DRAMA
The WB (Nov. 29, 8 p.m. ET)
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Executive-produced by Julia Roberts, this is the second TV movie developed from the popular line of dolls, high-spirited girls imagined through different periods of American history. I don't suppose we'll ever get Bette, a gen-Xer who listens to New Order and reads Prozac Nation. Felicity (Shailene Woodley) lives in Colonial Williamsburg, loves a horse named Penny and dutifully sits through lessons on how to serve tea. The show is prim and not remotely real, which is as it should be: Verisimilitude wouldn't jibe with the original lifeless doll or toy horse Penny (sold separately). Marcia Gay Harden plays Felicity's mom with sweet inertness.
BIO
WE (Dec. 3, 8 p.m. ET)
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This flavorably tart TV film is about how the odd, intimate friendship between young Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles—among other things, they bonded over the old British comedy The Goon Show—bowed to royal necessity when it came to marriage. To keep him on the path to the throne with a suitably virginal bride, they picked a deceptively placid mouse named Diana. It's Dangerous Liaisons, only the web of sex and deception is spun not by two spidery conspirators but by a tall geek and a lumpily built horsewoman. Laurence Fox and Olivia Poulet play the lovers with the appropriate damp frumpiness, occasionally combusting into passion.
>Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2005 (ABC, Nov. 29, 10 p.m. ET) Including Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Kanye West and Teri Hatcher.
Eminem Live from New York City (Showtime, Dec. 3, 9 p.m. ET) Taped, actually, last summer at Madison Square Garden.
The Happy Elf (NBC, Dec. 2, 8 p.m. ET) Harry Connick Jr. provides the music and narration for this computer-animated special. It's about an unbearably enthusiastic elf who does not, as Martha Stewart would say, fit in at the workplace.
Knots Landing Reunion: Together Again (CBS, Dec. 2, 9 p.m. ET) Two-hour retrospective of the suburban melodrama, in some ways the ancestor of Desperate Housewives, that ran from 1979 to 1993. Castmates reuniting include Michele Lee, Donna Mills and Joan Van Ark.
Patricia Heaton SOUNDS OFF
Six months after wrapping Everybody Loves Raymond, Patricia Heaton, 47, is starring opposite her husband, British actor David Hunt, 51, in The Engagement Ring, airing Nov. 28 on TNT.
ON WORKING WITH DAVID It was definitely harder. I just wanted to laugh, but he did a really amazing job.
ON WHAT'S NEXT We've talked about moving [to England.] An English upbringing is more laid-back. Kids get to stay kids a lot longer. We have a house in Cambridge, but it's a little too rural for me. I'd like to get a place closer to London. My boys [Samual, 12, John, 10, Joseph, 8, and Daniel, 6] are city boys.
ON LIFE POST RAYMOND Recently my youngest son asked," Why do you have to take an hour to get ready and put makeup on every time we go out? We're just going to the movies!" And my oldest son said, "Well, she's still a TV star."
- Contributors:
- Jessica Herndon.
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!
