So Robert Duvall’s talkative old gunslinger Gus McCrae still comes to a grim end (refusing to let a poisoned leg be amputated out of vanity), but earlier moments when he’s asked to deploy his Texas Ranger skills are genuinely thrilling; if anything, it makes his ignoble death hit even harder. And though finishing the cattle drive doesn’t fill the chasm at the core of Gus’s stoic partner Woodrow F. Call (Tommy Lee Jones), the long journey north contains all the elements of a classic adventure story, even if Call is unmoved by most of it.
Maybe the trick is to read McMurtry’s book—or the sequels and prequels that followed (and were later adapted for TV), each seemingly even bleaker in response to the audience’s love of the first miniseries—while listening to Basil Poledouris’s soaring score, which gives you the romanticism and revisionism all at once. But the miniseries itself does a great job of that.
—AS
4. Band of Brothers (HBO, 2001)
Just as From the Earth to the Moon allowed Tom Hanks to expand the micro story of Apollo 13 into the macro tale of the whole Apollo program, Band of Brothers let Hanks and Steven Spielberg tell a far more thorough accounting of the European theater in World War II than they got to do with Saving Private Ryan.
Following a single company of airborne infantrymen from basic training to V-day, the ten episodes are a sprawling affair, full of unknown, skinny actors—many of them, like leading man Damian Lewis as decent and inspiring Easy Company commander Dick Winters, Brits trying on American accents—with grimy faces and matching uniforms. As a result, it’s not always easy to make out who’s who in the early chapters, which compensate with impressive spectacle, particularly in the terrifying depiction of what it was like to parachute into Normandy the night before D-day.
It’s in the miniseries’ second half where the creative team (including From the Earth to the Moon holdover Graham Yost) really start landing haymakers, switching from the ensemble style of the opening to a single-POV structure that makes situations like the Battle of the Bulge or the liberation of a concentration camp feel even more harrowing from the personal touch.
With Lewis, Ron Livingston, Donnie Wahlberg, Neal McDonough, Michael Cudlitz, and the rest of the cast so committed and so likable as the men of Easy, it’s among the most compulsively rewatchable miniseries ever made: a dark and soul-scarring journey, but also an epic and rousing adventure yarn.
—AS
5. Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (ABC, 2001)
Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows was part of a wave of showbiz-centric historical movies and miniseries that aired on network TV in the ’90s and early aughts; the deluge included the Marilyn Monroe biopics Blonde and Norma Jean & Marilyn, Martin and Lewis, Lucy (as in Lucille Ball), Hendrix (as in Jimi), The Three Stooges, and The Beach Boys: An American Family. This one and the TV-movie James Dean (located elsewhere in this book) were the best, matching superior writing and filmmaking to personalities that rose far beyond the level of celebrity impersonation, and managing to suggest something akin to a critic’s or biographer’s point of view on the material.
Me and My Shadows treated its title character with much empathy and intelligence. Directed by Robert Allan Ackerman, and adapted by Robert L. Freedman from the memoir by Garland’s daughter Lorna Luft, this two-part miniseries is bracketed by Garland’s first and last public performances, as a little girl singing “Jingle Bells” in a vaudeville theater and as a boozing, pill-addicted grown-up singing “Get Happy” for a sold-out crowd in Copenhagen. Tammy Blanchard plays the young Garland, then known as Frances Ethel Gumm; Judy Davis plays her from 1944 onward. All of the expected biographical highlights get touched upon (including Garland’s career battles, substance-abuse issues, marriages, and children), but they’re structured around specific musical and acting milestones, a simple but clever device that gives the story a crystalline linearity while validating the idea that performance was Garland’s most potent and rewarding intoxicant. Davis’s incarnation of the grown-up Garland ranks with her very best work. Blanchard, then a juvenile, is as strong as Davis, and does her own singing. As in the similarly lush James Dean, the re-creations of period Los Angeles—specifically the back lots, nightclubs, restaurants, and bungalows—amount to a show of their own. Anybody who’s thinking of trying to pack an entire legendary career into two nights should study these two classics.
—MZS
6. From the Earth to the Moon (HBO, 1998)
Like many a boomer, Tom Hanks grew up dreaming of being an astronaut. Starring in Apollo 13 didn’t so much satisfy that old fantasy as rekindle it, to the point where he went to HBO to craft an even more elaborate love letter to the men (and, occasionally, women) responsible for taking humankind to the surface of another heavenly body.
What’s most impressive about the twelve-hour miniseries isn’t the scope—though in re-creating both life on earth in the 1960s and in the void of space, the technical work is impeccable—but the variety. Most episodes are devoted to a single Apollo mission, and where the public unfortunately grew bored with what they felt was the sameness of them after Neil Armstrong’s first footsteps, From the Earth to the Moon finds a different angle and narrative approach to each.
So the Apollo 9 episode is less about the astronauts who first tested the lunar module in space than it is about the nerds who devoted a decade of their lives to designing and building a spacecraft no one thought would work. The Apollo 12 episode is a buddy comedy about the three wisecracking pals assigned to history’s greatest afterthought, the one about Apollo 15 deals with NASA’s scientists teaching a bunch of test pilots how to be field geologists, and so on.
Overall, it’s an even more persuasive argument for why we should someday go back to the moon than the beloved movie that inspired it.
—AS
7. The Corner (HBO, 2000)
This four-part miniseries about a year in the life of a drug-riddled Baltimore neighborhood is the ancestral inspiration for The Wire. Written by David Simon and David Mills from Simon and Ed Burns’s same-titled nonfiction book, and directed by actor-filmmaker Charles S. Dutton (Roc), it has all of the characteristics of a Simon TV production, including scenes shot in real locations, a cast that mixes film industry veterans, local actors, and nonprofessionals, a determination to situate all of the action within a wider sociopolitical context, and an austere style that often feels like a twenty-first-century American cousin of Italian neorealism. The main characters are Gary McCullough (T. K. Carter), a junkie who lost a respectable middle-class life to heroin, scavenges for scrap metal, and lives in terror that his son DeAndre (Sean Nelson) will see what he’s become; DeAndre, who suffers through a love-hate relationship with his dad while trying to live a legitimate life in a series of mostly humiliating jobs; and Fran Boyd (Khandi Alexander), mother of DeAndre and lover of Gary, who worries about respectability when she’s not shooting up or getting embroiled in scams. Except for a shoot-out in episode 3 that’s mainly notable for its clumsiness and sheer chaos, there’s nothing in the way of traditional crime-film violence in The Corner. It focuses instead on the intractable realities of inner-city drugs, showing time and again that even if using is a matter of willpower, morality, and upbringing (the official conservative narrative, seen here as dubious), it’s hard to get clean and stay clean when you have to wait eight weeks for a state-sponsored detox bed, and can’t find a decent job anywhere near a neighborhood so poor that few of its residents own cars. The acting, writing, and direction are peerless, the material heartbreaking but never maudlin; despair is barely held at bay by knockabout humor.
—MZS
8. Olive Kitteridge (HBO, 2014)
Eyebrows understandably rise upon hearing of a miniseries about repressed small-town Maine residents described as “thrilling,” but that’s what Olive Kitteridge is. Its excitement originates in Frances McDormand’s performance as the titular character, a schoolteacher whose sharp tongue wounds everyone, and who takes her kindhearted pharmacist husba
nd, Henry (Richard Jenkins), and their son, Chris (John Gallagher Jr.), for granted. The character would be purely comical, and perhaps insufferable, if her crankiness were all that we knew about her, and if Olive Kitteridge were only about what it’s like to deal with a bullying prig who prefers to think of herself as a person of high standards.
Luckily, there’s much more going on in this miniseries, which was directed by Lisa Cholodenko (who directed McDormand in Laurel Canyon) and adapted by Jane Anderson (How to Make an American Quilt) from Elizabeth Strout’s novel. Throughout, the filmmakers give us quietly extraordinary moments of empathy and lyricism, such as the scene where Olive’s former student Kevin Coulson (Cory Michael Smith) hallucinates plants growing out of a bar singer’s baby grand piano as she sings the Carpenters’ “Close to You,” and the pathetic way Henry overdoes his smiles and laughs whenever he talks to the cute pharmacy employee (Zoe Kazan) that he’s sweet on, and that Olive has cruelly nicknamed “the Mouse.” The saltwater-abraded panoramas are by Frederick Elmes, who shot some of David Lynch’s masterpieces, including Blue Velvet and The Straight Story.
Because the program works so well as curdled Americana, you might not be inclined to peel back its other layers, much less delve into what’s happening at a storytelling level (which is even more impressive); but unobtrusive ambition is part of what makes Olive Kitteridge so pleasurable, along with its deep empathy for mentally or emotionally disturbed people who believe their problems are minor.
—MZS
9. Generation Kill (HBO, 2008)
Having already done plenty of disguised Iraq War commentary in their previous project, Wire creators David Simon and Ed Burns were able to dispense with metaphor entirely and tackle the harsh, ill-designed realities of the Iraq invasion head-on.
Adapted from Evan Wright’s book about his time embedded with the First Recon Marines at the start of the invasion, Generation Kill is three parts black comedy to every one part military adventure. A pugnacious noncom fanatically enforces their commanding officer’s grooming standard, bellowing, “POLICE THAT MOOSTASH!” at Marines who theoretically have better things to worry about. An officer the men derisively nickname “Captain America” takes a recovered enemy weapon as a trophy and likes to shoot it off in celebration, even though the sound of an AK-47 can invite friendly fire from other units who don’t know who’s wielding it. Rules of engagement are constantly changing, and while American forces easily dismantle the Iraqi military within three weeks, it becomes clear that no one in charge has thought through what to do next.
Yet even as its commentary on the overall experience is pointed, the miniseries is very much on the side of the Marines, and particularly the group traveling in the Humvee with Wright. They have off-key sing-alongs to “Tainted Love” and “Teenage Dirtbag,” do unseemly things with a photo of Wright’s girlfriend, and mock one another constantly, but they’re also excellent at their jobs, even if those giving the orders don’t know quite how to use them.
The overall commentary is chilling, even as the presentation is unapologetically entertaining.
—AS
10. Show Me a Hero (HBO, 2015)
Sometimes, you have to wonder if David Simon’s entire career in television was based on a dare:
Okay, your first big cable project is going to be a miniseries about dope fiends. Then you’re going to make a show where the average viewer will need to watch at least four episodes to understand or even decide if they like it. Then you’re going to follow that up with another miniseries about the Iraq invasion at a time when the public has no interest in stories about that mess. Oh, and then you’ll do a show about jazz and cooking with an even less traditional plot than all the others.
Hey, and while you’re at it, you might as well try a third miniseries about municipal housing laws!
Working with a higher-profile cast (Oscar Isaac, Catherine Keener, Winona Ryder) and director (Paul Haggis) than he ever had before, Simon and cowriter William F. Zorzi made Show Me a Hero into a superb example of how Eat Your Vegetables TV can also be incredibly enjoyable. Adapting Lisa Belkin’s book about the ugly late ’80s attempt to integrate public housing in Yonkers, New York, it returns to Simon’s pet themes about the difficulty institutions have in accepting and effecting change, and puts some profoundly human faces on it, from Isaac as the city’s overwhelmed young mayor to Keener as an aging resident who starts out seeming like the intolerant face of the opposition and proves to be much more complicated over time.
The performances are great, Haggis does a superb job capturing the ugliness of the protests in and around city hall, and the concluding moments contain that usual dose of David Simon magic, where everyday occasions that the audience takes for granted suddenly become an invitation for the waterworks to fly.
—AS
11. Rich Man, Poor Man (ABC, 1976)
Although Roots is widely credited with starting the 1970s and ’80s miniseries craze, this adaptation of Irwin Shaw’s 1969 novel about the German American Jordache family got there first, becoming an unexpected smash and turning its principal cast (Peter Strauss, Nick Nolte, and Susan Blakely) into rising stars.
Strauss is the rich man, Rudy, who rises out of his working-class background to become a powerhouse in business and politics; Blakely is Rudy’s childhood sweetheart, Julie Prescott, who eventually marries him; Nolte is Tom, the black-sheep (actually blond-haired) brother in the family, a handsome and charismatic but self-destructive man who eventually ekes out a living as a prizefighter; Edward Asner and Dorothy McGuire play the parents, Axel and Mary, who cling to old-world values as America remakes itself around them. The supporting cast is a veritable murderer’s row of great character actors, including Kim Darby, Norman Fell, Fionnula Flanagan, Gloria Grahame, Murray Hamilton, Van Johnson, George Maharis, Dorothy Malone. Ray Milland, and Talia Shire. Semiscandalous at the time for its frank treatment of adult themes (including alcoholism, adultery, class bias, racism, and McCarthyism), Rich Man, Poor Man holds up well, thanks to its unfussy script (by Dean Riesner), its uniformly excellent performances (led by the irresistible Nolte), and its lush production values, which served notice to Hollywood studios that TV could feel big and important. The score, by Alex North (Spartacus), makes the whole thing feel exuberant yet wise. The final shot of Tom leaving town on a bus, contemplating a yo-yo that is this production’s Rosebud, still stings. An inferior sequel, Rich Man, Poor Man, Book Two, followed in 1977, and was likewise a smash.
—MZS
12. The Thorn Birds (ABC, 1983)
Based on Colleen McCullough’s 1977 best seller, this four-part, eight-hour miniseries spans fifty years in the lives of the Cleary family. Rachel Ward plays both the teenage and the adult versions of the heroine, Meggie Cleary, a poor girl who moves to the sheepshearing station of Drogheda in the Australian Outback to live with her rich cousin Mary Carson (Barbara Stanwyck). The local priest, Ralph de Bricassart (Richard Chamberlain, who’s often stoic like an alabaster statue of a saint), befriends Mary, hoping to secure a large enough bequest from her to win a release from his purgatory. The hot-to-trot Mary wants to defrock Ralph, but he’s not interested, tolerating her insistence because she’s loaded, and because Meggie is so adorable; but once Meggie blossoms into a woman, you could cut the sexual tension with the blades used in episode 3’s rightly celebrated sheepshearing sequence. There’s more plot in The Thorn Birds than many of its synopses might suggest; most of it has to do with Meggie’s two-steps-forward, one-step-back progress through a male-dominated world that has plenty of use for a beautiful woman but none for an independent one. But most of her major decisions are still informed by her tortured relationship with the priest, and this miniseries—much more so than the novel—keeps building toward the inevitable moment when Ralph doffs his turned-around collar and breaks at least three commandments.
The ultimate TV “will they or won’t they,” The Thorn Birds is the second-highest-rated miniseries ever to air on American TV, behind Roots
. In terms of social impact, it couldn’t compete, not that it seriously pretended to; it aspired to be more of a broadcast network’s answer to a serious-but-not-really Hollywood epic like Gone with the Wind or Giant (which, like this miniseries, aged its cast with subtle latex eye wrinkles and gray hair dye rather than sagging skin and liver spots). Scored by Henry Mancini and photographed by Bill Butler (Jaws), it’s a superior example of long-form melodrama, ’70s-style; not a whole lot happens by twenty-first-century TV standards, yet the eight hours fly by. The supporting cast includes Christopher Plummer, Jean Simmons, Richard Kiley, and Bryan Brown, whose working-class magnetism briefly steals the spotlight away from Meggie and Ralph’s pining and moping.
—MZS
13. Top of the Lake (Sundance, 2013)
This New Zealand–set crime thriller is highly recommended to fans of its cowriter, coproducer, and sometime director, Jane Campion (The Piano, Portrait of a Lady); its leading lady, Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss, who stars as the heroine, a troubled police investigator; and, most of all, to anyone who’s watched in dismay over the past twenty-one years as program after program tried to equal the great British anthology series Prime Suspect only to fail miserably. The main plot concerns the mysterious disappearance of Tui Mitcham (Jacqueline Joe), a twelve-year-old pregnant girl who’s the daughter of the town bully and top criminal, Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan). Top of the Lake’s heroine, Robin Griffin (Moss), leaves her fiancé in Sydney to return to her hometown—a verdant mountain town—to confront demons in her past and becomes swept up in Tui’s story. Her behavior seems erratic, bordering on unprofessional and nonsensical, until you learn her secrets and study her interactions with the townspeople and with her mother, who’s suffering from cancer.
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