Donald Todd Movies

Former Married. . .With Children costar Christina Applegate returned to television in the slightly schizophrenic ABC sitcom Samantha Who? Applegate played title character Samantha "Sam" Newly, who after being stuck down in a traffic accident, awakened from an eight-day coma suffering from "retrograde amnesia," with no memory of who she was nor what she'd been. Slowly but surely, Sam confirmed that she was 30 years old, the vice president of the real-estate firm Chapman and Funk, and the ex-girlfriend of a photographer named Todd (Barry Watson). Sam's post-coma personality was one of pure "sweetness and light"--which greatly confused her friends, family members, and business associates, who recalled the pre-coma Sam as mean, overbearing, manipulating, vitriolic, and a hard-drinking, promiscuous party animal. It was up to Sam to remain as nice and pleasant as she now was, or to revert to her previous nastiness. Helping her put the pieces together was apartment-house doorman Frank (Tim Russ), who had often been the recipient of the "old" Sam's bitchiness and had a lot trouble reconciling himself to the "new" Sam, but was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Others in the heroine's orbit were her resentful mother Regina (Jean Smart) and her too-affable-to-be-true father Howard (Kevin Dunn); her best friend Andrea (Jennifer Esposito), an accomplished conniver and back-stabber in her own right; and her former childhood buddy Dena (Melissa McCarthy), who had her own special reasons for hanging around to see which of the "two" Sams would ultimately prevail. Cocreated by novelist Cecilia Hearn, Samantha Who? premiered October 15, 2007. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The funny side of sports fandom provides the common element for two stories in this made-for-cable anthology feature. In the first segment, based on a short story by Don Marquis, a golfer (Bob Newhart) looks like he's about to break 100 for the first time, but his partner (Kelsey Grammer) keeps insisting upon following every rule in the book, much to his friend's annoyance. The second story is based on 1968's real-life "Heidi Bowl" incident, in which NBC-TV's broadcast of a hard-fought game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders, which seemed likely to determine the AFL championship, was cut off --with 65 seconds left to play and the score at 32-29 -- in order to begin a scheduled showing of a made-for-TV movie based on the classic children's story Heidi. Eugene Levy plays a network control room supervisor, Ellie Harvie appears as a NBC switchboard operator trying to handle the sudden influx of angry calls, Gary Basaraba plays her husband, who is watching the game at home with friends, and John Kapelos is a bookie with a lot of money riding on the game. Fox-TV sports commentator James Brown hosts the two-part film, which was produced for the Showtime premium cable network. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi