A
Early in the first of its six hours, this documentary epic (to be released Jan. 27 on home video) conjures up the image of the Irish storyteller, regaling the peasants huddled by the fire on a long cold night. Though surely more faithful to literal truth than those yarn spinners of old, The Irish in America carries on their tradition of leisurely but enthralling narrative.
Produced by Thomas Lennon (The Battle over Citizen Kane) and narrated by actor Michael Murphy (Manhattan), the film spans more than 200 years of the Irish-American experience while avoiding both the dryness of a historical survey and the superficiality of a Hibernian Who's Who. It tells some familiar stories in fascinating depth-Ireland's potato famine of the mid-19th century, New York Gov. Al Smith's failed 1928 bid to become America's first Catholic President-but excels particularly in following immigrants who did not tread the beaten path from the boat to the big city. Everyone knows the colorful Irish politicians of Boston; here we also meet the unsung Irish copper miners of Butte, Mont.
The film, made in collaboration with The Walt Disney Studios and Boston's WGBH, concludes by taking a realistic yet wistful look at what assimilation (epitomized by John F. Kennedy's capture of the White House) means to a group so long held together by "the mythic story of the Irish as underdogs." The saga ends with shots of St. Patrick's Day paraders melting into the general pedestrian population of New York City. The American Irish have arrived, all right, but they've left something behind.
Fox (Thursdays, 8:30 p.m. ET)
D+
Oh, man, my bra is killing me," complained the main character in the early-January premiere of this sitcom. And that main character-are you sitting down?-is a guy. Anthony Tyler Quinn (Boy Meets World) stars as Jack Cody, an oft-fired, ultrasexist newspaperman who dons a dress and fools Melissa Peters (Lisa Waltz), his ex-editor and former lover, into hiring him as a female advice columnist called Sylvia Coco (pen name Harriet).
Quicker than you can say Tootsie, Jack starts noticing that he's a lot more popular as a woman than he was as a man-though heaven knows why, since his female self is only slightly less of a jerk. The appeal of this show is its energetic crudity, its unwavering belief that there's nothing funnier than a macho male going to the gynecologist. This spirit is exemplified by Ed Asner's uninhibited performance in the semiregular role of Maxwell Russell, the newspaper owner blinded by lust for his leggy new columnist. Asner's whole attitude says, "If you're not embarrassed to be watching, I'm not embarrassed to be working."
CBS (Fridays, 8p.m. ET)
C+
Last time Bill Cosby fiddled with classic TV, he did a syndicated update of You Bet Your Life starring himself as a kinder version of Groucho Marx. Bad idea. Here he's in the right revival, inspired by the kid-chat segments on Art Linkletter's House Party (CBS, 1952-69). Cos can't miss in the company of youngsters, especially when he assembles a panel of three and questions them like a country lawyer. But this half-hour show, which premiered Jan. 9, after two hour-long specials last year, is padded with previews of coming laughs, mock-apologetic lead-ins to the commercials, and clips from the Linkletter vault that often seem too darned cute to be true. Watching the premiere, we tried not to notice that Art moved his lips like a bad ventriloquist while the little people were being funny.
HBO (Sat, Jan. 31, 9p.m. ET)
B+
It's hard to imagine a less glamorous depiction of the fashion world than this uncompromisingly grim portrait of supermodel Gia Carangi, who died of AIDS in 1986 at age 26. A drug-addicted lesbian with a tough-also stunningly sensual-exterior and an aching need for love, Gia (played with striking conviction by Angelina Jolie) goes from the cover of Vogue to the bottom of the barrel, the victim of a lamentable upbringing (battling parents, broken home), a self-destructive nature and a fundamentally exploitive industry. Directed by playwright Michael Cristofer {The Shadow Box) from a script by him and novelist Jay Mclnerney {Bright Lights, Big City), the film ends with a strangely poetic tribute to the subject's life force, but otherwise plays more like an autopsy than a eulogy. All this haute couture might as well be a body bag.
>Irina Pantaeva
A RUSSIAN LANDS ON 3RD ROCK
CLAD IN A SKINTIGHT CATSUIT, IRINA PANTAEVA IS PLOTTING to invade Earth. In a one-hour post-Super Bowl edition of NBC's 3rd Rock from the Sun (Jan. 25), the Siberian-born supermodel (in her TV acting debut, following films like Mortal Kombat Annihilation) joins Cindy Crawford, Angie Ever hart and Beverly Johnson in the role of extraterrestrial Amazon seeking to take control of Earthmen's minds by slipping subliminal messages of submission into a Super Bowl commercial. Aboard their spaceship, Pantaeva counts down to the crucial moment of infiltration: "Five...four...three...seven...one."
Hmmm. ETs must not be very good with numbers. Neither, it turns out, is 23-year-old Pantaeva. "The whole shoot went in a funny way because I'm [still] learning English. When we were rehearsing, it was difficult for me to count backward." It was just one of several of Pantaeva's linguistic bloopers that so tickled 3rd Rock's executive producer Bonnie Turner, the show's co-creator (with husband Terry), that she kept them in the show. Pantaeva, who is fluent in five languages, is "so incredibly smart," says Turner, "and a real daredevil to take this one on without understanding much of the context of the jokes."
But Pantaeva wised up quickly. In one scene, dining on caviar with Dick (John Lithgow), she couldn't get enough of the delicacy: "I kept saying, 'Can we do one more take, please?' " So what's next for the fledgling TV star? Ellen, perhaps? "No, I'm working now. I'm an Ellen anyway," she says. "I have my resident Ellen card."
- Contributors:
- Craig Tomashoff.
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!
