CR Answer Drill 5A 8MS8

5 10

As a professional television critic, I have had to endure a forced, contractual separation from the discriminating TV viewer's favorite phrase: "You couldn't pay me to watch that." But that's how I feel about miniseries. To me. they are beach reading without the beach, airport reading with the airport. They last just the wrong amount of time -- they don't have the compressed energy of a short story, and they're not expansive and open-ended, like a regular series or a novel. A miniseries is like an informercial -- by the time you decide whether you want to buy the product, you've logged too many hours in front of the television.