Word: slappings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sitcoms are trying to make you cry until you laugh this season. A new term has even been coined to describe the hybrid form: dramedies. Three new series -- ABC's Hooperman and The "Slap" Maxwell Story and CBS's Frank's Place -- are ostensibly comedies, but they go for few jokes and have no laughter on the sound track. As for the more traditional sitcoms, they are tackling such heavy subjects as AIDS (Designing Women), Alzheimer's disease (The Golden Girls) and teenage drunk driving (this week's segment of Valerie's Family). On a recent episode of Kate & Allie...
...deliver their mixed messages more deftly, if not always more successfully. Hooperman, starring John Ritter as a San Francisco cop, is essentially a Hill Street Blues combination of crime-show action, broad comedy and "sensitive" character drama, slickly done but a bit overripe for its half-hour length. The Slap Maxwell Story, with Dabney Coleman as an oafish sportswriter, opts for a looser structure and more melancholy tone. Slap is a blustering loser who is constantly getting socked in the face, pushed around by his boss and dumped on by women; when his estranged son shows up for a visit...
Last January, Currier House student and bell desk attendent Johnathan O. Williams '88 was targeted by a "Negro hit squad." Now we learn that one racist punk, Gregory H. Williams '88, has been exonerated by the Harvard administration, first by receiving a slap on the wrist probation, then by being allowed to play football. For the well-heeled bigots who run this bastion of race and class privilege, Black students are obviously less important than Crimson pigskin and this is nothing...
...reading Leaving Home. She looked up and shook her head. "That Gary," she said. "Didn't I always say he was above average?" She smiled. Maybe it was the kind you describe in the book, "the smile she has used all her life on people she'd like to slap silly." But I thought it was more genuine than that...
Well, put them on disciplinary probation. For Williams, this now amounts to the equivalent of facing a 100-lb. guard across the line of scrimmage--a slap on the helmet and nothing more...