made-for-tv

Oh, how can I possibly resist Apocalyptic cheese like NBC’s *Revelations*? It’s goofy Jesus stuff *and* it’s ridiculous prime-time ‘drama.’ It’s movie actors slumming on TV *and* it’s a finely calculated mercenary attempt to get all those consumers of *The Da Vinci Code* back in front of the boob tube, where they belong. What’s *not* to have a love/hate/despairing-for-the-culture relationship with?

Fans of offbeat British humor will gobble up this BBC production, with all its elegantly silly and piquantly observant social satire, and they’ll be tickled all the more by how it comes by its stunning insight into the romantic games men and women play and the snobbery of late-Victorian England: It was written, with clueless … more…

Two genres of film collide in this workmanlike Masterpiece Theater entry: the Stolid, Plodding Historical Drama 7th Graders Will Be Forced To Watch In Social Studies Class, and Simplistic Valentines To Complicated Real-Life People For Those Who Want Their Sappy Melodramas Drained Of Any Disruptive Emotion. Actually, that may be giving this stodgy movie too … more…

Disappointingly, this made-for-cable sword-and-sandal action soap opera ain’t half as goofy as you’d expect it to be. It’s actually gripping and suspenseful in some places, tenderly romantic in others — it’s 90 minutes of great movie. Alas, its running time is more like three hours, so without a lot of silliness to distract the viewer … more…

Poor old Oliver Twist — his nearly two-hundred-year-old misery never fails to be relevant, and so he’s doomed to be resurrected every decade or so for the edification of a new generation. This elegant British production — which aired in the U.S. on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater and here is packaged with that series’ introductions — … more…

I can’t say that I actually have fond memories of *Battlestar Galactica.* I have only vague memories of the show itself, of shag hairdos, and Starbuck getting caught with some chick or other in a Viper launch tube, and the cool robot dog, and a kid named Boxey which I thought was kind of a neat name for some inexplicable reason, and bits from after the show jumped the shark, when they found Earth, and all the colonials could jump really high because of some ridiculous thing to do with gravity. Or was that in *V*? It’s all kind of a blur.

My, how our Horatio has grown! Only a green midshipman when we first met him, he’s now captain of his own ship, the sloop *Hotspur* of His Majesty’s Navy, battling the French on the high seas in a bid to bring down the treacherous Bonaparte. If it sounds a bit like *Master and Commander,* well, that’s because Hornblower and Aubrey are contemporaries fighting the same war and the same Old Boney, and if the thought of the possibility of Ioan Gruffudd and Russell Crowe together on the same ship in those snappy uniforms and wielding swords and buckling swash is simply too delicious, then you, my friend, are not alone.

As it turns out, the “real story” of “the most famous war in history” — the ten-year siege of Troy over the daughter of a god, the most beautiful woman in the world — isn’t really as exciting as it sounds, at least not to hear USA Networks tell it. This four-hour miniseries takes a … more…