Word: tanners
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RAGGED BUT RIGHT: GREAT COUNTRY STRING BANDS OF THE 1930s (RCA). Before the rhinestones, country music sounded like this: all heart and no slickum. Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers; Wade Mainer . . . the sounds are as good as the names...
...TANNER '88: THE REALITY CHECK (HBO, debuting Aug. 22, 10 p.m. EDT). Dukakis has won the nomination, but Tanner, TV's alternative candidate, is pondering a third-party run in the final cable installment of Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau's ingenious political satire...
...only way out of the fact-vs.-fiction morass may be satire, and that is why Tanner '88 is a unique pleasure. The twice-monthly HBO series, directed by Robert Altman and written by Garry Trudeau, follows the campaign of one Jack Tanner, a fictional presidential candidate played by Michael Murphy. He has stumped on location in New Hampshire, spoken at fund raisers and debated strategy with campaign aides, exactly paralleling -- and sometimes commenting on -- the actual presidential race...
...Tanner '88 has had fun trying to confuse the line between the real and the bogus: Tanner has crossed paths on the campaign trail, for instance, with | legitimate candidates like Bob Dole and Pat Robertson. But Altman and Trudeau have gone beyond such gimmicks and turned their parallel world into a sly fun- house mirror. The show skewers a host of familiar political types, from the tough-as-nails campaign manager (Pamela Reed), who fends off late-night calls from Joe Kennedy Jr., to the overzealous staff cameraman, who dogs Tanner's every step with his whirring minicam. The candidate...
...indignities never stop. At the Tanners', I sleep in the garage or the laundry room. At NBC, I share my dressing room with a mop and bucket. The one saving grace to this abuse is that it helps fool even the cast into thinking I really am a puppet, including Anne Schedeen, who plays the real-life Kate Tanner, and the guy who plays Willie, this dithery product of Hesitation ( School named Max Wright. He must have mastered the Dramatic Pause (wake me up at half time!) during his years on the stage at places like Yale and Harvard, schools...