Word: made-for-tv
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Playing catch-up made ABC receptive to change. It was the first network to encourage Hollywood studios to produce series, striking early deals not only with Disney but also with Warner Bros. (77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye). ABC was also a pioneer in the made-for-TV movie format. Perhaps its most striking achievements came in sports programming. Under the leadership of Producer Roone Arledge, ABC increased the scope of athletics coverage with its weekly Wide World of Sports; introduced technical innovations like the instant replay; brought pro football into prime time with Monday Night Football; and substantially raised...
...Money made as regal a figure as Jack Nicklaus fling a putter a few weeks back in his alltime display of rapture over an eight-footer, not to win the grand slam, not even to clinch a 20th major championship, but to publicize a condominium development in Arizona at a made-for-TV golf tournament. Ben Hogan would never have wet his pants over such a glory, but there are levels of ego in this. When Bjorn Borg slipped merely to second, ahead of everyone but John McEnroe, Borg had to go. Eleven years removed from his No. 1 rating...
...Spent My Summer Vacation," Brooke Shields, 19, who returns to school there this week, should have no problem finding something to write about. While her classmates may have been hiking in Nepal or holding regular summer jobs, Brooke spent four weeks on location in Nassau for a made-for-TV movie called Wet Gold. She plays a waitress who goes on a treasure hunt with her boyfriend, a scuba diver and the salty survivor of a sunken ship (Burgess Meredith, 75). The two younger men fight over Brooke and of course everybody rights over the gold. "She's quite...
...Walsh's disappearance from a shopping mall became a national cause celebre two years ago. It led to the passage last year of the federal Missing Children Act, giving the FBI more authority to investigate disappearances of children, as well as the filming this fall of a made-for-TV movie, Adam. By coincidence, the show aired a week before Toole's prison confession, which he later recanted. But police still consider him the case's prime suspect. "He knows things only the murderer could know," says one Florida policeman...
Despite or perhaps because of the presence of such pairings, these two pay-cable productions fall somewhere between theatrical and made-for-TV movies in style and quality. The question is whether the stars are diminished by this hybrid form or raise the level of it. A little of both. -By Richard Stengel