USA (Wed., April 3, 9 P.M. ET)
B+
In this senescent sequel to two feature films, our 17th-century swashbucklers (Michael York, Richard Chamberlain, Oliver Reed and Frank Finlay) are reunited 20 years beyond their prime by a Franco-English political plot. Also returning from the '70s historical comedies The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers are director Richard Lester and costars Geraldine Chaplin, Christopher Lee, Jean-Pierre Cassel and Roy Kinnear, the portly British comic who died during the filming.
Lester profitably explored the theme of aging heroes in 1976's Robin and Marian. He doesn't do much with the notion in this movie, released theatrically in Europe in 1989. Young bloods C. Thomas Howell and Kim Cattrall get most of the swordplay. And the slapstick and ribaldry of the previous "one for all and all for one" outings have even degenerated into food fights.
Still, Lester's breathless pacing remains unhampered, giving this film considerably more zest and color than USA's usual Wednesday night screenings.
MTV (Wed., April 3, 10 P.M. ET)
B+
Paul McCartney is the featured artist on a one-hour edition of MTV's acoustic performance show. Running through familiar favorites ("Blackbird") and exotic covers (Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-a-Lula"), McCartney gives ample evidence that he still possesses one of pop's sweetest voices.
The stadium spellbinder seems oddly nervous in front of the show's intimate studio audience. He even messes up the lyrics to "We Can Work It Out." But the legendary charm is intact. If he lived in this country, McCartney would be a good candidate for his own sitcom. In fact, at 48, he could still probably play the Kirk Cameron role on Growing Pains.
ABC (Sun., April 7, 9 P.M. ET)
A
This eloquent miniseries begins in 1950 with the principal (Ed Hall) of a rural black school in South Carolina requesting a bus to pick up his far-flung students. It culminates in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that declared school segregation unconstitutional—and abolished the doctrine of racial separation in education.
Writer-director-producer George Stevens Jr. has turned these events into a streamlined and precisely scaled historical mini of unusual integrity and impact.
Sidney Poitier, making a rare TV appearance, gives a shrewd, prudent performance as Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer who argued the case for desegregation before the Supreme Court. Burt Lancaster plays renowned attorney John W. Davis, who opposed Marshall. The conclusion on Monday belongs largely to Richard Kiley as Earl Warren, the former California Governor who was appointed U.S. Chief Justice during the months it took the court to deliberate the matter. A strong supporting cast includes Cleavon Little, Gloria Foster, Lynne Thigpen, Graham Beckel, John McMartin and Mike Nussbaum.
Because the pace is unhurried and Stevens hasn't resorted to TV's most abused crutches—sentiment and sensationalism—this isn't visually exciting television. It is, however, powerful and moving.
A&E (Mondays, 10 P.M. ET)
B
In an offbeat limited series, Tony Peck, Gregory's son, plays a '30s detective who only works for big-name authors slumming in Tinseltown—clients like Hemingway and Faulkner. In the premiere Ian Buchanan plays F. Scott Fitzgerald in trouble with a studio boss.
Who cares that the St. Paul-born Scotty speaks with a Scottish burr? This video fantasy doesn't skew toward realism. The look is stylishly chintzy; the writing ridiculously florid. Consider this clunky confessional dialogue between Buchanan's besotted Fitzgerald and Peck's gumshoe: "The new script...I'm not sure I wrote it."
"Excuse me?"
"Well, you see, the last few weeks—they've been rather a haze of protracted revelry."
"A binge!"
"Apparently."
"So between highballs the muse guided your hand."
The casting is a kick. In the debut Peck's sister Cecilia shows up in several dream sequences. Subsequent episodes (there are six in all) feature Marisa Berenson as Dorothy Parker, and model Cheryl Tiegs—Peck's real-life bride—as a kinky bar girl. Juggling such an abundance of genres—detective, Hollywood, literary lions and Depression era—the show is impossibly jumbled and silly. Also oddly irresistible.
PBS (Mon., April 8, 10 P.M. ET)
A
This wonderfully photographed and edited documentary examines one of the lowest rungs on the ladder of professional baseball, following the Class A Bakersfield Dodgers through their 1989 season.
Though there's little on-field action, the program paints a most vivid picture of minor-league life: the waiting around, the horseplay, the bus trips, the gross humor and the competitive strain. You see these young faces shining with promise, all of them dreaming of making it to "the show."
As of this spring, none of them have even played in a major-league game.
>You can get a look this week at some currently hot actors in their prepeak days. Michelle Pfeiffer and Val Kilmer star in a rebroadcast of the 1985 ABC Afterschool Special One Too Many (Thurs., April 4, 4 P.M. ET). Mare Winningham and Lance Guest round out this tragedy of teenage drinking, which marked the network directorial debut of Peter Horton, the recently departed Gary on thirty-something. Then there's Sarah Jessica Parker, beguiling star of screen (L.A. Story) and tube (Equal Justice). In 1982 she played an awkward high school freshman in the CBS sitcom Square Pegs. USA Network is showing the series, which also featured Jami Gertz and Tracy Nelson, weekends at 4 P.M. ET.
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!
