All tagged Television
It’s Halloween time and nothing gets me quite in the mood for ghouls and goblins like revisiting some of the best of the Halloween specials that aired on television when I was kid (oh so many years ago). Over time, new classics have entered into my yearly rotation. I thought it would be fun to share with my readers some of my favorites, hopefully prompting you to do a little exploring.
Atypical, a new Netflix original series, is a TV drama that beats with equal parts melancholy and heart. The show follows the lives of the Gardner family, whose eldest child Sam (Keir Gilchrist) is struggling to acclimate with the world around him, trying to adjust to life with Autism Spectrum Disorder. His parents Elsa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Doug (Michael Rappaport) worry about their son as he decides to enter the world of dating, even as their own relationship appears to be coming apart at the seams. Casey (Brigette Lundy Paine) is Sam’s protective younger sister, defensive of her brother when anyone picks on him, but masking her own personal sadness, exacerbated by a rift with her mother. Sam also makes regular visits to his therapist Julia (Amy Okuda) on whom he has developed a crush.
If you have ever attended a production of the 1985 Dan Goggin musical Nunsense (or any of its myriad sequels), you are going to approach a TV series based on the property with certain expectations (or lack of expectations, maybe). Nunsense has always been a bit of a one-joke musical, irreverent behavior and tired religious jokes enacted by a posse of fun and feisty nuns who are trying to raise money for one of their causes. The musical trades in B-grade humor, peppy (if forgettable) melodies, and our delight in feeling slightly naughty for laughing at such serious stuff as the holy spirit and communion wine.
The late 1970s and the better part of the 1980s were the battleground for some of television's sauciest and sexiest nighttime soaps. This genre of television teased us with gripping cliffhangers, bitter rivalries, luxurious locales, and some of the fiercest cat fights to ever grace the world of entertainment. It was a dizzying world of champagne and shoulder pads that enticed us to tune in every week for the melodrama. The shows were also well known for their lushly orchestrated theme songs that captured the regal nature of the powerful families at the center of the action.
