Word: mania
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This reductio ad absurdum of TV's talk-show mania has had funny sequences, like Jim Belushi joining in an inept neighborhood game of charades: while the women whiz through titles like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the men are stumped by Jaws. But the Hollywood-meets-the-heartland satire falls a little flat. My Talk Show is too straitlaced and good-natured; it needs a bit of the rudeness of Late Night with David Letterman. Or at least some quirkier performers. Where have you gone, Louise Lasser...
High school football is a quasi-religion all over the South, but in Odessa, Texas, it is more -- a mania, a frenzied obsession, a compensation, perhaps, for living in the wind-beaten, mesquite-covered, dust-ridden, sun-baked locale that novelist Larry McMurtry calls (in Texasville) "the worst town on earth." Odessans often fill every one of the 20,000 seats in the gleaming $6 million stadium, complete with two-story press box, built in 1982 for Permian High School's five-time state champions, the Panthers. Odessa's preoccupation with the Panthers is richly chronicled in Friday Night Lights...
...LIST-O-MANIA...
Thus for the fourth time in five years Washington had failed to produce a budget by its own, self-imposed deadline. All concerned concede that Washington-style budgetmaking is a disgrace. Ideas for rationalizing the process, to curb both spending mania and cliff-hanging melodrama, have been as numerous as attempts to cure the common cold -- and just as ineffectual...
...even Lynch must know that every fad must fade. Any enthusiasm with the velocity of Twin Peaks mania is bound to boomerang. "Fame is an unnatural thing," says Mark Frost, Lynch's TV partner and Twin Peaks co-producer. "There is no equivalent to it in the animal kingdom." A director on the edge gets critical indulgences when he steps into the mainstream; a director on top is ripe for a raspberry. The trick for Lynch is to keep the ebb of acclaim from affecting either his work or his attitude toward...