Word: made-for-tv
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Television, of course, sold out to commercial interests long ago. With the exceptions of All in the Family and some of its spinoffs, an occasional made-for-TV movie or "mini series", some of the news analyses and documentaries, and most of the public television BBC imports, the decade was unmemorable. The networks received more prase for their coverage of the Watergate hearings than for any other programming event. In the '70s the news became entertainment because T.V. offered little else of value. Public and cable TV tried to fill the void: the former by presenting the best of British...
...broke one of TV's sacrosanct laws: it moved winning shows to new time periods. Such traditional Top Ten hits as Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy have all suffered from being shifted. Some have at times fallen to the bottom half of the Nielsen chart. Made-for-TV movies and miniseries, usually a strength for ABC, have also proved poor draws this season...
Losey's breakthrough is the meticulous attention he gives to sonic perspective. Many made-for-TV opera films ludicrously maintain the same concert-hall acoustic whether the singer is standing in a bedchamber or a wheatfield. In Don Giovanni, when the camera zooms in on a singer's mouth, the voice becomes more distinct and louder--and you can tell simply by listening whether a singer is indoors or out. Losey's dubbing technique, too, seems more precise and less distracting than most, including Bergman's. Only one singer, Malcolm King as Masetto, suffers from the "disconnected mouth" disease endemic...
Conceived by Paris Opéra General Director Rolf Liebermann, Don Giovanni is an attempt to go beyond the usual filmed operatic performances or made-for-TV studio productions. Joseph Losey (The Servant, The Go-Between) takes his cast of international singing stars out on location to the waterways of Venice and to some stunning Palladian villas in the countryside around Vicenza. Never mind that Ingmar Bergman's 1975 version of Mozart's The Magic Flute showed what enchanting results a modest, studio-bound production could achieve. Never mind, too, that the locale of the Don Juan legend...
...this November's ratings war is crucial. Many of the No. 1 network's hits have suffered erosion this season, and the time has come to recoup. To this end, ABC is betting on an ambitiously sleazy collection of made-for-TV movies. Leading the pack is a six-hour miniseries, The French Atlantic Affair, which will have to face such competition as A Bridge Too Far (NBC) and Silver Streak (CBS). ABC just may win. Its mini-series aims so low that it does not even qualify as popcorn entertainment; the show is best watched while chewing...