C
In a curiously moralistic new series from the maker of Beauty and the Beast, an 85-year-old man (Tom Irwin in heavy makeup) sits in a retirement community in the year 2035, reflecting on his life. The bulk of each episode is made up of a well-executed, if predictable, flashback, such as the day his son was born during the 1990 San Francisco earthquake or the aftermath of the economic collapse of '98. Helen (Next of Kin) Hunt costars as Irwin's late wife.
As in NBC's Quantum Leap, the concept allows the series considerable plot latitude. Hut all the stories are infected with the same swollen melodrama. Irwin's eyewitness history is distilled at the end of each program into a greeting-card lesson for some troubled whippersnapper who is either visiting him or else works at the home. Here's a typical summation: "Sometimes you have to let go of your plans. Sometimes life has a better plan. Sometimes you have to let life pick you up and carry you away." Each episode goes through a lot of work to reap a similarly skimpy harvest. If you're in the mood for sage advice, rent Little Big Man.
VH-l (Saturdays, 7 P.M. ET)
B
Vanessa Williams—the lapsed beauty queen, not the costar of New Jack City—hosts this addictive clip-interview-profilette hour devoted to current and classic soul artists from the Four Tops to After 7. The musical history is rather superficial, and the interviews are really more like sound bites. But the selection of clips and the sounds are sublime.
As hostess, Williams often seems too sedate and posed, but who cares? I'd tune in to see her read last year's Congressional Record.
PBS (Sun., April 28, 9 P.M. ET)
A
In a touching Australian movie, Bryan (F/X) Brown plays a former prizefighter who, on a rare trip home, discovers his wife sleeping with another man. In an impulsive moment of spitefulness, he plucks up the 10-year-old daughter (Rebecca Smart) he hardly knows and begins wandering the outback looking for work, with the girl nattering along close on his heels.
The film aired as MacCauley's Daughter on the Disney Channel. The new title is Aussie slang for a tramp's kit bag or, figuratively, his burden.
The setting is unusually gritty for Masterpiece Theatre. But the acting is marvelous, especially Brown's performance as a proud, stubborn man who's curt with the girl until she completely melts his heart. She'll melt yours too. Smart gives the most beguiling child performance since Taturn O'Neal in Paper Moon.
NBC (Sun., April 28, 9 P.M. ET)
B
This fact-based miniseries begins in 1978 when two couples have babies days apart at a rural Florida hospital. Brian Kerwin and Judith Hoag take home a healthy girl. The daughter of Bonnie Bedelia and John Jackson is diagnosed with a congenital heart problem. It isn't until nine years later that Bedelia and Jackson discover, via genetic testing, that the child, whose health continues to deteriorate, could not possibly be theirs.
As the media pitches its circus tent around them, the couple begin a legal battle to establish the identity of their biological child, who it turns out is with the now widowed Kerwin.
Despite a dreary exposition, this tragedy, based on the real experience of the Mays and Twigg families, which concludes the following night, is worthwhile. That's because of Michael O'Hara's quietly plausible script, solid performances by Kerwin and Jackson and a memorably visceral one by Bedelia.
CBS (Sun., April 28, 9 P.M. ET)
C
In this botched remake, Mark Harmon steps clumsily into some big shoes, those of Joseph Gotten in the 1943 Hitchcock film of the same title.
Harmon is Uncle Charlie, visiting his sister (Diane Ladd) and his worshipful niece (Margaret Welsh) in California. William Lanteau, Chester on Newhart, plays Ladd's husband.
The mystery is: Could the charming visitor be the notorious Merry Widow murderer who has been killing rich women back East? None of the performances approach those of their '43 predecessors, though, and John Gay's script reveals Harmon's culpability right at the start, making a mockery of the title. Hitchcock executed a nimble fan dance with Cotten's evil nature. Stick with the master.
Fox (Sundays, 9:30 P.M. ET)
C-
In a curdled sitcom, Joseph (The Woman in Red) Bologna plays a crude apartment-building superintendent who is constantly scheming to get his dense, malaprop-spouting hunk of a son (TV 707's Matt LeBlanc) to marry a rich woman so they'll both be provided for in the style to which they would like to become accustomed.
These sleazy slugs are friends with the Bundys. whose similarly raunchy sitcom, Married...With Children, precedes this. Think of it as Fox's dyspeptic one-two punch to the gizzard.
Bologna swaggers through the ooze, but LeBlanc is blank. Of course, he has such lines as "Dealing with rich people makes me uncomfortable. I'm much more at ease dealing with the average John Dope." Rita Moreno got roped into this mud fight as a country-club manager and LeBlanc's boss.
Bologna says to his son at one point, "I'm pouring my heart out here. Why are we talking bodily fluids?" Good question.
>THE NATURE OF TELEVISED SPORTS IS changing. Translation: Get out your checkbook. Pay-per-view has already been enthusiastically embraced by boxing and wrestling. (The Douglas-Holy field title fight in 1990 grossed a record $38.6 million on pay-per-view at $36.50 per household. Last week's Holyfield-Foreman bout is expected to rake in more than $64 million.) Baseball, basketball and football, drooling over the profit potential, are all exploring their pay-up options.
The technology to charge cable subscribers for individual events is currently available in 16.6 million households. NBC is working aggressively to expand that number in time for the 1992 Summer Olympics, seeking to recoup the $401 million it bid for broadcast rights. In addition to its traditional over-the-air programming, NBC will be offering 540 hours of live competition on three pay-per-view channels for packages of $95—$170.
The networks and pay-per-view will no doubt coexist in that manner, at least for a while. But the staggering money won't roll in until such big events are exclusive to pay-per-view. To pacify fans, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue recently vowed that the Super Bowl won't be taken away from "free" TV in this century. This is probably a good time to point out that we're already in a fin-de-siècle situation here. What Tagliabue has issued is the equivalent of a two-minute warning: No-fee sports TV is doomed.
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!
