Word: beach
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...late '80s, the time has again come for a fresh cast of characters. This time their faces show the lines of age and experience because the new motto may well be MATURITY SELLS. In a new Eastern Air Lines ad, the happy vacationers cavorting on the beach are over 60. In the McDonald's commercial, the Lothario with an eye for the female customer is 75 if he's a day. And the lady who takes the Subaru for a joyride to the pulsing music of La Bamba must be pushing...
...Beach Boys would be jealous...
...Tour of Duty is the war genre's L.A. Law, China Beach is its thirtysomething: narratively loose jointed, laced with ironic dialogue and moody introspection. Created by John Sacret Young (screenwriter of A Rumor of War) and former magazine editor William Broyles Jr., the show lurches between the fey (a macho war hero parachutes into camp and romances all the women) and % the loquaciously self-important, as if it were a sorority bull session with grenade sound effects. But the writing is a notch above standard-issue TV fare, and the show follows its own adventurous, if sometimes bumpy, path...
...sympathetic Everysoldier in Tour of Duty, confides to his ex-wife his feelings about the war: "It's just like everything you hear. It's death and destruction, it's hell on earth, it's twisted limbs. I just want it to be over." An injured grunt in China Beach expresses his despair even more starkly: "Nobody here gets out alive. Breathing maybe. Eating. Sleeping. You ride the bus to work, cash a paycheck, wait. But your life is out there . . . always...
...series about Viet Nam that was set in Korea) has been tempered by sympathy for the average grunt. There is still a place, in TV's current view of Viet Nam, for courage in battle, duty and loyalty to buddies. At a champagne dinner for officers in China Beach, a Red Cross worker blurts out a drunken toast to the men in the field: "Out there, it's not your war. It's not our war. It's their war." And it's their war that TV is finally trying to tell...