Word: shows
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Freberg--who at 73 is living in Los Angeles and still does a syndicated radio show--likes to recall that St. George and the Dragonet, his chart-topping parody of Dragnet, was a big hit in Australia even before the TV show was seen there. Later, when it finally arrived, an Aussie fan came up to Freberg and marveled, "Somebody has gone and built a whole TV show around your record!" For a satirist, that's the Academy Award...
...Hollywood heaven. Robbie, the irrepressible con man, vs. Evon (her cover name), a repressed Mormon with an Olympic bronze medal. In what sport? Don't ask. Turow seeds his story with delayed disclosures and surprises, including an inspired variation on one of dramaturgy's soundest rules: if you show a dangerous implement in the first act, it must be used in the last...
...wouldn't have thought it, but in his 1998 documentary Cold War, Sir Jeremy Isaacs had it easy. In that show, he could impress the viewer with bombshells (real ones); in Millennium (CNN, Sundays through Dec. 12, 10 p.m. E.T.), he has to astonish us with what we already know. This 10-hour, chronological series doesn't always succeed, but at its best, its hyper welter of history renders the familiar surprising...
Isaacs can't help his subject's unruliness, but one wishes for more interpretation and overarching narrative--a history of ideas atop the history of events. There are a couple of implicit morals. The first is that cultures that turned inward, notably China (the breakout star of the show, with an apparent big role in the sequel), have not fared so well as those that were outward looking, even imperialist. The second is that the era's driving force, for good and for ill, is human arrogance. This millennium is a graveyard of eternal empires, authoritative explanations and overreaching ambitions...
...Four's a good number," he tells me. "We'll say you caught a few. It'll sound like more." We watch an air show: an osprey scares off a bald eagle that has probably come too close to its nest...