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And then they would still go online and ask "has it been canceeeeeeelled?" and "can anyone explain the endiiiiiiiiing?"
Which of the most watched miniseries did you watch?
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Well obviously the Butler did it!
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You mean something special or just the butlerly stuff?
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Just the butlerly stuff! I suppose it's actually how well written a mini series is for it to be a hit, like Roots and The Thorn Birds. They're better having a proper conclusion to make them memorable.
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I was a big miniseries fan and wish we’d see them again. There was an event to them much like breaking news, people talked about them the next day. Even if someone didn’t watch them they got talked about. I enjoyed them very much.
I thought Scarlet was a let down from Gone with the Wind. I watched it but too similar and yet too different. A continuation problem I guess. I like the other sequel, Rhett’s People, at least the book and was disappointed it wasn’t made into a mini series. As it was from a different perspective and not a continuation it really worked for me. Plus it has an opportunity to be more authentic to the time period.
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You should've had the original Return To Eden mini series on the list because apparently it did very well in the US.
If anyone is after a good copy of just the Return To Eden mini series itself.
This is the release they need to get. The copy on the newer Via Vision complete series collection boxset hasn't been cleaned up.
My favourite mini series is the original Return To Eden mini-series.
If anyone is after a good copy of just the Return To Eden mini series itself.
This is the release they need to get. The copy on the newer Via Vision complete series collection boxset hasn't been cleaned up.
My favourite mini series is the original Return To Eden mini-series.
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I had to look it up as I haven’t heard that song in many years and ur definitely right. I had forgotten how nice a theme song it was.
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Australian miniseries Return To Eden never aired in the US, but would it have been a hit in the US if a network aired it in the 80's? We'll never know...You should've had the original Return To Eden mini series on the list because apparently it did very well in the US.
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V was good as a mini series and ABC should have left it that way. Making it a series was pretty bad. I tried to get into it but was not pleased. The premise was bad. If you are forced to through someone out because of their bad behavior, why would you welcome them back?
I wonder if they'll have to retitle it like what happened to Prisoner outside Australia if it is rerun in Britain due to the BBC costume drama.
At least the US North and South had big stars who went on to more work (like Patrick Swayze, Lesley Anne Down and James Read), while Richard Armitage mainly became the breakout star of the UK one as Daniela Denby Ashe's went the reverse (at the time of North and South, Daniela was more known than Richard thanks to regular roles in EastEnders and My Family.)
V actually aired on NBC rather than ABC to begin with - both the mini series, and the weekly series, aired on NBC.
The 2009 reboot of V aired on ABC, which explains the confusion. That never had good ratings, and by the end of Season 1, ABC weren't sure whether to renew it.
They gave it a second chance at the expense of Flash Forward (which unlike V, was their sort of in house show, as ABC Studios made it), but V continued to flop despite Marc Singer and Jane Badler being added to the cast.
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I wonder what genius decided to make V, of all things, a cop show.
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Marc Singer should've been running around naked!
That would've made it a much better show!
Have him handcuffed by the cops & you've got the ratings up!
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I mean, 26 hours is actually a legitimate full season.
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I watched many of these miniseries in their entirety, and portions of them as well.
The mini-series format can be both promising and frustrating in equal measure... Obviously, you have much more time to address and flesh out the details of plot and character from the source material, usually a book. And while that sounds like a luxurious opportunity to do justice to a novel in a way a 2 1/2 theatrical movie cannot -- even one which attempts to be faithful, I almost always find miniseries use much of their additional screen time in a manner that winds up feeling like indulgent filler and reductive ponderousness.
With a two or three hour motion picture -- a good one, naturally, since you have to pare down the narrative, removing side-characters and extraneous detail from the book regardless, the limitations in length can force the filmmakers to focus on the "spirit" of the original story, the key plotlines in the book which provide the gist of it, and emphasize geographic and cultural and zeitgeistical details through the camera lens to offset the loss of those aforementioned side-characters and minor events which populated the pages.
I mean, give me L.A. CONFIDENTIAL any day to a bloated miniseries that wants to be everything yet doesn't know what. (Minus, of course, the "Lana Turner" scene which cast the wrong non-lookalike model, and I would still fix with CGI).
As a banal aside, I rather liked the AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN miniseries from 1991. It was bemused Dominic Dunne high society silliness, for the most part, what with its improbable pattern of coincidences, as per Dunne's pattern. But I still liked it well-enough, never read the book, and they filmed a lot at Filoli which reminds the viewer what DYNASTY could have felt like had they done anymore location shooting -- even just a little -- after the pilot.
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The mini-series format can be both promising and frustrating in equal measure... Obviously, you have much more time to address and flesh out the details of plot and character from the source material, usually a book. And while that sounds like a luxurious opportunity to do justice to a novel in a way a 2 1/2 theatrical movie cannot -- even one which attempts to be faithful, I almost always find miniseries use much of their additional screen time in a manner that winds up feeling like indulgent filler and reductive ponderousness.
With a two or three hour motion picture -- a good one, naturally, since you have to pare down the narrative, removing side-characters and extraneous detail from the book regardless, the limitations in length can force the filmmakers to focus on the "spirit" of the original story, the key plotlines in the book which provide the gist of it, and emphasize geographic and cultural and zeitgeistical details through the camera lens to offset the loss of those aforementioned side-characters and minor events which populated the pages.
I mean, give me L.A. CONFIDENTIAL any day to a bloated miniseries that wants to be everything yet doesn't know what. (Minus, of course, the "Lana Turner" scene which cast the wrong non-lookalike model, and I would still fix with CGI).
As a banal aside, I rather liked the AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN miniseries from 1991. It was bemused Dominic Dunne high society silliness, for the most part, what with its improbable pattern of coincidences, as per Dunne's pattern. But I still liked it well-enough, never read the book, and they filmed a lot at Filoli which reminds the viewer what DYNASTY could have felt like had they done anymore location shooting -- even just a little -- after the pilot.
Not the best print:
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I'm not sure, but I think I've watched the Holocaust, Return To Eden, Sins and North & South miniseries the most, but I think it would be nice to see the Thornbirds miniseries again, since it's exactly this year 40 years since it came on TV, and perhaps the minisere V right after it.
So here is my top 10 most wactched miniserie
01. Return To Eden
02. North & South
03. Holocaust
04. Thornbirds
05. Sins
06. V
07. Band Of Brothers
08. Queer As Folk (1999 UK version)
09. Prinsses Daisy
10. Valley Of The Dolls (The 1981 remake version)
So here is my top 10 most wactched miniserie
01. Return To Eden
02. North & South
03. Holocaust
04. Thornbirds
05. Sins
06. V
07. Band Of Brothers
08. Queer As Folk (1999 UK version)
09. Prinsses Daisy
10. Valley Of The Dolls (The 1981 remake version)
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Rich Man Poor Man Book II was a case of going to the well too often.
While Roots: The Next Generations didn't get the ultra-buzz obtained by Roots, that last 100 or so years of the story did need to be told and when James Earl Jones as Alex Haley said, "Kunta Kinte! I found you! I FOUND YOU!!!", that was a whale of a payoff line.
While Roots: The Next Generations didn't get the ultra-buzz obtained by Roots, that last 100 or so years of the story did need to be told and when James Earl Jones as Alex Haley said, "Kunta Kinte! I found you! I FOUND YOU!!!", that was a whale of a payoff line.
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f you want to learn more about the Holocaust miniseries, the fifth most-watched miniseries in the history of US television, there is a 90 minute German documentary about it called "Wie Holocaust ins Fernsehen kam (How Holocaust came to television) ", in which part of the cast and crew are reunited.
I learned a lot of interesting things from the documentary. Because of the Emmy Awards, I always thought that Holocaust was popular not only with audiences but also with critics in the US, but from the documentary I learned that there was criticism of the miniseries in the US too. The well-known Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was appalled that the subject was being made into a soap opera, as he called it. There was also criticism that the murder of the Jews was portrayed in such a way that one could think that the Jews themselves were to blame because of their passivity.
Filming Holocaust was not easy for the cast. Michael Moriarty needed a psychiatrist, David Warner got eczema and Ian Holm got the measles.
A large part of the documentary is devoted to the first broadcast of Holocaust on West German television in 1979. On the day of the premiere, two bomb attacks were carried out on television masts to prevent the broadcast (this happened again on premiere night of Dallas in 1981). After each episode of Holocaust there was a discussion session entitled "Anruf erwünscht (Call requested)", in which historians and journalists discussed the issue and more than 10,000 viewers called in. The Holocaust miniseries was also mentioned in the German Bundestag, shown in schools, and discussed in class.
I learned a lot of interesting things from the documentary. Because of the Emmy Awards, I always thought that Holocaust was popular not only with audiences but also with critics in the US, but from the documentary I learned that there was criticism of the miniseries in the US too. The well-known Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was appalled that the subject was being made into a soap opera, as he called it. There was also criticism that the murder of the Jews was portrayed in such a way that one could think that the Jews themselves were to blame because of their passivity.
Filming Holocaust was not easy for the cast. Michael Moriarty needed a psychiatrist, David Warner got eczema and Ian Holm got the measles.
A large part of the documentary is devoted to the first broadcast of Holocaust on West German television in 1979. On the day of the premiere, two bomb attacks were carried out on television masts to prevent the broadcast (this happened again on premiere night of Dallas in 1981). After each episode of Holocaust there was a discussion session entitled "Anruf erwünscht (Call requested)", in which historians and journalists discussed the issue and more than 10,000 viewers called in. The Holocaust miniseries was also mentioned in the German Bundestag, shown in schools, and discussed in class.