(4 of 4)
Tour of Duty, CBS's ambitious Viet Nam series, should have been smarter and better timed. This cleaned-up-for-TV look at an American platoon in 1967 might have just passed muster a couple of years ago, before the recent surge of Hollywood interest in Viet Nam. After Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, it just won't do. When a battle-hardened sergeant (Terence Knox) grills a group of new recruits in search of "winners, survivors" for his platoon, he rules out marijuana users right away: "If you're smokin' dope and gettin' high, you're not listenin' to me. You don't listen to me, you're gonna get me killed." That doesn't stop him, however, from picking an antiwar protester who claims at the outset that he won't fight. The point, of course, is to complete the rainbow coalition on a show where the issues, and the men, are too clear-cut. Viet Nam was a quagmire; Tour of Duty is a game of hopscotch.
Sometimes TV does better when it forgets about reality altogether. In CBS's new fantasy series Beauty and the Beast, a young New York attorney (The Terminator's Linda Hamilton) is accosted after a party by some thugs who slash her face. She is nursed back to health by Vincent (Ron Perlman), a deformed, leonine creature who lives in abandoned tunnels beneath the subways. After she has recovered -- her scars miraculously removed by surgery -- this underground Equalizer becomes her benefactor and partner in fighting crime. The first episode had some inept action sequences and could have used more fanciful detail. But there are nice lyrical touches, and the show may have hit on something. Beneath the city streets, away from the hassles and hazards of everyday urban life, lies a hidden world of refuge, romance and moral order. The perfect yuppie fantasy.