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...cobwebbed corners of America's pop culture: Michael Jackson, staring from his mug shot like a revenant; Ronald Reagan, whose culture wars CBS exhumed with its planned, then canceled mini-series. But these were only minor hauntings compared with what will happen on Sunday, as Angels in America (HBO, Dec. 7 and 14, 8 p.m. E.T.) sends the '80s crashing into American homes with a fanfare of hosannas and portents of pestilence and apocalypse...
Bringing his work to TV was no comedown for the playwright, who is unapologetically "addicted to television," including HBO'S The Wire, The Honeymooners and "Law & Order: Sexual Filth" (his nickname for Special Victims Unit). In a sense, Angels was TV waiting to be made, an HBO drama before HBO dramas as we know them existed. Director Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Wit) notes that the plays often cut between split-stage scenes, a "very filmic" technique. "So much of it concerned dreams and magic," Nichols adds, "and those two things are very much in the realm of movies...
Nichols, Kushner and HBO all call Angels a movie (it will debut in two parts as it did onstage but will be rerun in one-hour episodes and in one six-hour shebang), but its high-literary and low--pop culture sensibility--it references Hegel and The Wizard of Oz--best recall Dennis Potter's British mini-series. (The Singing Detective's Michael Gambon even shows up as, of course, a ghost.) And it ranks in TV history with Potter's masterworks. The key to Angels is that it is realistic and fantastic at once--a miraculous event in mundane...
Justin Kirk, who plays brokenhearted AIDS sufferer Prior Walter on HBO's Angels in America, has the kind of impossible good looks that bad-TV actors are made of. And while he has done some bad TV--he played Barto Zane for two years on the WB's forgettable Jack & Jill--in reality, Kirk, 34, is an accomplished stage actor. He did his first play at 7 (Brecht, no less) and has since racked up accolades that include an Obie for playing the blind man in Terrence McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion!--"the other gay play of the '90s," says...
DIED. MICHAEL KAMEN, 55, Grammy-winning, Oscar-nominated composer who scored more than 80 movies and television shows, including all four Lethal Weapon films, three Die Hard pictures and HBO's Band of Brothers series; of an apparent heart attack; in London...