Heaven on Earth

In the dazzling HBO mini-series Angels in America, the politics and crises of the '80s feel close to home

Ghosts are what history sends to remind the living that it is not done with us. This fall the shades of the 1980s have been lurking in the cobwebbed corners of America's pop culture: Michael Jackson, staring from his mug shot like a revenant; Ronald Reagan, whose culture wars CBS exhumed with its planned, then canceled mini-series. But these were only minor hauntings compared with what will happen on Sunday, as Angels in America (HBO, Dec. 7 and 14, 8 p.m. E.T.) sends the '80s crashing into American homes with a fanfare of hosannas and portents of pestilence and apocalypse.

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