Masterpiece Theatre

It's been more than a year since we've had a "Masterpiece Theatre" presentation worth going out of our way to see. But the wait ends tonight with the arrival of "Reckless," a six-hour miniseries that's part domestic drama, part romantic comedy and all kinds of steamy, smart, sophisticated fun."Reckless" touches all the bases of contemporary adult drama and then some: marriage, mid-life angst, balancing personal and professional lives, social class differences, boomers caring for aging parents, doctors in love, older-woman-younger-man relationships and older-man-younger-woman trysts as it explores the classic theme of what fools we mortals be, especially when we're in heat.

Oprah Winfrey is the kind of reader every writer dreams about. She's got intelligence, taste, enthusiasm and, oh, yeah, a national TV forum that enables her to rocket any book she recommends onto the best-selling list.By forming an on-air book club that reaches millions of viewers who devour the Gospel According to Oprah, Winfrey has become a missionary for literature, a televangelist of sorts. While she may have brought the passion of a new convert to that task, the reality is that Winfrey has spent her whole life immersed in the world of books, as the September issue of Life makes clear in an excellent cover piece by Marilyn Johnson.

If there has been a better performance this television season than the one Derek Jacobi delivers tomorrow night in "Breaking the Code" on PBS' "Masterpiece Theatre," I missed it.By comparison, Helen Mirren can fascinate and make you want to know more and more about her Jane Tennison, but Jacobi seems to take you inside the very soul of his Alan Turing -- Englishman, code-breaker, mathematician and persecuted homosexual. It is a trip so intense that I am still seeing images from it in my dreams.

LONDON - It began March 24, 1946, with a polite "Good evening," followed by a simple sentence.Alistair Cooke said: "I want to tell you what it's like to come back to the United States after a sobering month or more in Britain, and what daily life feels and looks like in comparison."Fifty years and more than 2,000 scripts later, Mr. Cooke is still writing and presenting his "Letter from America" for the British Broadcasting Corp.The 15-minute radio program is wonderfully old-fashioned. Just a man speaking into a microphone, explaining the ways of his adopted country.

Old F.U. is back.That's Francis Urquhart to viewers of "Masterpiece Theatre," and he's back at 9 tomorrow and Monday nights on MPT (Channels 22 and 67) and WETA (Channel 26).To those who missed his previous two outings on "Masterpiece" -- "House of Cards" and "To Play the King" -- Urquhart is the most hypocritical, cynical and downright criminal of politicians. He makes Oliver Stone's Nixon look like a Disney creation.But, as played by Ian Richardson, Urquhart is also as charming, brilliant and successful a politician as has ever been imagined.

PBS' "Masterpiece Theatre" officially turned 25 Wednesday and got a new name that will be with it at least until the end of the century: "Mobil Masterpiece Theatre."Mobil is the only corporate underwriter the network's longest-running drama series has ever had, but the company is "downsizing" and already has dropped its sponsorship of "Mystery!" as of the end of this season, so its continued sponsorship of "Masterpiece Theatre" was not a certainty until quite recently.As a condition of renewing its support of the venerable series through the 1999-2000 TV season, Mobil asked for the name change, which its executives believe will give the company increased visibility.

Let the night become day! Actually, it's just the soap opera "The Young & The Restless" getting a special nighttime airing. Also look for a terrific "Frasier" repeat and a look by CBS at the lucrative business of love -- the fictional kind, that is.* "The Young & The Restless" (9 p.m.-10 p.m., WJZ, Channel 13) -- In a primetime edition of the top-rated daytime soap opera, Victor and Christine (Eric Braeden and Lauralee Bell) try to help rape victim Amy (Julianne Morris) unlock her memories, while Dru (Victoria Rowell)

Maryland Public Television will stage a one-day "mini pledge drive" tomorrow, with special programming and membership solicitation breaks, to make budgetary ends meet for the fiscal year ending June 30.Pledge phone lines will be open from noon to midnight, and programming during those hours includes encore presentations that are among the most requested in the PBS repertoire, said Barry Freidly, MPT director of development.No dollar goal has been set for the drive. Officials noted that MPT staged a similar three-day drive last summer.

What might be the high point of the season on "Masterpiece Theatre" begins a three-week run at 9 p.m. Sunday. "The Rector's Wife," starring Lindsay Duncan and Jonathan Coy, is not to be missed.Based on the controversial 1992 novel by Joanna Trollope, "The Rector's Wife" examines the life and tiny, circumscribed world of Anglican rector, his wife and family.The drama begins when the rector, Peter Bouverie, played to perfection by Coy, fails to get a promotion to archdeacon. With the promotion, he would have been able to lift his family -- his wife, played brilliantly by Duncan, and two children -- out of a near-poverty existence.

Leesburg, Va. -- Russell Baker has this theory about success. When good things happen to good people, it can be bad for you."I think that comes from my upbringing, ever since I was in the cradle: You don't expect anything good to happen," he is saying. "I always thought it was peculiar to me, but this Jewish girl I knew told me that if you were Jewish, you have this giant-thumb view of life. Just when things really start going well for you, this giant thumb emerges from the sky and crushes you."

Unwed motherhood, alcoholism, lack of education, a hypocritical church - the themes that swirl around Tess of the D'Urbervilles just keep going around and around and coming back at us. Perhaps, that is why Masterpiece Theatre - now simply Masterpiece Classic - keeps coming back to Tess. Two versions - one by Roman Polanski in 1980 and a second with Justine Waddell in 1998 - have already wowed the critics. But a new, four-hour version arrives tonight on PBS and concludes next Sunday. This Tess is a star vehicle for the actress playing the title role, and Gemma Artertot is more than fine enough to carry trouble and travail that was a woman's lot in 19th-century England.

theater 'Peter Pan - the Musical': What a concept - in this production, the boy who won't grow up is actually played by someone with a Y chromosome. ("Peter" traditionally has been portrayed by a woman.) The nontraditional casting meant that some songs had to be reorchestrated. Through Jan. 4 at Olney Theatre Center, 2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Drive, Olney. Showtimes vary. Tickets are $25-$48. Call 301-924-3400 or go to olneytheatre.org. Mary CaroleMcCauley design Bike racks: Why do bike racks have to be boring?

The advance DVD of The Virgin Queen, a handsome Masterpiece Theatre life of Elizabeth I, bears the tagline "She led by leading men on ..." Give Bess some credit. There was a little more to it than that. Still, one can't fault the Masterpiece Theatre folks for hyping the sexy side of the Virgin Queen, which airs at 9 tonight and Nov. 20 on PBS. The TV landscape is competitive, especially on Sundays; not only that, each new telling of Elizabeth's tale must stand out from the pack of previous depictions of the legendary queen's royal career.

Fall is when mainstream producers and directors, like high school and college kids, head back from the beach and prove that they can crack open the books. This is when they unleash the heavyweight projects designed to lure shell-shocked adults back to the theaters and -- who knows? -- maybe win over part of the dating crowd that might recognize an author from an English class. You can empty a small library by checking out the sources of this season's prestige releases. Just for starters there's Oliver Twist and Pride and Prejudice, David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Proof, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Gerald Clarke's biography Capote, Steve Martin's Shopgirl, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Next week's shoreline thriller, Into the Blue, starring Jessica Alba in a bikini, is the exception that proves the rule.

PBS hasn't yet found an underwriter for its 33-year-old Masterpiece Theatre series, but it has landed 11 new corporate funding commitments for other programs, said President and Chief Executive Pat Mitchell, who was in Los Angeles over the weekend attending the television industry's midseason press tour. "We see an encouraging trend," said Mitchell in an interview after the conference's executive session. "I would go so far as to say we're doing much better, but those 11 are pretty substantial programs."

The miniseries The Forsyte Saga signals a foundering PBS trying to get back in touch with its roots and re-create the kind of Sunday-night buzz that has been missing on public television since the arrival of another sprawling Sunday-night family saga, HBO's The Sopranos. As entertainment, the eight-hour adaptation of John Galsworthy's Victorian epic on the Forsyte family delivers most of the goods. There is a great performance by Damien Lewis (Band of Brothers) as Soames Forsyte, the tormented lead character, a lawyer highly skilled in making money but a desperate failure in making love to the woman he weds.

After being forced to read Othello in more college courses than I care to remember, and seeing Shakespeare modernized far too often, word that Masterpiece Theatre was doing the tragedy as a contemporary cop drama didn't exactly set my heart racing. Not even a screenplay by the brilliant Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice) could raise my dismal expectations. Was I wrong. This Othello, about a black police commissioner and set in Scotland Yard, is a mesmerizing dramatic ride through race, ambition, paranoia, false friendship, political correctness, jealousy and lies.

For decades, the producing-directing team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory has been denigrated for plush and cautious "Masterpiece Theatre" moviemaking. After comparing their production of Henry James' "The Golden Bowl" to the 1972 BBC production that appeared on "Masterpiece Theatre," I consider any such comparison an insult - to "Masterpiece Theatre." The Merchant-Ivory "Golden Bowl" takes a literary milestone of ambiguity and makes everything about it blisteringly obvious. The "Masterpiece Theatre" version, written by Jack Pulman - the same adapting genius who dramatized "I, Claudius" for the BBC - slyly and wisely pulls you into a tissue of evasion, half-truth and elegant prevarication.

"Take A Girl Like You" has style, a cool jazz score, rich 1950s detail, a good-looking leading man and a gorgeous female star. Based on a book by Kingsley Amis, it also has a script by Andrew Davies, the best screenwriter in English television ("A Rather English Marriage"). So why does this four-hour miniseries from "Masterpiece Theatre" leave me so cold? The answer lies in what the producers have done to Amis' book. Written in the 1950s, it was part of the Angry Young Man movement in England - a full-frontal literary assault on a stultifying system of social class and morality that was still firmly in place despite a world war that had threatened England's very existence.

Masterpiece Theatre, which opened its new American Collection series so stylishly in October with "Cora Unashamed," scores again tonight with its second production, Henry James' "The American." The novel, published in 1877, tells of the clash between Old and New World values when Christopher Newman (Mathew Modine), a 19th-century "new man" who has amassed a fortune selling washtubs and building railroads in California, comes to Paris to experience its culture and find a wife. As he innocently explains his trip to a duchess at an elegant dinner party, "I'm here for the great history, the paintings, the cathedrals.