Word: minis
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Sixteen years have passed since ABC's landmark telecast of Roots. In TV time, that is nearly a millennium. Back in 1977, the mini-series was a fresh and vital form. The Big Three networks still had a virtual monopoly on the TV audience. And an old-fashioned, multigenerational family saga disguised as a history lesson about slavery could seem like a major contribution to racial understanding...
Queen has poignant moments, thanks largely to Halle Berry's delicate, deeply felt performance in the title role. But the mini-series seems both dated and distressingly up to date. It bears less resemblance to Haley's earlier epics than to a 1990s woman-in-jeopardy TV film, or maybe a Danielle Steel soap opera. Queen is the classic innocent heroine who embarks on a picaresque journey in which evil and injustice lurk around every corner...
...property did not suspect it was there, the room could be reached only by using a block and tackle to lift a 200-lb. concrete trapdoor hidden beneath a carpet. Then it was necessary to climb down a 7-ft. ladder to a narrow passage that led to the mini-dungeon. Though it had only a camp toilet, the room was equipped with ventilation and a closed-circuit TV that enabled Esposito to keep an eye on his living quarters upstairs...
Harry, the former high school football coach who had made a string of B pictures not quite bad enough to attract a cult following, got his break with a TV tearjerker about a dying athlete and the mini-series The Blue and the Gray. Linda attributes her success in network television, one of the last remaining outposts of prefeminist thinking, "to the Bic pen and nothing else." She wrote 35 straight episodes of Designing Women, an indoor record in Hollywood. But after 150 episodes, the top-rated show about four intelligent women had won only one Emmy -- for hairdressing...
...Civil War was not just the pivotal event of American history. It . provided a milestone in TV history as well. The astonishing popularity of Ken Burns' 12-hour mini-series, which aired on PBS in September 1990, profoundly shook the TV world. On PBS, attempts to duplicate The Civil War's success have ranged from big-event mini-series like Columbus and the Age of Discovery to countless American Experience documentaries. The commercial networks too have jealously eyed the program's hefty ratings. It was only a matter of time before one of them took a chance on a similar...