Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...unprecedented eight shows with religious and spiritual themes. Each of these supplicants is praying for the Top-10 ratings success of last season's surprise hit, Touched by an Angel (CBS, Sundays, 8 p.m. E.T.). Also back this fall are 7th Heaven (the WB, Mondays, 8 p.m. E.T.), the melodrama about a minister's family; Dan Aykroyd's priestly sitcom Soul Man (ABC, Tuesdays, 8 p.m. E.T.); and the Angel spin-off Promised Land (CBS, Thursdays, 8 p.m. E.T.). Joining them are four newcomers, each offering a slightly more irreverent approach to religion. A pastor tries to fill his church...
...sober realism of her style that redeemed the novel, its weight and conviction that prevented readers from noticing (or caring) that by replacing noble enigmas with banal behaviorism, Smiley had downsized tragedy to melodrama. The movie version--bereft of diverting literary stratagems, relentlessly focused on what-next narrative--takes it another step down--to soap opera...
...melodrama was set in Burlington, N.C., a small town about 20 miles from Greensboro, where Dorothy Hutelmyer was twice president of the PTA, her husband Joseph coached baseball and ran Seaboard Underwriters, and Lynne Cox worked as his secretary. The Hutelmyers' was "a storybook marriage," says Dorothy's lawyer Jim Walker. "He wrote poetry to her, love songs...
...name is Freddy Heflin, and in Cop Land--a sharp-eyed character study and virtuoso acting class masquerading as a violent melodrama--he is played by Sylvester Stallone. This time Hollywood's longest lived action star is not battling Apollo Creed or the Vietnamese or a killer mountain, but his own rep as a stolid, vaguely comic, pre-Modernist hunk-lunk. Freddy is surrounded by guys who think they're men because they carry guns in the big city. But Sly is crowded too--by an intimidating gang of quality thesps, including Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Ray Liotta...
...fine, dreamlike first novel, The Light of Falling Stars (Riverhead; 308 pages; $23.95), J. Robert Lennon does start off with an air crash, not far from a Montana town he calls Marshall. But he declines his own generous offer of melodrama (and of irony too, for that matter) and proceeds to a far more interesting narration that amounts to a kind of anti-melodrama. The plane falls, townspeople grieve and attend funerals. But enemies are not reconciled, deep perceptions are not arrived at, lovers do not see each other more clearly and dearly. Paul and Anita, a shakily married couple...