Entertainment Weekly- Lisa Schwartzbaum
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| Television Listings: The Week Entertainment Weekly- Lisa Schwartzbaum |
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| HOMEFRONT (ABC, 10-11 p.m.) A special episode for this post-World War II series: Gina (Giuliana Santini)-single mother, currently dating likable lug Charlie (Harry O'Reilly)-begins having flashbacks to the time she spent in a Nazi prison camp. Her horrific reveries are touched off by a piece of lace, which is the material she and her mother (Lelia Goldoni) were put to work making in the camp. Soon, nearly everything reminds her of this subject: She walks into a drugstore and sees a pharmacist writing in a ledger, and we're shown a scene in which a number is being tattooed onto the arm of a prisoner. | ||||||||||
| Such associations don't make much dramatic sense; in fact, they frequently seem absurd when they're meant to be startling and appalling. It's nearly impossible to pull off an episode like this, anyway. In series television, characters have to be reasonably consistent from week to week. For Gina's life suddenly to be overtaken by her prison-camp past this week, when it has never figured prominently in previous shows and (given the large cast and number of & ongoing subplots) probably won't much more in the future, only belittles the subject. | ||||||||||
| In the end, we're no more enlightened about what Gina endured than big-lunk Charlie, who says things like "Gina, you're acting squirrelly." Homefront usually has its charms, all of them having to do with the way it manages to make the postwar era seem like an innocent time, even though we know this was the war that ended any remaining innocence America had. When Homefront stops dead to spend an hour tackling a Major Subject, the show seems merely, drearily, earnest. C- | ||||||||||