Poetry

...And as the camera circles around her--like a predator?--Rosie simultaneously reveals her neurotic pain and bravely, failingly, strives to maintain an ironic distance from it, as if she is, after all, in control...

...FRANK McCONNELL 20: Commonweal...

...That is no small accomplishment for any actor, but the fascinating thing is that Gless does it on and for TV...

...The very bright Katrine Ames has already highlighted "Rosie O'Neill" in Newsweek (November 5), so the show is probably assured of survival for at least its first season...

...Wit A spider, I, Lethal though little, Crouch at the middle Of my Silk pie...

...Think about the last shot of Godfather H: A1 Pacino with the thousand-yard stare and no dialogue and no movement, and if that is not "great acting," then we might as well trash the concept altogether...

...And Gless--who has a face and a tone of voice that are damn near a working definition of integrity--seems capable of making almost any line sound like human speech uttered by a human person...

...Well: every episode of "Rosie O'Neill" begins with Rosie talking in her shrink's office about what has traumatized her that week: bitterness over the divorce, memories of her father, problems dating younger men, etc...

...The pain we feel in defending the "obviously" guilty is like the pain we feel in gazing into our own most arid desert places...

...And Sharon Gless...

...Again, no: it means that we all ought to celebrate Sharon Gless and her new series, "The Trials of Rosie O'Neill...

...The premise is almost preemptively ho-hum: Rosie O'Neill (Gless) is a forty-three-year-old, recently divorced woman with a law degree trying to work out her sense of pain and loss by working the Public Defender side of the street in Los Angeles...

...I remember--I swear--as a kid seeing Lee J. Cobb perform the last soliloquy of King Lear on "The Dean Martin Show" right between a troupe of Russian acrobats and Dean's closing, sloshed medley at the piano...

...Oh, yeah: she also comes from this very well-heeled family, and so is regarded as something of your white liberal twit by most of the other studiously ethnic lawyers in her office...

...One can almost hear, as if it were Fibber McGee's mythic closet, the clichrs about to start tumbling...

...But what about TV...

...This is really the special quality Janssen and Selleck and, at her best, Mary Tyler Moore, brought to the business of TV acting: realizing that the great TV actor neither projects nor reflects, but--because of the almost erotic intimacy of the Tube--simply allows his/her vulnerability to emerge under the gaze of the smallscreen camera...

...It's even better news because watching Gless work at her craft week after week gives the same intense pleasure as watching anybody ieally good do what they do (Paula Abdul dancing, John Sununu prevaricating), and also because Gless--I'm serious about this--is virtually defining what TV acting, as high art, is all about...

...But it's a pain that has to be endured, if we are ever to be whole...

...That the Tube reduces the actor's craft to nothing more than a harmonic in the brainless carrier-wave of the cathode ray...

...Does this mean that TV is, as its detractors like to say, a mere commodity, inimical to the finer articulations of drama...

...John Nixon, Jr...

...Those openings are, of course, crucial to the political point of Rosie O'Neill: as a Public Defender Rosie is frequently in the position of defending the indefensible, for the sake of the Law: the Law of nations or the Law of human self-consciousness, which demands that even the most monstrous within ourselves be allowed its voice, since to deny or repress that voice is to deny and repress our full humanity...

...of clowns (Milton Berle through Lucy to Candice Bergen), prophets (John Cameron Swayze through Cronkite to Peter Jennings), "real people" (Joe McCarthy to the sad people on "America's Funniest Home Videos"), or caricatures (Howdy Doody through Big Bird to the Simpsons...

...This is good news because the show's producer, Barry Rosenzweig, who also guided "Cagney and Lacey" (Gless played Christine Cagney) is one of the few people out there who seems capable of dealing with "controversial" subjects and dealing with them from a stance of moral maturity: a Norman Lear with wit...

...On the stage you have to project: any emotion you convey has to be seen by the people in the back row, or otherwise you haven't earned your pay...

...But they don't...

...If you've ever been on the couch yourself, you know how common and how desperately important this kind of performance is to sustain...

...On the big screen you have to reflect: from an actor's perspective, the special quality of film is that it puts everybody in the front row, so that what might work on stage has to be carefully toned down to the gigantic intimacy of the close-up...

...I like to think that, somewhere, that great and gifted man is smiling and nodding at the work of the tough and witty woman who was once his namesake...

...Don't be afraid," he told her...

...The real Cagney--James-----once said to a nervous young Pamela Tiffin on the set of his last starring movie, One, Two, Three, something that is virtually a compendium of, and a blessing upon, the actor's art...

...Damn few actors--who, whatever theory of drama you were force-fed in sophomore year--ought to be clowns and prophets and caricatures, all at the same time...

...Just walk on to the set, plant your feet, and tell the truth...

...Rosenzweig is a good and smart producer and hires good and smart screenwriters...

...What makes Gless special is that she seems fully aware of what she's doing, fully aware that her little twitches and voice cracks and misdirected eye-movements are the building-blocks of a new version of one of the most venerable arts...

...But for Gless to mime it so brilliantly and so regularly is nothing less than an actor's tour de force...