Word: mini
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...there were a dog bites man channel (slogan: "news of the obvious, 24 hours a day!"), its top stories last week would have been HOLLYWOOD ACCUSED OF LIBERALISM and TV EXECUTIVES CRAVENLY BUCKLE UNDER PRESSURE. CBS canceled The Reagans, a four-hour mini-series, after conservative activists and pundits said it made Ronald Reagan out to be a ninny and a bigot. If one is to judge from selective quotes that made the press, the critics seemed to have a point. (The series reportedly had the President say about gay AIDS victims, "They that live in sin shall...
...able to judge The Reagans fairly - as if anyone really wants to - until it airs next year on Showtime, CBS's pay-cable corporate sibling. But we don't generally look to made-for-TV mini-series for ungilded truth. Remember, if not for scurrilous, insensitive, sensationalized TV movies about the (liberal, Democrat) Kennedys, we would have to clone five Michael Jacksons to fill the holes in the sweeps-stunt calendar. If Americans were going to depend on The Reagans as a history lesson - rather than as a campy Washington version of I Love the 80s - the Republic is doomed...
...Reagans skirmish was less about objective facts than subjective balance - which of Reagan's actions really mattered, which didn't, who gets credit, who gets blame - something historians will joust over for decades. No one with sense expects a mini-series to answer those questions, but if The Reagans' critics - and defenders - didn't invest it with more import than it deserved, there would be no advantage to be gained. Truth be told, little real damage can be done by a sensationalized mini-series or a network's cowardly cave-in. But opportunistic partisans have something in common with opportunistic...
...footwear—think macaroni and cheese for your feet—and yes, they’re more toasty than a hot, doughy bagel, but Uggs have a troubled history in the cultural lexicon that remains unknown to many of the campus fashionistas who sport them with a mini in public. From admittedly cool beginnings among Aussie surfers in the 1970s for warming up after hanging ten, the Ugg became shorthand in Antipodean fashion circles as synonymous with only the most slothful and sloppy of lazy layabouts. Banned from public places—either through cold stares or more...
Almost inevitably, great exercises in style deteriorate, through imitation and repetition, into mere stylization. So it is with The Singing Detective. Yes, Dennis Potter wrote the screen adaptation of his famous mini-series, which may be the best television show ever made. And, yes, all concerned with the film have labored on it with obvious love and respect. And, yes, all the TV show's moves are honorably replicated. Potter's hero, Dan Dark, is immobilized, in searing pain, by crippling psoriasis (as the writer himself was). Dark escapes into a fantasy world, imagining himself the hero of a movie...