Shirley MacLaine, Debbie Reynolds, Joan Collins, even Elizabeth Taylor. The gang's all here—now what?
That was the problem for Carrie Fisher (Reynolds's daughter) and Elaine Pope, who collaborated on the script of this lavishly cast TV movie. The solution: Toss the principals into a rehash of The Sunshine Boys, provide them with plenty of bitchy dialogue, and add time-filling plot complications as necessary.
MacLaine, Reynolds and Collins play feuding has-been actresses back in vogue thanks to the rerelease of a 40-year-old Hollywood musical in which they co-starred. Taylor shows up for a few scenes as their overripe agent. Jonathan Silverman portrays MacLaine's son, an inexperienced director trying to keep the divas from doing violence to one another during preparations for a TV reunion special. The ladies' insults are vivid ("One more face-lift and she'll blow her nose through her forehead"), but after about an hour it all starts to sound like Joan Rivers in stereo. So the film resorts to frantic slapstick involving the corpse of Collins's gangster boyfriend—shades of Weekend at Bernie's, one of Silverman's career low-lights—and drags in questions about the Silverman character's parentage and sexual preference. Though the four headlines undoubtedly enjoyed spoofing themselves, Broads gets old fast.
Bottom Line: Big names, little fun
Cartoon Network (check listings)
This whiz-bang series about a trio of primary school superheroes has become one of the Cartoon Network's most popular attractions since its debut in 1998. (There's even a Powerpuff Girls movie due in 2002.) Like the show's young fans, I enjoy it when saucer-eyed cuties Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup exercise their powers to save the ever-embattled city of Townsville and its dithering mayor. But my favorite characters are the resident villains—particularly Mojo Jojo, a cunning simian given to redundancy-filled fulminations.
Mojo and three other baddies—Him (he of the menacing falsetto), Fuzzy and Princess—form a quartet of evil in a special Feb. 9 episode (9 p.m. ET) timed to the 37th anniversary of the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Calling themselves the Beat Alls, they swagger through Townsville like rock stars—until Mojo falls for a strangely seductive Yoko Ono type who splits the group with her shrieky voice and creative interference. Only grown Beatlemaniacs will grasp all the references, but this is one that moppets and baby boomers can groove on together.
Bottom Line: Let it be on your TV
ABC (Tuesdays, 8 p.m. ET)
"It is a simple game," host Anderson Cooper says before every episode of this so-called "reality" series, whose nine-week run continues until March 6. I'm shocked that a former ABC News correspondent would make such an inaccurate statement. The show is rather complicated—and simply uninteresting.
Survivor is partly an endurance contest; The Mole seems more like a vacation marred by inconvenience. In the first three episodes the participants are sent to pretty places in France and Spain and put through a number of stunts, with prize money going into a "group pot." But the main object is to identify the saboteur in their midst. Each week there's a written quiz on who this double agent might be, and the player who knows the least about the mole is eliminated ("executed," as Cooper coldly puts it). Instead of being voted out by your peers, you get zapped by a computer—hardly high drama. I'm guessing Cooper himself is the mole. When it comes to trust, he's no Walter Cronkite.
Bottom Line: Wrong burrow
CBS (Sun. and Wed., Feb. 11 and 14, 9 p.m. ET)
Show of the week
STARS "1"
The newspaper hawker cries, "Today's news—D-Day invasion!" Each time a Holocaust survivor tells a heartrending story, we hear a mournful violin. But for every cliché or melodramatic excess, this World War II miniseries offers a moment of powerful emotion.
Natasha Richardson stars as Ruth Gruber, the Interior Department official assigned to accompany 1,000 Jewish refugees on a troop ship from Europe and shepherd them to an Army camp in Oswego, N.Y.—where their "temporary" settlement turns into a 17-month confinement. Though she affects a Brooklyn accent that takes getting used to, Richardson becomes completely convincing as a woman determined to succor Hitler's victims despite small-town prejudice and an inflexible Washington bureaucracy. She gets strong support from Colm Feore as a refugee entertainer and Bruce Greenwood (Thirteen Days) as the local merchant who gradually learns tolerance.
Bottom Line: Haven worth seeking
>Sunday, Feb. 11 THE SIMPSONS FOX (8 p.m. ET) Homer's new tennis court lures Venus Williams and Andre Agassi.
Monday, Feb. 12 EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND CBS (9 p.m. ET) Ray and Debra go out for a romantic dinner and find they have, uh, nothing to say to each other.
Tuesday, Feb. 13 DAG NBC (8:30 p.m. ET) The First Lady's temp secretary (sexy hip-hopper Lil' Kim) turns heads.
Wednesday, Feb. 14
BARBRA STREISAND—TIMELESSFOX (8 p.m. ET) Thrill to the voice of Babs in a special taped on New Year's Eve 1999.
Thursday, Feb. 15 WILL & GRACE NBC (9 p.m. ET) Ellen DeGeneres guest-stars as a nun who drives a hard bargain.
Friday, Feb. 16 NASH BRIDGES CBS (10 p.m. ET) Don Johnson's old Miami Vice partner, Philip Michael Thomas, appears as a U.S. marshal.
Saturday, Feb. 17 THE WHOLE NINE YARDS HBO (9 p.m. ET) Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry are an odd couple of neighbors in this labored comedy from 2000.
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!
