Word: holocaust
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Like Roots, Holocaust is neither documentary nor docudrama, but a fictionalized interpretation of real events. Its dramatic structure is simple: Writer Gerald Green has invented a bourgeois family of assimilated Jewish Berliners and then propelled its members through the events of 1935-45. Shortly after the show opens, the head of the Weiss family, a doctor played by Fritz Weaver, is exiled from Berlin to the Warsaw Ghetto. His wife (Rosemary Harris) soon follows, and eventually the couple end up in Auschwitz. The oldest Weiss son (James Woods), an artist, marries a Roman Catholic (Meryl Streep), only to be sent...
...Holocaust is often brutal. "Unlike pop movies about genocide such as The Diary of Anne Frank and Voyage of the Damned, this show does not leave the brunt of Nazi violence offscreen. Almost all the major characters in Holocaust die, and we see how they are murdered: in mass machine-gun executions, in death-camp ovens, in torture chambers. Though some viewers may be tempted to turn off the horror, Green does everything in his power to keep the audience transfixed. Once some early exposition is out of the way, his narrative races along at a relentless pace, spinning...
...also shrewd enough to give the audience a wide assortment of characters with which to identify. Holocaust's Jews are religious and nonreligious, Zionist and non-Zionist; some of the younger characters (notably those played by Bottoms and Feldshuh) are out-and-out heartthrobs, designed to hook the kids who often dictate the TV-watching habits of American households. As a result, most viewers will be trapped by the time the story reaches its most grisly sections...
...Holocaust is necessarily rooted in the conventions of melodrama, it is sophisticated in its approach to the history it covers; Green does not miss too many angles. He dramatizes the special anti-Semitic character of Hitler's policies, but also shows that many non-Jews were victims of German genocide. He depicts those Jews who went quietly to the slaughter as well as those who tried to resist. He reminds the audience that a few Jews even curried favor with their German captors and that the Allied powers (the U.S. included) stood idly by as evidence of the Holocaust...
...most movies or TV shows that describe the Third Reich, the Nazis are heel-clicking automatons who run around yelling "Heil Hitler!" The effect of such theatrics is to rob genocide of its meaning; audiences can dismiss the Final Solution as the creation of a few madmen. In Holocaust, most Nazis are seemingly normal people who all too easily answer the call of a racist and fascist government. One of the show's principal characters is an intelligent lawyer and family man, Erik Dorf (Michael Moriarty), who rises in the SS by dreaming up "legal" justifications...