Word: soaps
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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EVERYBODY'S ALL-AMERICAN. A college star (Dennis Quaid) peaks early; his prom- queen wife (Jessica Lange) piques often; a star-struck bookworm (Timothy Hutton) peeks into their problems. Taylor Hackford's entertaining soap opera polishes the cliches until they shine like movie truths...
TWENTY years ago, Joe McGinnis explained to the nation how our presidents could be sold to us like so much soap. The same soap-peddlers who gave us President Richard Milhouse Nixon have now also given us President-elect George Herbert Walker Bush. They marketed the same product twice, and the nation bought it both times...
...future excavators can pore over the bones of War and Remembrance and see (in the fall chapters, at least) the definitive example of a once flourishing breed: a lumbering but amiable dinosaur, equal parts history and hokum, spectacle and soap opera. The historical narrative plays best, as the series provides a lucid account of the key battles and decisions on which the war turned. It also dramatizes, with chilling bluntness, the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz, as well as the slaughter of Jews at Babi Yar. Few lines on network TV are as shocking as the remark of a Nazi officer...
...concerns over the deficit or defense or health care. Last week's fuss over the NBC mini-series Favorite Son pointed up the campaign's love/hate tempest with the pervasive boob tube. Now, it seems, politics is in dialogue not only with the network news shows but with primetime soap operas as well...
Republicans protesting the show made the mistake of underestimating the savvy of American viewers by thinking that voters would conflate the outlandish soap operatic hero of Favorite Son with the solidly pedestrian Quayle. Whatever one might think of Quayle as a political thinker, he's an unlikely candidate to be at the center of a kinky sex scandal. As Quayle's wife said, "Anyone who knows Dan knows he would rather play golf than have sex any time...