"Welcome to 28 Barbary Lane!" - Olympia Dukakis as Anna Madrigal
Tales of the City DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Tales of the City started out in 1976 as an enormously popular daily serial in a San Francisco newspaper. The columns were later collected in a series of bestselling books. Although Hollywood flirted with turning the books into a movie or TV series over the next few years, it would take almost twenty years (and a British television network) to finally bring the world of Mary Ann Singleton to life. It was worth the wait.
Laura Linney plays Mary Ann Singleton, a nice Mid-Western girl who decides to leave behind her "safe" life back home in favor of starting over in decadent 1970s San Francisco. Her new apartment building, run by down-to-earth but mysterious landlady Mrs. Anna Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis), is also home to an eclectic group of people who become Mary Ann's surrogate family: free spirit Mona Ramsey (Chloe Webb), lovelorn Michael "Mouse" Tolliver (Marcus D'Amico), idealistic lothario Brian Hawkins (Paul Gross) and creepy loner Norman Neal Williams (Stanley DeSantis).
The cast of characters is further widened when, thanks to Mona, Mary Ann gets a job as secretary to Edgar Halcyon (Donald Moffat). She even begins an affair with Beauchamp Day (Thomas Gibson), a young executive at the firm who is unhappily married to Edgar's daughter DeDe (Barbara Garrick). Part of the fun of Tales of the City is watching how the lives of each of the characters eventually intertwine in surprising ways.
Laura Linney is perfectly cast as Mary Ann. In the world of Tales of the City, all of the characters harbor personal secrets and mysteries. Mary Ann is our surrogate in their world as she copes with the difficulties that surround living in a new place while simultaneously stumbling on the personal secrets of her newfound friends. She encounters many things that she could not have dreamed of back home: a city full of gay men, blissful potheads, sophisticated adulterers, delusional child pornographers, and hideous macramé. Her combination of pluck and wide eyed innocence while coping with her surroundings is endearing.
As a matter of fact, all of the actors are terrific. This includes the many cult figures of the past and present who show up in cameo roles: Nina Foch, Edie Adams, Country Joe McDonald, Parker Posey, Syd Straw, Karen Black, and Ian McKellen, just to name a few. It is a feat of casting that these cameos do not come across as "stunts" but as a natural part of the show.
Perhaps the biggest star is San Francisco itself. The miniseries is a paean to both the city and its status as a cultural icon. The city's landmarks are lovingly filmed, and there are several homages to classic San Francisco-based movies like Vertigo.
Originally produced for British TV, Tales of the City had its U.S. premiere in January of 1994 on the now defunct PBS series American Playhouse. Unrepentant gay sex, rampant and casual drug use, partial nudity - Tales of the City presented all of the fun things in life. Needless to say, it was not long before conservatives got wind of this. (Probably from reading the TV Guide. It is not like they could actually watch something before calling for a protest, lest they go straight to hell). Its airing was widely and loudly protested by conservatives, leading to even more calls than usual for PBS funding cuts. PBS, cowed by the protests, chose not to fund the follow-up Tales productions, which were instead picked up by Showtime.
It is a shame on many levels that PBS capitulated to these self-appointed moral arbiters. Here, finally, was a terrific show based on an American literary work. The usual miniseries that PBS imports from Britain are of topnotch quality, to be sure, but the Tales of the City series was PBS' opportunity to present an important and entertaining work that we could lay claim to, that spoke of our lives as Americans. Instead they chose to shy away from the controversy and retreat to their typical safe, innocuous British-set period dramas. Hopefully PBS learned a lesson here: safety at the expense of innovation often leads to irrelevance.
The six hour-long episodes that comprise the series are divided onto three discs. The discs are housed in a digipak which slides into a cardboard sleeve.
