” returns at Monday on WFLD-Ch. Eight prisoners, as fans already know, busted out of the joint at the end of last season, but life is no picnic on the outside for the Fox River Penitentiary escapees. For one thing, William Fichtner (“Invasion”) joins the cast as a canny investigator determined to find the prisoners, and escaped Death Row prisoner Lincoln Burrows can’t rest knowing that his son has been charged unjustly with murder.
Thanks to the latter complication, Burrows and his brother, chief escape plotter Michael Scofield, end up traveling in the first couple of episodes to the last place you might expect them to go. The “Prison Break” creators know that the key to any good serial — to any good show, really — is the creation of memorable characters, and Fichtner’s Special Agent Alexander Mahone promises to be an intriguing nemesis for Scofield, Burrows, T-Bag and the rest of the on-the-run gang. For more on the new season of Prison Break, go for an interview with executive producer Matt Olmstead.
in New shows for the 2006-2007 season, Television review | Permalink | Comments (9) Look at the picture that accompanies this article. It’s not possible to convey the emotional impact of the photo in words. The picture can be described: An emaciated child huddles on the ground, seemingly wracked by despair as well as starvation.
A vulture lurks just a few feet away, by all appearances waiting for the child to die. The response this photograph created when it was first published in 1993 was enormous. It not only ignited efforts to send aid to the famine-stricken Sudan, where the photo was taken, but won its photographer, South African Kevin Carter, the Pulitzer Prize the next year.
The short but provocative documentary “ The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club Cinemax airs at 6 p.m. , attempts to explain why Carter committed suicide months after winning the ultimate journalistic accolade and shortly after the death of his best friend.
Given that it’s only a half-hour long, it’s surprising how thorough this Academy Award-nominated documentary is regarding Carter’s life and times. The only criticism one can make is to wish the film were longer, given that Carter’s colleagues and friends clearly have many stories to tell, not only about the gifted photojournalist but also about the birth of post-apartheid South Africa. Viewers learn about Carter’s membership in South African journalism’s “Bang Bang Club,” a band of elite photographers who documented the tumultuous final days of the apartheid regime, often at great personal risk.
Carter and his colleagues were witnesses to some of South Africa’s most horrific and frightening violence, and the photos they took while pursuing that dangerous story garnered them notice all over the world. But acting as witnesses in that place, in that era, took its toll. Drugs provided one form of escape, but Carter was still haunted by what he captured with his camera.
“It’s all dead people,” he said to a friend while paging through an album of his work. Colleagues and family members talk of Carter as an emotionally volatile, courageous man, one who may well have been unprepared for the maelstrom that erupted when his photo of the starving child appeared worldwide. “My first instinct was to make the picture.
After the child moved on, I felt completely devastated,” Carter says in an archive interview clip. Such was the outpouring of interest in the child that after the photo ran, the New York Times was forced to run an editor’s note to say that though Carter saw the emaciated girl resume her journey to a feeding center (which was, according to some reports, about 100 yards away), “it is not known whether she reached the center.” Almost in passing, we learn that Carter was accompanied by an armed contingent of soldiers while on that photo assignment in Sudan.
What if helping the child had put him at risk, and he hadn’t been able to file that haunting picture to his editors? As one of Carter’s colleagues notes, if it weren’t for that photo, “we wouldn’t know how to spell Sudan.” But still, it’s impossible to look at that child and not have one’s heart moved -- as Carter’s was.
And the questions raised by that photograph about whether journalists should be witnesses or participants are still relevant today, and always will be. Even though the fate of that child is not known, perhaps the legacy of that photograph taken by Carter, who committed suicide after the death of a friend, is to remember that somewhere in the world, whether stalked by a vulture or not, a child is starving to death. in Television review | Permalink | Comments (21) Though it might surprise some that the “ ” veteran, film star and producing mogul (left) would join the cast of a promising comedy that didn’t make much of a dent in the TV scene in its first season last summer, the move actually makes a lot of sense.
“Sunny” traffics in the kind of cheerful amorality that DeVito’s most memorable characters have reveled in. Here, DeVito plays Frank Reynolds, the newly repentant absentee father of Dennis and Sweet Dee, who, with their pals Charlie and Mac, own a bar in Philadelphia. Because the bar never seems overly packed with patrons, they have plenty of time to cook up relentlessly un-P.
C. schemes, and Frank turns out to be even more delightfully venal than his kids. At one point in Thursday’s one-hour season premiere, Mac and Dennis troll the mall in wheelchairs, convinced that the disabled look will help them pick up women.
Later schemes have the young folk making an incredibly unconvincing jihadist tape and plotting to rob their parents blind -- before Frank can give away all his money to poor people. “Why don’t you just die and leave your money to your kids like normal parents of America?” Dee sputters at one point.
The young actors in “Sunny,” who also produce and write the show, are uniformly talented, and it’s clearly not easy to master the nuances of an energetic, single-camera comedy. Lifetime’s new “ ,” for example, despite its skilled roster of actors, is far too manic for its own good, especially given the thinness of that show’s material. “Sunny’s” lively energy can get a bit too manic at times (certainly chews up too much scenery as Barbara, Frank’s wife), and the characters are not quite differentiated enough to make much of a lasting impression.
For that reason, “Sunny” doesn’t belong in the ranks of the very best recent TV comedies, such as “ ” and “ ,” where each character feels incredibly specific and real. Still, there are pleasures to be had in Philadelphia. Often the best moments are the throwaway lines or the most surreal, seemingly unplanned moments: Who raised the kids while he was out making a fortune?
Barbara asks her estranged husband. “A series of Mexican women,” he replies. For some reason, the cast’s brief, a cappella version of the cheesy rock hit “More Than Words” is strangely hilarious.
And the details feel right. Charlie’s apartment is suitably grimy (not TV grimy, which always seems too clean); the boys’ grasp of world politics and current events is believably shaky (Dennis thinks the word “Jew” is a racial slur); and the crew’s post-college directionless lives and petulant insecurity all ring true.
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