Post Date:
March 11, 2000 Issue Date:
March 11, 2000

Television

Name: WORLD
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The top 5 TV series in popularity as measured by the most recently available A.C.

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NBC, Thursday nights: 20.9 share

GIST Ensemble cast portrays doctors, nurses, and other workers in a big-city emergency room.

MESSAGE God is mostly left out of the continual life-and-death drama the show spotlights.

CAUTION Plenty of violence, blood, mature situations, and gurneys full of liberal platitudes.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

ABC, Tuesday: 19.2 share; Sunday: 17.8 share; Thursday: 17.7 share

GIST A lowbrow Jeopardy for the television generation; a quiz show with questions so easy its own insurance carrier has sued.

MESSAGE If only I had been in that hot seat ... I knew Mrs. Howell's first name!

CAUTION Regis

Friends

NBC, Thursday nights:15.4 share

GIST A tight group of New Yorkers dress well, act badly, and complain a lot.

MESSAGE Morality is made up as we go along; relationships matter more than right and wrong.

CAUTION Sexual situations, occasional profanity. Very sympathetic portrayal of a lesbian quasi-marriage.

60 Minutes

CBS, Sunday nights: 14.9 share

GIST News magazine that harrumphs about all the favorite liberal causes: consumer protection, gun control, homosexual rights, and so on.

MESSAGE We're objective reporters-honest we are.

CAUTION Andy Rooney

Frasier

NBC, Thursday nights: 14.1 share

GIST The shrink from Cheers has divorced and moved to Seattle to host a radio show.

MESSAGE Marriages may come and go, but analysis is forever.

CAUTION Unrelenting sexual innuendo, some profanity. And Daphne

IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Do not look to The Practice, the L.A. Law for the new millennium, for realism. In this top-10 show's sophomore season, the story lines have included the following:

A physician "finds" a human head in his medical bag; after interminable plot twists, it turns out that, yes, he really did dress up as a nun and murder people. Henry Winkler appears as a dentist with a "crush fetish" (he likes seeing women stomp on bugs); after a murder, a suicide, and a prison rape, the attorneys cut a deal for him with the DA. Jimmy, the blue-collar criminal-defense attorney (and purportedly faithful Catholic), goes to court to try to help his mother marry her lesbian lover. The Boston lawyers travel to L.A. to defend a murder suspect-and one of the lawyers has a brainstorm during closing arguments; she proves that the suspect's wife framed him, because the wife's eyeglasses are just like the victim's eyeglasses. Don't forget the geriatric, nymphomaniac judge, who has her own nun outfit; the ever angry police detectives who spend their time either fabricating evidence or lying on the witness stand; and the parade of sleazy criminal clients who, every week, force the lawyers to rethink their commitment to criminal-defense work and the legitimacy of the legal system. Week in and week out. The series has become both tired and tiring-even Entertainment Weekly asked last month, "When did The Practice turn into such a screechy, contrived shouting match of a show?" Truth is, it was never anything but. And if the plot lines get any more ridiculous, it will be downright criminal.

Television

The top 5 TV series in popularity as measured by the most recently available A.C.

Full access isn’t far.

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