Word: formulaic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Someone should write an ode to Mary Tyler Moore, whose show seems to get better with every passing week. Now in its third year, the series has taken the brass of the usual situation comedy formula and transmuted it into something resembling gold...
...waves move at the velocity of light in a vacuum, that speed was recognized as a constant of nature. Einstein's theories hold that nothing in the universe can ever move faster. The constant (represented by the letter c) appears in his famous equation E=mc², the formula for the conversion of mass into energy, which was grimly proven July 16, 1945 in the first atomic blast at Alamogordo...
RAFELSON'S MONOPOLY METAPHOR is too slick a formula. He has poached inconsistently on the terrain Arthur Miller familiarized: Shopworn sales talk has become the idiom of a society based on manipulation, commercial go-getting has been universalized as a private ethic, preservation of personal integrity means self-destruction. These are his cool assumption, the truisms of one who has seen-it-all. Sentimentially is a demon to him, so he lavishes heavy filmic methods in an effort to play it tough, and it is wholly at the expense of his material. He has twisted the form of his film...
What finally downed this venerable show was a fusillade from several directions. It never recovered from the death last May of Dan Blocker, who played Hoss, the bluff but gentle giant. Perhaps most important, public taste was changing, and the show's simple formula did not allow for exploration of the more complicated themes that interest viewers today. In the latest Nielsens, the series had fallen to No. 53. There is still some solace for Bonanza buffs, however. Chances are that it will rerun through syndication for at least another 13 years...
...large extent shut out. Some argue that the election was already lost when faithful Democrats gazed at the convention on television, did not see a soul on the floor they recognized, and did not care for those they did see. The prospect now is for a new formula that avoids the stigma of the quota system. It would give the traditional factions some additional strength and at the same time retain some of the gains won by the reform wing...