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- <text id=89TT0010>
- <title>
- Jan. 02, 1989: Video:Best Of '88
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- Jan. 02, 1989 Planet Of The Year:Endangered Earth
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- VIDEO, Page 90
- BEST OF '88
- </hdr><body>
- <p> BABY M (ABC) With an intelligent script, restrained
- direction and riveting performances by JoBeth Williams and John
- Shea, this docudrama about surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead
- became a stark thirtysomething nightmare.
- </p>
- <p> DEAF AND BLIND (PBS) Cinema verite specialist Frederick
- Wiseman took his cameras to the Alabama Institute for Deaf and
- Blind and came back with four enlightening, often heartrending
- documentaries.
- </p>
- <p> HOLLYWOOD: THE GOLDEN YEARS (Arts & Entertainment) RKO, the
- studio where King Kong, Fred Astaire and Orson Welles once
- roamed, was celebrated in six beautifully crafted, impressively
- researched episodes. Imported from the BBC, alas.
- </p>
- <p> KENNEDY RETROSPECTIVES Twenty-five years after J.F.K.'s
- assassination, specials on CBS, PBS and elsewhere reminded us
- movingly -- if excessively -- of the days when Presidents, and
- television, could be heroes.
- </p>
- <p> LIP SERVICE (HBO) An old-school TV anchorman (Paul Dooley)
- finds himself teamed with a shallow New Wave co-host (Griffin
- Dunne). Howard Korder's script for this made-for-cable movie
- neatly skewered television, but also located the tragedy
- beneath the tackiness.
- </p>
- <p> TANNER '88 (HBO) While voters slogged through an uninspired
- presidential campaign, Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau invented
- their own candidate (Michael Murphy) and fashioned, in this
- eleven-part series, the year's definitive satire of media
- politics.
- </p>
- <p> THE TENTH MAN (CBS) A rich lawyer imprisoned by the Nazis in
- Paris bargains to save his life and later faces the
- consequences. Anthony Hopkins made the viewer feel every moral
- pang in Graham Greene's engrossing story.
- </p>
- <p> VOICES & VISIONS (PBS) TV and poetry usually do not mix. But
- in this series of 13 thoughtful and evocative essays on American
- versifiers, the alchemy was just right.
- </p>
- <p> WISEGUY (CBS) Ken Wahl is Vinnie Terranova, an undercover
- cop sniffing out Mob bad guys, in TV's roughest, toughest, most
- flamboyantly entertaining crime series.
- </p>
- <p> THE WONDER YEARS (ABC) The nostalgia is ladled on a bit
- thick, but this wry, affectionate comedy about a
- twelve-year-old's angst in the late '60s has wit and insight --
- and the most believable family scenes on TV.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
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