Word: lear
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Mature people gravitate to mature subject matters. Situation comedies in the '50s and '60s made a statement by omission louder than any I could have made," television writer and producer Norman Lear said yesterday...
Apple Pie (Sept. 23, ABC, 8:30 p.m. E.D.T.). Other people have bad days, so why shouldn't Norman Lear? It must have been a dark afternoon in Beverly Hills when the producer dreamed up this sitcom. A dumb idea, indifferently executed, Apple Pie is easily the worst show ever from the Lear factory. It makes Hot I Baltimore look like Heartbreak House...
...charming Rue McClanahan, late of Lear's Maude, stars as a fey woman who, in the Depression, hires an entire family out of the want ads. Why? Never mind. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of F.D.R. and Anna May Wong jokes. Among the unruly supporting players, Dabney Coleman is refreshingly laid back as the heroine's hired fella, but the gifted Jack Gilford is squandered as a crochety blind grandpa. Someone should put Apple Pie back in the oven. - Frank Rich
...hero of this drama, and the viewer immediately knows where he is: in Thomas Hardy country, dark, gloomy and unrelievedly tragic. Haunted by one terrible incident in his past, Henchard proceeds to ruin his own life and the lives of nearly everyone he touches, until, like Shakespeare's Lear, the character he most resembles, he is left with nothing but his own relentless memories...
Today, Korchnoi is the Lear of chess: pacing and grimacing, given to lavish tirades and, on occasion, paranoia. During a qualifying match with Spassky earlier this year, he accused his opponent of inducing hallucinations via hypnosis, and even suspected microwaves had been employed to destroy his concentration. In Baguio City last week he demanded the right to bring to the match a fountain pen-sized device designed to detect "X rays, gamma rays and other radiation...