If TV's new season looks disappointing, count your blessings. What you don't get to see is 100 times worse than what makes it on the air. That's the inescapable conclusion drawn from this revised version of Goldberg's encyclopedic Unsold Television Pilots, 1955-1988.
He includes 300 wild turkeys that never got the go-ahead that transforms test runs into full-fledged series. Take America 2100, in which two stand-up comics are put into suspended animation and wake up in the year 2100, where they are befriended by a scientist played by Karen Valentine.
Would you believe Crash Island? Greg Mullavey and ex—Harlem Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon are pilots whose plane, filled with a coed swim team, crashes on an island. Its only inhabitant, Pat Morita, a Japanese soldier, thinks World War II is still on.
You see? Suddenly Family Man—Gregory Harrison's cloying sitcom—is starting to sound pretty good.
Some of the shaggy dogs Goldberg catalogs, such as Dan Aykroyd's sitcom about Mars colonists, never got past concept stage. But most of these shows got shot before being consigned to richly deserved oblivion.
That brings us to another conclusion: Judging by the way actors like Teri Garr, Art Hindle, Barry Van Dyke, Paul Dooley, Granville Van Dusen and Carol Lawrence show up again and again in atrocious pilots, maybe people should pay more attention when they pick their agent. (Citadel, paper, $12.95)
by Alan M. Dershowitz
To the perpetrator of chutzpah it means boldness, assertiveness, a willingness to demand what is due.... To the victim of chutzpah, it means unmitigated gall, uppityness, arrogance." So Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz (portrayed in the film Reversal of Fortune as the defender of Claus von Billow) explains the title of this bold, assertive, uppity book.
Dershowitz's introduction makes his argument clear: American Jews are too passive and worry too much about "charges of dual loyalty, of being too rich, too smart, and too powerful.
The author's own chutzpah is beyond doubt. In Moscow last year, at a conference on legal and economic cooperation, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev made an appearance. From the rear of the hall, Dershowitz strode past security guards to confront him, urging Gorbachev to publicly condemn anti-Semitism. Gorbachev responded positively, Dershowitz reports, and "asked for my card."
Chutzpah repeals itself, but it is a provocative survey of Jewish-interest issues. Proclaiming his own pro-Israel stance, Dershowitz pulls no punches; his hit list of overt and covert racists, anti-Semites and anti-Zionists includes not only such predictable targets as Vanessa Redgrave, but two Harvard presidents, as well as Harlan Stone and William Howard Taft, who both became U.S. Chief Justice.
Attacks, defenses, reflections, all are offered in admirably direct prose, with comic relief provided by Jewish jokes, Woody Allen one-liners and family anecdotes. Arguing with him once, Dershowitz's mother defined the differences between a Jewish mother and a terrorist. "With a terrorist," she said, "you can sometimes negotiate." (Little, Brown, $22.95)
by Liz Nickles
Most of the world will feel small sympathy for Kate Harrison-Weil. Besides the hyphenated name, there's a collection of antique silver tea strainers in her office; there's her Fifth Avenue co-op with Chanel-laden closets and revoltingly expensive bed sheets (kept in an antique armoire); and there's the name after the hyphen, that of her handsome, famous doctor husband.
But there's a sadness at the heart of Harrison-Weil, founding editor of trendy Child-style magazine, and irony of ironies it is this: Though the nursery is nearly complete (there's a problem with the hand-painted French tiles), Kate, 39, cannot conceive!
A funny novel about yuppie infertility? No one could accuse Nickles, a New York City ad exec and coauthor of Girls in High Places, of going for the tried and true. Yet against all odds, Baby, Baby succeeds, as both social commentary and rollicking comedy.
Adding to the central character's stress are her evil stepchildren (one specializes in insider trading using secrets learned at boarding school) and her new job revamping Finance magazine. But things really get kicking when Kate splits from her husband, then discovers she is finally pregnant.
By chance she meets a clumsy yet sympathetic male sportscaster and tries pregnant dating. Meanwhile her stepchildren want her to sign a contract giving up the baby's rights to their father's money. And back at the office, a sneering male cabal plots against her with such original ploys as staging a dinner at a Japanese restaurant where she must try to gracefully lower her pregnant self to the floor.
There's a wily intelligence here, as well as a formidable wit, and Nickles sustains the outlandish action. By the end, she has even won us over to Harrison-Weil—who finds love and happiness beyond $500 sheets. (Pocket, $18.95)
by Patrick Anderson
Popular fiction, at its paradigmatic pulpy best, provides a track-hugging narrative, a judicious mix of sympathetic and evil characters, and enough sex to satisfy all but the most prurient readers. All those qualities are present, with verve and drollery—and in Texas-size proportions—in this tale of twins who become enmeshed with one of the Lone Star State's richest, most twisted families.
Twins Jessica and Mickey Ketchum, who are taken from their teenage mother shortly after birth, live together until they are separated at age 13. Jessica, the sweet, intellectual one, is adopted; Mickey, the resourceful one, stays at the orphanage.
Cut to almost 20 years later: Jessica marries a Texas billionaire with a messed-up family, and Mickey joins the Drug Enforcement Agency as an undercover agent in Washington, D.C. When one twin is murdered, the other sets out to avenge her.
What makes all of this such compulsively page-turning fun is that Anderson, a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and Robert Kennedy and author of eight previous novels (including the best-sellers The President's Mistress and Lord of the Earth), keeps his parallel stories of the twins moving along deftly, while also finding room to include colorful subsidiary characters.
That many of these people seem inspired by recent headlines only adds to a reader's pleasure, offering the titillation that Anderson is giving the inside skinny. Could, for example, a well-known U.S. senator be the model when Anderson writes, "The Senator was a genial man and a champion of noble causes. The problem was that in middle age he had developed a fondness for illegal drugs and teenage girls that worried even his most stalwart aides"?
Rich as Sin, except for a trial scene that drags, is indeed rich in entertainment value. (Simon & Schuster, $22.95)
>FROM THE UNITED STATES OF AMBITION: Politicians, Power and the Par-suit of Office by Alan Ehrenhalt (Random House, $23):
Who sent these people?
It is not hard to ask that question every now and then during a normal political year, as we find ourselves confronted with office-holders and candidates who fail to meet any commonsense definition of what political leadership ought to be: aspirants for the U.S. Senate who traffic in the basest kind of playground name-calling; governors who win election on antitax platforms they know they will have to repudiate; members of Congress who talk endlessly about cutting the federal deficit and never even begin to do it; state legislators who fall for the most heavy-handed bribery schemes cooked up by federal prosecutors to entrap them. Is it possible that this is the best we can do—that this is the best political leadership the world's oldest democracy can muster?
- Contributors:
- David Hiltbrand,
- Jeff Brown,
- Susan Toepfer,
- Leah Rozen.
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!
