Moonstruck
Chicken Little would love life in Milford
This summer, ABC Family has been taking on a sci-fi glow with mixed results. I'm rather fond of the diverting
Kyle XY, about the savant-like John Doe teen whose missing belly button is just one of his mysteries. More recently, the bizarre TV-movie
Fallen (with sequels to follow) featured a teenage boy who's part angel. Last and definitely least, there's the aggressively quirky fantasy-dramedy series
Three Moons Over Milford (Sundays at 8 pm/ET), showing how life is turned upside down in a bucolic Vermont town following a cosmic disaster: The moon has broken into three parts, all suspended over Earth.
While the townspeople wait for the sky to fall and the world to end, they act out in crazy ways that are meant to be cute. But this frantic tongue-in-cheek mayhem had me asking, "Apocalypse when?"
Three Moons focuses on the charmless Davis family, whose patriarch split so he could chase his New Age bliss. His wife, Laura (Elizabeth McGovern in an excruciating performance of pained grins and grimaces), is broke and bereft. Her kids are no help. Her daughter joins a Wicca-style coven, and her genius son plays with hormonal fire via an older woman.
This family's such a pain that our sympathies turn toward Milford's nice-guy lawyer (Rob Boltin), whose cup runneth over with fools he must suffer gladly. The courtroom scenes play like David E. Kelley for dummies.
The one good thing about Three Moons is that it reminds you that life truly is too short. Too short to be wasted on TV this cloying and annoying.
Memory Lane
Launching Turner Classic Movies' August-long Summer Under the Stars series, with each day devoted to a different star, Angela Lansbury sits for a Private Screenings interview (Tuesday, August 1 at 8 pm/ET) with gracious TCM host Robert Osborne. He steers her through anecdotes of a remarkably diverse career encompassing movie stardom, Tony-winning Broadway fame and a long run as TV's beloved Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote. She says that she'd love to have one more great Oscarworthy movie role. Hollywood, are you listening?
