Word: abc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Where the hip, forthright girls were harder to come by, however, was on TV. With the exception of the short-lived ABC series My So-Called Life, you would have searched the dial long and fruitlessly during those years to find a show that focused on the sort of teenager who might go home after school and find meaning in the words of Courtney Love. Perhaps because TV has always been a few steps behind other media in the race to reprocess and package alternative culture (remember that the women's movement was already in swing in the late 1960s...
...seems that moment has arrived. There are currently half a dozen series airing on network and cable television that center on young women in their mid-teens so capable, self-assured and unfrivolous that any feminist would be proud to call them little sisters. Three of the shows--ABC's Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (Friday, 9 p.m. EDT), Nickelodeon's The Secret World of Alex Mack (airing three times a week) and the WB's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Monday, 9 p.m. EDT)--have even bestowed symbolic supernatural powers upon their young heroines...
...these shows are doing quite well for their networks, largely because nearly equal numbers of boys and girls (and often grownups of both sexes) are tuning in. Sabrina, just renewed for a second season, is often the highest-rated show in its time period and remains one of ailing ABC's only new hits. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the witty action series based on the 1992 film of the same, self-explanatory name, tosses off enough high kicks and punches to appease even the most devout Hercules viewer. In a mid-season of countless failures, Buffy has become the most...
...criminologist's eye for psychology, that the boys killed to see how it felt. Here we have an entirely inward explanation, severed from the world at large as well as from the victims. In some sense this explanation is convincing as one female teenager from Franklin made clear on ABC: "That's something that not very many people in the world know what it feels like. They probably just wanted to know, see if they could get away with it, I guess...
Fame is a fickle dame. Nick Matzorkis, who helped discover the bodies of the Heaven's Gate cult members and finagled that into a TV development deal with ABC, now has to cope with her nastier side. Matzorkis was jailed last week for an alleged probation violation for auto theft in Cleveland. Ohio authorities recognized him on TV. His publicist told the Los Angeles Times that the TV deal would not be affected...