A Few Reviews

Every week for the past couple of years, I would tune into a special half an hour of television. It was like a miracle, like someone had taken a video camera and captured my life on tape. It was like looking into a mirror and at times I wept. It was a cathartic cry from the soul. Now those skunks at CBS have cancelled "Major Dad". They have robbed me of that special thirty minutes every week. What am I to do?

Some movie directors will go to extraordinary lengths to slam a medium they consider inferior. That is the lesson anyone who endured Oliver stone’s Wild Palms learned last week.

The seven-hour stylistic mini-series made for entertaining TV although Stone has the subtlety of a car alarm. The scenes of the virtual reality created by the "inter-active" TV were creative and stimulating. Visually Stone far-surpassed David Lynch’s Twin Peaks which Wild Palms obviously aspired to do.

The message was delivered early on when the tattooed boy muttered, "No one watches movies anymore." The evilness (conspiracy?) of TV was exposed: sometime in the future TV and reality will clash in the form of a pseudo religion which will engulf us all. What we hold to be true won’t necessarily be; and what we want to be true can happen with a mixture of chemicals and an all-encompassing television station.

This was not great TV. The story was muddled and confused. Yet it was better than watching another episode of Murder She Wrote. It was a bit depressing and hard to follow but so is life (or is that life on TV?)

I for one, enjoyed the final installment of "Cheers." Once you got past all the hype, and that dreadful "pregame show" with Bob Costas, the actual finale was fun. Unlike "M*A*S*H," Cheers went out with proper touch. It was nice seeing Diane as neurotic as ever; Sam’s lecture to the gang about their "real" home; Cliff’s theory on footwear; and Sam finally discovering where his true love is.