Word: minis
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...FIRST GLANCE, The House of the Sports is the stuff of which television mini-series are made: A poor miner from a fallen family longs to marry the eldest daughter of a wealthy senator. But his beautiful bride-to-be dies before the wedding. Disconsole, the miner returns to his family's ancestral home, a once-great plantation which has gone to seed...
...They are also usually simultaneous, so each country's view dominates its own press." Senior Correspondent Frederick Ungeheuer, who has traveled to three summits, found that his first obstacle this time was technical: adapting the portable computer he brought from New York to the West German telephone system. A mini-summit of his own with telephone engineers and a computer service representative finally worked out the bugs...
...days when a big network mini-series could mobilize the country around its TV sets night after night seem to have vanished. Though none of this season's mini-series were outright bombs, all fell short of smash ratings. Despite A.D.'s stars (James Mason, Ava Gardner), spectacle and heavy pretelecast promotion, it attracted only 19.2% of the nation's TV viewers. That is above average but no larger than the audience for a typical episode of Magnum, P.I. The most popular three-parter of the season, ABC's Hollywood Wives, drew an unspectacular 22.8 rating, much lower than...
...years ago, by contrast, ABC's The Winds of War swept the nation with an average 38.6 rating over its seven nights. A month later, The Thorn Birds, also on ABC, surpassed that score with a whopping 41.9. Enticed by these colossal numbers, all three networks began developing mini-series at a rate unseen since the heady days following the ground-breaking 1977 telecast of Roots (at 45.0, still the all-time ratings champ). Such "long form" dramas, however, need out-of-the-ordinary ratings to justify their hefty production costs (a reported $32 million for Space, for example), especially...
Bored might be a better word. As a genre, the big network mini-series has become as predictable and formulaic as the half-hour sitcom. This season's multiparters were mostly sprawling family dramas or historical sagas, with hackneyed plots spiced up with vaguely exotic locales (1920s Paris in Mistral's Daughter, turn-of-the-century New York City in Ellis Island). A.D.'s meticulous evocation of the ancient Roman Empire could not redeem a ponderous extravaganza that looked as if it had been conceived and directed by computer...