Word: lear
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...hardly surprising that Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, whatever Norman Lear's original intent, didn't end up as pure parody. Soap operas as a genre already verge on self-parody; the swelling music, anguished faces, mystifying plot complications and sexual entanglements all represent exaggerations of the vicissitudes of life on the other side of the screen. Parodying parody is a difficult business at best, and why bother when you can go parody one up and deliver instead what the New York Times Magazine called "the ultimate slice of life...
...SITCOM has two new entries from Norman Lear and one from Mary Tyler Moore's mill. As might be expected, the most sophisticated, All's Fair, is a Lear production for CBS. The story about a conservative Washington columnist in his late 40s, played by Richard Crenna, and his affair with a young, radical chic photographer, gives saucer-eyed Bernadette Peters a long-overdue opportunity to close in on an identifiable personality. But All's Fair is not for all viewers. In the damning words of one West Coast handicapper: "It's a thinking...
...Lear's other new sitcom, The Nancy Walker Show, has the inspired notion of casting the crafty comedienne as a high-powered Hollywood agent married to a Navy officer who decides to retire from the sea. (Lear's low regard for TV brass is reflected in the character of a network executive whose eight-year-old son makes all his programming decisions.) A likely...
...like a career doctor. I look at somebody, and I become an analyst of everything from what they wear to what they want out of the business." What Nancy Walker wanted was her own show. "Would two years be good enough?" asked Allan. When he heard that Producer Norman Lear "had a fantasy about doing a series concerning a show-biz lady," he got Walker the starring role-the series is called The Nancy Walker Show and will premiere next month. At the moment, Carr is helping Ann-Margret shed the beat-up image she acquired from Carnal Knowledge...
Touchstone (not found in the source novel) is Shakespeare's first intentional fool, a character the playwright would vastly improve on in Twelfth Night, All's Well, and King Lear. It is a tribute to George Hearn's skill that, with rouged cheeks and polychrome doublet, he makes this satirizing role better than it really is; and he fully merits the applause his speech on duelling elicits...