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## HEADING: POLICE-GANGSTERS ## LEFT COLUMN 1718. MANCUSO, F.B.I. (Debut) 10/13/89 Another cop treading political waters is Nick Mancuso (Robert Loggia), the gruff Washington-based FBI agent from last season's NBC miniseries Favorite Son. His own series—Mancuso, FBI—makes its debut on Friday (it's the last of the new network shows to do so), and on the opener, Mancuso is assigned to conduct a hush-hush FBI probe of a controversial Defense Secretary-designate whose secretary was found dead in his swim- ming pool. IN THE LINE OF DUTY: A COP FOR THE KILLING. 11/25/90 w/James Farentino & Steven Weber. 1719. CAROLINE? 4/29/90 close up CAROLINE? 4/29/90 "Hello, Father I'm not dead." Fourteen years after being presumed dead in a plane crash, a woman "resurfaces"—just in time to claim a sizable inheritance from her grandmother. The 1980 "Hall of Fame" TV-movie is set in the 1950s and centers on the Carmichael, Paul (George Grizzard) and his second wife, Grace (Pamela Reed), who have a somewhat peripheral relationship with their two children, 12-year-old Win- ston (Shawn Phelan) and his 10-year-old sister, Heidi (por- trayed by Jenny Jacobs), the 1982 career-casting center child. Enter Caroline (Stephanie Zimbalist)—of a woman claiming to be Paul's "late" daughter from his first marriage. Paul ac- cepts her story that she never boarded the plane, and used the crash to escape her shadow debauched life. But Grace is more than skeptical, and the "headmistress" (Patricia Neal) of Caro- line's teaching school is sure that Caroline is a fraud. In a flashback, Dorothy McGuire plays Caroline's grand- mother. (2 hrs.) Bunny Additional Cast Scott Wilson Libby Whitman Mary John Barnes Larry Barbara Bird Lorne R. Smith Jr. SWEET REVENGE. (1990) Carrie Fisher WEB OF DECEIT. (1990) Linda Purl & James Read. THE FATAL IMAGE. 12/2/90 Justine Bateman & Michele Lee. 1720. JACKIE COLLINS' LUCKY/CHANCES You want to wash those bastards out of your hair? NBC has the soap—six hours worth—on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights. Jackie Collins' Lucky/ Chances, which the author lifted from two of her novels, has all the sex, greed, glamour, power and melodrama that you'd expect from a high-gloss potboiler. I also owe a thing or two to "The Godfather," but it has its principles: its drug dealers, pimps and pederasts are definitely the bad guys. Basically, it's the story of a father (San- ta Barbara's Vincent Irizarry) and his daughter (Natalie Sheridan of Kira's Landing), early in Part I, in 1930, oil-and- casting bootlegger Gino Santangelo watches enviously as gangster Lucky Luciano drives by. "That's what I want," Gino vows. "Everything." Flash forward to the end of Part 3. It's 1973, and Lulu Vegas (casino magnate Santangelo can't figure out why his feisty daughter, Lucky, won't stay out of his businesses. "What do you want to do," he asks her. "Own the world?" Lucky's reply: "Why not?" Now flash back to Part 1. Young Gino is getting his start, and the overzealous wife (Mary Frann) of his first benefactor (Rich- ard Anderson), an important Wall Street ty- coon, is summoning up this miniseries. "Slumming," she cries, "is so amusing." (3-parts) Debut. THE BRIDE IN BLACK. 10/7/90 Susan Lucci & David Soul. ## RIGHT COLUMN 1721. EQUAL JUSTICE. Debut. 3/27/90 EQUAL JUSTICE I liked the idea of this series before it aired. Defense lawyers have had enough glorification in television. A show about prosecutors—those overworked and underloved lawyers who try to put some of our criminals in jail some of the time—is overdue. I liked Equal Justice (Wednesdays at 10 P.M. (ET) on ABC) even better when it appeared: a smart, concise, quick- moving piece that does a take on our chaotic courts, with their pressure- cooker schedules, deal-making attor- neys, weary judges, courteous defen- dants and riddled-with-compromise sentences and settlements. The men and women in the DA's office here are the counterparts of the L.A. Law gang—wonderfully young workaholics whose idealism is taken for granted; you don't get rich working for the city. The viewer isn't babied much: the jurors aren't explained or the hallway maneuvers overelaborated. Much of the courtroom stuff, though melodrama- tized, looks like the real thing. It's true that PDs and DAs in our big towns often have such wallopings caseloads that they don't always recognize their clients or witnesses on sight and are sometimes learning the facts of a case as they walk into court. These prosecutors hustle and whee- dle for courtroom time, fake confidence in a shaky case, talk tough to the de- fense lawyers and move on. Sometimes they will dig in when settling is just too offensive, but they will let one crook walk in return for his testimony against another, all on the name of the People, in a system that guarantees every defendant a trial and can't afford to try every defendant. The characters do enough blunder- ing, ego-tripping and self-serving poli- ticking to keep them human, but what finally makes them attractive is their dedication to the job, to that tattered but surviving ideal, public service. The mix of characters is a bit calcu- lated but still interesting. The head of the shop, District Attorney Arnold Bach (George DiCenzo), is a shrewd leader, principled but not above political ma- neuvering. The most vivid of the law- yers is Michael James (Joe Morton), a passionate advocate and a spellbinder of juries. Most adorable is JoAnn Har- ris (Sarah Jessica Parker), a young re- cruit from the Midwest who makes up in dedication what she lacks in experi- ence. Other players include Deborah Farentino, Jane Kaczmarek, Kathleen Lloyd, Barry Miller, Cotter Smith, Jon Tenney and James Wilder. (Above, l.-r.: Morton, Smith, DiCenzo.) In Hill Street Blues style, the series constantly shifts focus from one lawyer to another, as each deals with a case or a personal crisis. This slice-of-life ap- proach can seem thin at times—all inci- dent and no plot. But it moves. An interesting sidelight is to watch the scriptwriters try to make all the usual liberal ideas work in a series in which the prosecutors are the heroes. The strain shows, and eventually view- ers will wonder why only the white- collar criminals are rats. TV GUIDE APRIL 28, 1990 1722. Equal Justice 5/9/90 1723. Equal Justice 2/13/91