.
The plotting and humor are a tad creaky too. But the concept is still cool and the show is well cast.
PBS (Sun., April 5, 9 P.M. ET)
B
Masterpiece Theatre takes on a daunting project: the dramatization of this work by Samuel Richardson, considered the first English novelist. It's a challenge of condensation (distilling a book of a million words into three one-hour episodes), of adaptation (Clarissa was written in epistolary form) and of viability (making a novel from 1747 entertaining for today's television audience).
The BBC succeeds on all counts in telling the story of virtuous heiress Clarissa Harlowe (newcomer Saskia Wickham), who flees an odious arranged marriage only to be emotionally snared and ruined by the rake Robert Lovelace (Sean Bean). The film is shrewd, involving (albeit less so with each successive Sunday) and full of vivid characters.
ABC (Sun., April 5, 9 P.M. ET)
D
In this pulpy suspense trilogy, Victoria Principal and John Terry star as three pairs of lovers in three different decades. In the hammiest segment, he's a mad painter in the '30s and she is his lover and model.
At the start, a voice-over explains the film's premise: "Somewhere between seduction and betrayal, between ecstasy and anguish, between passion and obsession, lies the inner sanctum." Yeah, and somewhere between 9 and 11 most people will tire of this dopey charade.
Fox (Sundays, 10 P.M. ET)
D+
Comic Rosie O'Donnell and Melissa Gilbert-Brinkman (Little House on the Prairie) star in this new sitcom based on the British show Birds of a Feather. They're two temperamentally opposite sisters from New Jersey who are forced to live together when their husbands are put away for eight years for bank robbery.
The girls now have to scramble to survive—which they do, primarily through their jobs at the Bargain Circus discount warehouse. O'Donnell is a clerk, and Gilbert-Brinkman, who has never worked a single day in her life, is hired as her supervisor. "Anything happen while I was gone?" asks O'Donnell. "Yeah," says a coworker, "a crate of bug bombs went off, and everyone got a rash." For this show, that's a high-toned joke. How crass does it get? "I haven't turned a man's head," says O'Donnell, "since I cut one on the crosstown bus."
If Tammy Wynette didn't like Hillary Clinton alluding to the title of her song, wait till she gets a load of this.
NBC (Mon., April 6, 9 P.M. ET)
B
This potboiler is a soap opera within a soap opera about a fictional prime-time serial, Manhattan, and its tempestuous cast. There's the show's suave producer (Christopher Plummer), his leading lady (Stephanie Beacham), the leading man (Gary Collins of The Home Show), the heroine (Linda Purl), the young stud (Ben Browder) and the ingenue (Josie Bissett). All of them pair up romantically off the set, and all of them are nursing deep, dark personal secrets.
Steel, as always, is a good plotter and a lousy writer. She assembles all the right ingredients (sex, drugs, murder and limousines) and then pulverizes them. But Plummer brings such savoir faire to his role that he makes the whole thing seem more savory than the video junk food it is.
>PUTTING THE 'V' IN TV
OF ALL THE RECENT TONIGHT SHOW guests who have offered up farewell tributes to Johnny, the funniest so far has been Martin Mull, who recited a poem that was a kind of acronymic testimonial invoking the host's full name ("J is for the jokes you made so funny..."). It included the evocative line: "H is for the happiness it gives me to see your face between my feet each night when I'm in bed."
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!
