Who am I to argue with the power of Danielle Steel?
Though I will be watching the NCAA basketball finals Monday night, many others will be drawn to best-selling author Steel`s special-and amazingly successful-brand of silliness.
For the last couple of years, NBC has craftily counterprogrammed adaptations of Steel`s novels against such muscled offerings as the World Series and ”Monday Night Football.” The last three Steel sagas,
”Kaleidoscope,” ”Fine Things” and ”Changes,” proved ratings winners, all ranking among the top six made-for-TV movies of the 1990-91 season.
A typically trashy, implausible, glitzy and, yes, strangely alluring mix called ”Danielle Steel`s Secrets” (8 p.m. Monday, NBC-Ch. 5) is set in Manhattan and Hollywood, where we are given a typically varied cast of characters, all with secrets that threaten their personal happiness and the new TV series in which they are all involved.
There`s Jane Adams (Linda Purl) who is married to one of the most brutish characters I`ve seen. He`s a physically and emotionally abusive man who, after 16 years of marriage and a bad day at the office, comes home and forces sex on his wife, saying, ”There`s one thing you do good.”
There`s Gaby Smith (Josie Bissett), who is afraid that her filthy rich background will make others think she bought her way into show biz.
There`s Zack Taylor (Gary Collins), who is being blackmailed by a couple of bimbos for a previous indiscretion.
There`s Bill Warwick (Ben Browder), whose wife, a former TV star, is on a spiral of drug abuse. Yet he stands by her, saying, in what has to rank as one of the great unintentionally funny lines in the Steel canon, ”It`s not so much the drugs … but your prostitution.”
There`s Sabina Quarles (Stephanie Beacham), a famous screen star who can not fully explore an old romance with the show`s producer because she keeps running away to San Francisco to meet ”obligations.”
Overseeing this menagerie is famous producer Mel Wexler (Christopher Plummer), who is trying to recover from the trauma caused by the accidental deaths of his wife and child. He doesn`t really have a secret, which makes him, I have to assume, the perfect producer.
Despite all those difficulties, the TV show the characters are involved with, ”Manhattan,” becomes a smash. The characters mingle and mate and overcome the problems of their secrets, or have them fixed by outside means.
Near the end, there`s a courtroom speech by Plummer (I won`t tell you how the whole gang ends up at a murder trial) that addresses the unreality of TV and show business.
Life doesn`t get much more unreal than it does in a Danielle Steel movie. But that, obviously, is the way a vast number of people want it.
– When ”Katyn: Slaughter and Silence” (10:30 p.m. Monday, PBS-Ch. 11)
premiered in September, I wrote a favorable review, but it never saw the light of day because of space limitations. Well, I`ve watched the tape again.
What I wrote in September still stands:
Chicago`s Ethnic Television Corp., without much money but with great passion and professionalism, brings us a horrific and little-known slice of history: the execution of some 15,000 Polish army officers and civilians by the Soviet secret police in 1940.
Using dramatic re-creations, archival footage, experts and eyewitnesses, the film not only crafts a story of inhumanity but also explains the politcal climate that could enable such a huge tragedy to remain obscure.
This is an important, moving, infuriating and chilling documentary.
”DANIELLE STEEL`S SECRETS”
A made-for-TV movie presentation of Cramer Co. in association with NBC productions. Douglas Cramer is executive producer; produced by Dennis Hammer, directed by Peter Hunt, based on the novel by Danielle Steel. With Christopher Plummer, Stephanie Beacham, Gary Collins, Linda Purl, Ben Browder and Josie Bissett. Airing at 8 p.m. Monday, WMAQ-Ch. 5.
– Two intriguing, multipart PBS series begin Monday. ”The Machine That Changed the World” (8 p.m. on WTTW-Ch. 11) takes a four-part look at the history of computers with an emphasis on the people behind the machines. This first part focuses on the events that led up to the 1946 debut of the world`s first electronic digital computer. . . . ”Madness by Jonathan Miller” (9 p.m. Monday, WTTW) is a five-part examination of mental illness conducted by the clear-thinking Dr. Miller.
