E.R. Live! And Other Comments...

by Christopher Walsh

E.R. has regained my trust with its highly hyped--and highly effective--"E.R. Live" episode, performed live twice, once for each coast. It's a sometimes uneven but great show, with a strong and talented ensemble cast and cinematic use of sights and sounds.

When I heard that the live show--about a documentary crew in the hospital--also would include live music, I was a little skeptica

TV Sweeps Round-Up Part Two

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

This is the handsomest piece of TV I've seen in a long time. Done with style and verve for ABC?following a flatfooted version on CBS a few months ago?the new four-hour miniseries of the Jules Verne classic is thick with ideas, condensing the novel in well-thought-out ways and adding absorbing new wrinkles such as racial difficulties and family conflicts. The narrator Aronnax

Music and Storytelling of the May Sweeps

Okay, how much TV did we all watch this past month? How much did we wish, afterwards, that we had watched? At least as far as TV is concerned, if it's crap, it's still free, and it's still eminently easy to tune out (neither of which could be said for Twister). And in the quest to remember what was wheat and what was chaff in the special events and their music, TV is still worth talking about.

The Synthesizer and the Odyssey

The miniseries edition of The Odyssey, happily, overcame the typical problems of translating literature to manageable size for TV; despite the Cliff's Notes story condensing, exceptionally poorly timed cuts to commercials the frequent cartoonishness of men-in-togas acting, the end result was a well-paced, beautifully shot ripping yarn. While the poetry of the original epic was left far behind?what if some