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...Most Intimidating Election-Night Set: ABC. Peters Jennings is presiding from the starship deck of what looks like a rejected set for "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," accessorized with a giant panel of honeycomb, and the ubiquitous New York City streetscape does nothing to soften things. Worse, every person on the team - Jennings, Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts - is forced to stand coolly and uncomfortably, like the keyboard players in an early-'80s New Wave band. Who's the network news sadist who decided anchors suddenly can only seem authoritative if they stand for hours on end? This could...
...ABC's election-cast is threatening to become like some journalistic Hands on a Hardbody contest, as the entire iron-calved Alphabet news crew is going for their third hour standing up. (Except for George Stephanopoulous, but maybe they just didn't want to subject the poor guy to the embarrassment of being dwarfed by the statuesque Jennings.) Further accentuating the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" parallel, Jennings throws out a question to the audience - Do you think Hillary will run for president now? - to vote on at the ABC web site. Thanks, Pete, but I think tangling with...
...from the Nelsons to the Simpsons, it has largely meant married parents with kids. Not so this year. The lead character on abc's The Geena Davis Show shacks up out of wedlock with a widower and his kids. The single-mom heroine of the WB's Gilmore Girls was knocked up as a teen; the grownup star of Fox's Titus gets knocked out by his hard-drinking, oft divorced dad. On Fox's Normal, Ohio, Dad is divorced and gay. From Ward and June Cleaver, we've gone to Ward and June, cleaved...
This isn't the first year TV has explored contentious families or divorce (Grace Under Fire). Past producers would sometimes simply kill off Mom, leaving a cute dad who could date (ABC's Madigan Men continues the widower-com tradition). But now the nontraditional family is practically mandatory, for reasons as much economic as social. After years of big-city yuppie-coms, the networks realized, says NBC entertainment president Garth Ancier, that "the urban work setting was getting old." That meant a return to the domestic comedy--but now, says Geena creator Terry Minsky, "it's not enough...
...surprising among contentious sci-fi fans (ask Patrick Stewart and Kate Mulgrew). But The X-Files isn't the only series of a certain age adding a prominent new face and taking a prominent risk. After losing nice guy Michael J. Fox, who's fighting Parkinson's disease, ABC's city-hall sitcom Spin City added bad boy Charlie Sheen. On NBC's Law & Order, Dianne Wiest takes over from Steven Hill, who was the show's savvy, world-weary district attorney for 10 years. Law & Order, driven more by taut crime tales than characters, has gradually jettisoned its original...