Word: hokeyness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What explains Harry and Louise's inspiring 286,000 calls to a toll-free number since the series began in September? Sure, they lured both Clintons into blasting them, but it's the hokey soap-opera techniques perfected in the Taster's Choice coffee ads that have made Harry and Louise seem like a bad song you can't stop humming. The actors cast as Harry and Louise by Ben Goddard, president of the Goddard-Clausen/First Tuesday ad agency, are similar to the Taster's Choice twosome in age, self-absorption and pseudo sophistication, although they have dissimilar levels...
Viewers from eight to 80 have little trouble recognizing the unwavering formulas of these arthritic whodunits: murder discovered, suspects questioned, red herrings introduced, culprit finally tripped up and exposed. Not every show is as hokey and mechanical as Burke's Law, which routinely ends with a scene in which Burke gathers all the suspects and eliminates them one by one until he fingers the guilty party. The better shows at least try to bring their criminology into the '90s: the key to the solution of Cosby's first mystery -- Who is murdering a corporation's top executives? -- was the redial...
...weekend here and you'll never want to live anywhere else," proclaimed the sales brochure for the 42 lots of the Whitewater project near Flippin in northern Arkansas. However, despite the scenic snapshots and the homey-but- hokey handwritten spiel, no one was buying into the forested real estate development. To spur sales, Jim McDougal, a local savings and loan tycoon, % thought he needed a model home -- and the help of one of his Whitewater partners, Hillary Rodham, as she then called herself. In 1980 McDougal loaned her $30,000 to build, own and ultimately sell a three-bedroom ranch...
...intermittently congenial exercise, and the biggest name, four-time Emmy winner Nancy Marchand (Lou Grant), very nearly redeems the event. In the first piece she is the pseudo seer, caked in makeup and swathed in fading Gypsy finery but maintaining an inner core of steely rage. Her climactic revelations, hokey on the page, sound torn from the depths of a great and dangerous soul. She has less to do in Black Comedy, but as a spinster liberated in the dark -- literally -- to indulge dreamy fantasies of booze and sex, she melds exquisite comic timing and gesture with spontaneous sweetness...
...into a metaphor for his Administration. The egalitarianism of the Round Table and the script's palaver about the rule of law echoed public optimism about the United Nations and the potential of the Third World. We live in more cynical times, and Camelot now plays as just a hokey love triangle. That aspect is not too pertinent either: while Queen Guenevere fights off her adulterous yearnings toward Lancelot in keeping with the morality of the past, Britain's present Queen-in-waiting makes indiscreet phone calls and negotiates a separation...