Show of the week
Here is a TV movie that clearly aims to make you cry and almost certainly will succeed. But the emotions evoked by this true story are too honest, deep and universal for Nicholas' Gift to be dismissed as a tearjerker.
Jamie Lee Curtis and Alan Bates play Maggie and Reg Green, a California couple vacationing in Italy in 1994 with their children, 7-year-old Nicholas (Gene Wexler) and 4-year-old Eleanor (Hallie Kate Eisenberg). In a terrifying night attack, masked highway bandits shoot Nicholas in the head. Doctors declare him brain-dead. Though their grief is overwhelming, the Greens have the presence of mind and generosity of spirit to donate the boy's organs—a gesture that moves a country previously resistant to this practice. The film pulls awfully hard on viewers' heartstrings, but pay attention as Curtis's Maggie stands watch near her son's hospital bed and sorrow squeezes her throat before she can finish the Lord's Prayer. There's something real here, something that can make a whole television audience feel like one family.
Bottom Line: A rare gift for viewers too
PBS (Sun., April 26, and Sun., May 3, 9 p.m. ET)
Helen Mirren is a grade-A actress. It's not that she lacks the skill to make the tough transition from police detective Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect to faded blues singer Maggie Sheridan in this Mobil Masterpiece Theatre miniseries. The main reason we have trouble accepting Mirren as a "Janis Joplin figure" (to quote host Russell Baker) is that Painted Lady does a poor job of developing its main character. After sketching Maggie's past (seduced by drugs, abandoned by fame, rescued by a wealthy patron), the script thrusts the heroine into a murky mystery that requires her—most improbably—to pose as an art buyer who also happens to be a Polish countess. The plot has complexity without fascination, though art-history buffs may appreciate some sly visual and verbal references. "You don't know anything about Van Dyck," Maggie is warned early in her masquerade. "Yes, I do," she says. "I thought he was very good in Mary Poppins." Van Dyke was a bit miscast, too. But like Mirren, he managed.
Bottom Line: Worth a look, but no masterpiece
CBS (Tues., April 28, 9 p.m. ET)
"Tell me this isn't happening! Tell me it's not real!" moans Lisa Hartman Black's character in this TV movie. We hear ya, hon. The acting and writing are so bad that the film, though based on fact, is almost beyond belief. Hartman Black's real-life husband, country music star Clint Black, makes his dramatic debut as rodeo cham-peen "Cadillac Jack" Favor, wrongly convicted of a 1964 double murder committed by a pair of hitchhikers he happened to pick up and treat with his usual kindness. Jack's wife, Ponder (Hartman Black), calls the noble Texan "as good a man as God created," but that testimonial cuts no ice in a brutal Louisiana prison, where he keeps getting thrown into solitary just for being a well-meaning guy. Every time Ponder comes for a visit, we're guaranteed a painful scene in which Black struggles to shed a tear or grit his teeth while Hartman Black sets a sad example of how a professional actor portrays anguish. Eventually, Jack is granted a new trial, but Still Holding On deserves to be laughed out of court.
Bottom Line: Junk this clunker
WB (Sundays, 9:30 p.m. ET)
Bridget Loves Bernie, Dharma & Greg. We think we've seen everything in the way of sitcoms about mismatched but romantic couples and culture-clashing in-laws. Then along comes this new one to prove that an old concept can yield fresh stupidity. Comedian Elon Gold is Mark, the Jewish New Yorker who's daffy about Southern-bred gentile Lindsay (Cynthia Geary from Northern Exposure). In the April 19 pilot, Mark's parents (Dori Brenner and Lenny Wolpe) meet Lindsay and fall into an argument over who sat where at sonny boy's bar mitzvah. Lindsay's father (Leo Burmester) meets Mark and makes the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan look like a moderate. The opener ends with a marriage that cries out for annulment.
Bottom Line: Nothing to love
Lifetime (weeknights, 11 p.m. ET)
If you seek a late-night alternative to newscasts, talk shows and syndicated sitcom reruns, we suggest sleep. But for female TV addicts, cable's Lifetime (slogan: "Television for Women") offers this magazine show with service pieces on beauty, health, fashion, finance and more. (We'd like to say New Attitudes is not for women only, but how many guys wouldn't grab the remote after two seconds of a consumer report on panty hose?) Viewers may be pooped after a long day, but not hosts Leanza Cornett (Miss America 1993) and Suzanne Whang (TV Censored Bloopers '98). They're so perky they ought to be sedated. Nearly everything is shot at odd angles by an unsteady camera, giving us the sensation of watching from a water bed. The show (which started March 9) imparts some useful information, but its overall tone is notably promotional. "So get rid of your old skin and take a dip into the fountain of youth," urged Cornett after a recent body-peels story—the same night Whang wrapped a week of puffery on Jamaican tourism.
Bottom Line: Switch to the news
Cartoon Network (Wednesdays, 8 p.m. ET)
Youth must be served. This two-year-old animated series about a warped boy genius marks its 50th episode on April 29 with a story submitted by second-grader Tyler Samuel Lee of Merrick, N.Y. "Dexter and Computress Get Mandark" is a seven-minute short that combines an audiotape made by Tyler with crude animation in the style of a 6½-year-old. The plot grows increasingly bizarre, and the young narrator sounds delighted with the tallness of his tale. Kid, you've got a future in the fantastic. The half hour also includes a shocking segment in which Dexter forcibly shaves off Santa's beard.
Bottom Line: Catchy 'toons
>Sunday, April 26 THE SIMPSONS FOX (8 p.m. ET) There's a big stink about garbage in Episode 200, with the voices of Steve Martin and U2's Bono.
Monday, April 27 THE WRATH OF GOD: DISASTERS IN AMERICA History Channel (9 p.m. ET) Take cover! First of a four-parter on tornadoes, hurricanes, avalanches, etc.
Tuesday, April 28 BUSTED: AMERICA'S WAR ON MARIJUANA PBS (9 p.m. ET) Frontline has a high time reporting on America's homegrown drug.
Wednesday, April 29 3RD ROCK FROM THE SUN NBC (9 p.m. ET) Guest John Cleese joins the university faculty. And you thought John Lithgow was strange.
Thursday, April 30 THE NATIONAL HATE TEST USA (7 p.m. ET) Host Gregory Hines asks us to probe our prejudices.
Friday, May 1 BOY MEETS WORLD ABC (8:30 p.m. ET) Cory and Topanga plan prom-night sex, but his parents are in the same hotel. That's an uh-oh.
Saturday, May 2 DR. QUINN, MEDICINE WOMAN CBS (8 p.m. ET) The doc hurts her head; Sully reminisces to keep her from slipping into a coma. Roll the flashbacks.
>Sam Neill
Magic Man
The young Sam Neill spent many childhood days in New Zealand acting out Arthurian legends. "I grew up with these stories," says Neill, 50, who has starred in Jurassic Park and The Piano. "It was sometime between my French Foreign Legion and Davy Crockett phases." Now, Neill is playing the title role in NBC's $30 million, effects-laden Merlin miniseries (airing April 26 and 27 at 9 p.m. ET with a cast that includes Isabella Rossellini, Helena Bonham Carter and Sir John Gielgud), and he gets to add his own spin on the sly sorcerer. "I was very anxious for him not to be one of those pointy-headed wizard guys," says Neill, who lives in Australia with wife Noriko and three kids. "This is a guy who makes mistakes. And those errors were what I related to."
Neill also bonded with his equine costar Velasquez, the horse he rode in the series. The chemistry between the actor and his steed led to a "fond rapport" between the two, Neill says. But there was no time for horsing around during the five-hour makeup sessions. "The only way to make it bearable was to set up a little television set in the [makeup trailer]," Neill says. And what did Merlin find in the cathode-ray crystal? "I watched as much Seinfeld as possible," he says.
- Contributors:
- Craig Tomashoff.
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