Word: made-for-tv
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...blackface charade is on the air! A troupe of darkies in their field-workers' clothes and prison garb are singin' and dancin' and funnin' away, in a skewed, bitter, made-for-TV version of the old minstrel show. The feet flash, the banjos are pummeled; the energy level ascends in megavolts, moving beyond satire into irresistible entertainment. And suddenly a weird thought creases the moviegoer's skull: TV could use a comedy-variety show with a self-lacerating edge; and Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show--the defiantly offensive TV parody that is at the heart of Spike...
Until now, Fugit, the 17-year-old actor from Salt Lake City, Utah, who snagged the role of Crowe's teen self, has been seen mostly in bit parts on television. "Usually I played a jerk," he says. "I did a made-for-TV movie--I was a jerk and got eaten by ants. On Touched by an Angel, I burned down a mentally-retarded kid's house...
...irony is that as, over the past eight years, political conventions have been transformed entirely into made-for-TV spectacles, their prime-time coverage has actually declined. That's simply because the image-makers have systematically weeded out everything that might make them interesting as TV. Perhaps the conventions' best hope for clawing their way back to prime time may occur outside the halls - at the shadow events and street protests planned by elements ranging from major-party mavericks to Starbucks-trashing anarchists. At least those have the not-quite-scripted frisson of reality TV...
...spent the rest of the week looking for signs of the loving relationship my parents had built when the obnoxious teenager in me - reared on the fairy-tale love stories of made-for-TV movies or the cheesy teen-romance novels my local library ordered by the series - was too busy to notice. After the accident, Maria was the first name my father could say after he pronounced his own. Hers was the first face he could recognize. Last weekend, when my older sister substituted for our mom at a speech therapy session, my father immediately asked her where...
This is mitigated, however, by the fact that GE--again, a partner of Microsoft in MSNBC--is also a partner, with Disney and Hearst (which, along with Dow Jones, owns SmartMoney magazine; more on that later), in A&E, the Arts & Entertainment cable channel, which is showing a made-for-TV movie starring Jeff Daniels as George Washington, which I haven't seen but which is hard not to hold against these companies anyway. What's worse, GE has direct links, via co-ownership of CNBC, the financial-news cable channel, with Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal...