Word: serials
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SERIAL Directed by Bill Persky Screenplay by Rich Eustis and Michael Elias...
Cyra McFadden's comic bestseller, The Serial, was as much journalism as satire. In order to devastate her prey, the trendy, upper-middle-class denizens of Marin County, Calif., McFadden did not resort to barbed wisecracks: she merely let her characters speak for themselves. Like Director-Writer Paul Mazursky in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, she understood that the affluent, desperate hipsters of the Far West are their own worst enemies. There is no point in making fun of people who are already self-parodies...
...that Mazursky did not buy the movie rights to McFadden's book. Instead, they went to Sidney Beckerman, a producer whose credits include the legendary film desecration of Portnoy's Complaint. Next to Serial, Portnoy seems like an earnest failure. Not only is McFadden's cool point of view lost, but so are her satirical targets. Though Serial is set in the present-day San Francisco suburbs, it might as well unfold in '50s Dubuque. Most of the characters are whining, repressed squares who, at heart, disapprove of free sex, drugs, divorce and teenagers. For some...
...designation is appropriate, because doctors still precede their cautiously hopeful statements with serial "ifs." If longer-range tests show good results. If interferon can be manufactured in the massive quantities needed for effective treatment. If it proves not to have unexpected side effects. Should these and other ifs become fact, IF will be an ideal cancer drug, for it is a natural substance, produced in infinitesimal amounts by the body. Unlike existing treatments, interferon seems not to damage healthy cells or produce horrendous side effects. Its only apparent shortcomings seem temporary and confined to slight fever, fatigue, and a small...
...criticism is essentially unfair; people want to know about the weather, and TV forecasters tell them-not just the niggardly name, rank and serial number of temperature highs and lows but also the larger meteorological events: cold sweeping down from Canada, a warm front out of the Gulf Stream or the metastasis of a storm from Martinique. It may sometimes sound like a cheerful patter of mumbo jumbo and Celsius conversions, like a lounge comedian who did a semester at M.I.T., but on the whole, people learn what they want to know. The audience pays weathercasters the compliment...