Saturday, September 24, 1983

The large cost of mini-series pays off for networks: The Winds of War and The Thorn Birds were huge successes for ABC and CBC's Empire, Inc. drew raves in Canada. So the networks keep cranking them out.


CBC will broadcast Backstretch this season. It's a four-part drama set at a small Ontario harness-racing track, with Florence Paterson as the owner and Sneezy Waters a driver. The Tin Flute is a five-part TV adaptation (not to be confused with the current feature film) of Gabrielle Roy's moving novel set in Second World War Montreal. Marilyn Lightstone stars as a woman trying to cope, after she's abandoned by her lover. The Undaunted is a six-part series of docu-dramas about men of history who played a significant role in the early development of Canada. Real-life husband and wife Michael and Susan Hogan play a not-so-happily married couple in Vanderberg, a six-part drama about a ruthless oil tycoon.

From NBC, Princess Daisy is an adaptation of Judith Krantz' melodramatic novel about a down-on-her-luck Russian princess who becomes an unwilling celebrity when she's chosen as the figurehead of a multi- million dollar cosmetics campaign. She's reluctant, that is, until she falls in love with the head of the company. Lindsay Wagner, Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach, Robert Urich, Claudia Cardinale, Paul Michael Glaser and Stacy Keach star with newcomer Marete Van Kamp as the lustrous aristocrat. The twentieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination is marked by a rash of dramas, documentaries and movies including the seven-hour Kennedy, a mini-series starring Martin Sheen as the former U.S. President and Blair Brown as his wife Jacqueline. A.D., an expensive epic filmed on several locations around the world, traces the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity in the decades after the death of Christ. Anthony Andrews, James Mason, Michael Wilding and Ben Vereen are featured. Celebrity is a six-hour adaptation of Thomas Thompson's novel about three prominent Texans linked by an ugly secret from their past. Joseph Bottoms, Ben Masters and Michael Beck star, with Hal Holbrook, Tess Harper, Mickey Rooney and James Whitmore as supporting actors.

ABC presents Mystic Warrior, a five-hour drama which was five years in the making. Based on Ruth Beebe Hill's novel Hanta Yo, the show dramatizes an American Indian band's struggle with a hostile tribe and the encroaching white man. Napoleon and Josephine chronicles the courtship, marriage and divorce of the French emperor and the woman who captured his heart - but couldn't give him an heir. North and South is a 12-hour Civil War epic based on the John Jakes' bestseller. The tale of the cataclysmic destruction of Pompeii gets a seven-hour treatment in The Last Days of Pompeii, another big-budget effort filmed in exotic locales. Nicholas Clay, Duncan Regehr, Olivia Hussey, Franco Nero and Laurence Olivier star.

CBS features Chiefs, in which three consecutive police chiefs (Wayne Rogers, Billy Dee Williams and Brad Davis) in a small Georgia town have their lives changed irrevocably by their investigations into a series of grisly murders over a span of years. Charlton Heston stars as a banker and prominent town father in the six-hour mystery-drama. George Washington focuses on the early life and military career of the first American President. Barry Bostwick is Washington, Patty Duke Astin is his wife Martha and Jaclyn Smith is Martha's best friend, for whom, it seems, Washington harbored a secret love. Master of the Game, the Sidney Sheldon bestseller, traces the fortunes of a family whose wealth is founded in the South African diamond mines.