From the Earth to the Moon (TV Mini Series) We Interrupt This Program (1998) User Reviews

Episopde 8

[raymond-ohara · 8/10 · 27 July 2009]

The previous reviewer missed this episode while actually watching it. the Apollo 13 story is well known enough that making a show about the way it was saved was redundant. so instead they focused on the press and how news coverage morphed from the Edward R Murrow/Walter Cronkite in-depth coverage to the tabloid news such as Fox News and MSNBC now practice. It is a brilliant episode that follows the brash new reporter covering the "people" and the fading away of the old reporter who reported the story. Anyone interested in news coverage should watch this episode. In my opinion it might have been the best. "filler added to make ten lines" what a stupid rule

An essential companion to Apollo 13

[paulpellerito · 8/10 · 29 December 2018]

Produced by Ron Howard, this episode is essential viewing for those who enjoyed the film Apollo 13. Serving best as a companion piece to that film rather than an episode of this series, the episode gives a different point of view of the true events of the mission.

Weak entry in the series but not wholly terrible

[Solnichka · 7/10 · 16 February 2016]

As noted in many places, the producers of the series did not want to tell the same story that the full-length film _Apollo 13_ told about that mission, so they constructed a story to relate it to the audience from a differing point of view. And it just doesn't work, mostly because Jay Mohr is miscast—and it's all a fabrication, too. While the fabrication of the documentary crew worked for Episode 3 of this series about Apollo 7, this take on the TV news perspective of the Apollo 13 mission doesn't work well. It's interesting in the principle of the "power struggle" it tells between the old journalism school and the new, but that is going to bore most viewers. Again, admittedly one of the reasons this episode fails so much is because the Apollo 13 film was SO good at covering the incident from so many diverse angles already. Thus, the writers were grabbing at straws here to be different, and they just came up with the short straw. That's all. It's not as bad as Episode 4 ("1968"), but it's pretty close.

Looking At The Well Known Disaster In A Brand New Way

[AllNewSux · 9/10 · 21 September 2017]

From The Earth To The Moon tells the story of the entire American space program from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo. Soon enough they had to get around to Apollo 13, but how do you tell the story that is already so well known thanks to a brilliant movie a few years earlier? The 1995 movie Apollo 13 was so perfect and so well done that I, like some reviewers, used to think I disliked this episode. Boy was I mistaken! This episode takes this familiar tale and puts us in the seats of the viewing public at the time. The movie Apollo 13 focused on the astronauts and their families and tells a great tale, but this episode gives us history. We never see anymore of the astronauts than the average TV viewer saw in 1970. We only get to hear the garbled transmissions of those trapped in space facing certain death. We as the viewer are occasionally moved into the press pool, but even there we only gets bits and pieces of information. Some of it accurate and germane and some of it off the wall nonsense. This gives us a view of the situation on the ground and like the public we're never allowed to know the full story and like NASA we're unsure of the whole story. The splash down finally gives us some relief because despite knowing what's going to happen in the end, we are put into the story and become emotionally involved.

Now in addition to this masterful new way of telling an already popular story, there's some nice commentary here that we don't really see in the other episodes. To me it's a commentary of the failings of journalism and perhaps our attention spans beginning in the late 1990s and continuing to this very day. The young tabloidesque reporter (Jay Mohr) ousting the far more experienced, far more talented veteran reporter (played by Lane Smith in perhaps his greatest performance ever) is a comment on the take over of real news and real television shows by corporate propaganda parading as news and falsely labeled "reality" television. They also focus on how quickly the world became bored with space exploration. While somewhat true I see it more as a warning about our pathetic short attention which has diminished ten fold since this TV series was made. In a car race, most people don't care to watch until there's a crash. In 1970 America lost interest with human beings accomplishing the most astounding scientific achievement ever. Things have only gotten worse since then and HBO's From The Earth To The Moon saw it coming a mile away...

The weakest episode of the series by unfortunate circumstance

[t_smitts · 5/10 · 18 April 2009]

Tom Hanks and the crew of "From the Earth to the Moon" have given us some fascinating insights into the space program; the Gemini program, the Apollo One fire, the building of the Lunar Mondule, Apollo 8 ending the turbulent year of 1968 on a high note, the historic landing of Apollo 11, and even the irreverent fun of Apollo 12.

Then they had to deal with Apollo 13.

Now unless you've been in a coma for the past fifteen years, you know that mission was dramatized in the highly acclaimed movie of the same name. In fact Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, and a good portion of the cast and crew had come over to work on this project after finishing the movie. Add to that the fact that the movie was only three years old at the time and thus still fresh in people's minds, and you see why it would have been unthinkable to simply rehash the story with different actors.

Of course they were stuck between a rock and a hard place, because you can't really skip over it (even though they essentially did with Apollo 10 and later with Apollo 16). You can't really show the story from the POV of mission control or the astronauts' families since the movies pretty much covered that as well. What to do then?

What we're left with apparently, is an episode told from the point of view of the TV reporters who covered the story. More specifically, it depicts Emmett Seaborn, clearly based on Walter Cronkite; (my guess is they didn't want to show the real guy, as he was associated with another network). Played by the likable (and, unfortunately, late) Lane Smith, Seaborn had appeared in most of the preceding episodes, essentially as a Greek chorus.

Here, he comes to the forefront, reporting on the crisis of the mission as it unfolds. On the other hand, we have Brett Hutchins, an ambitious and hungry young reporter played by Jay Mohr, who'd much rather cover more sensationalist aspects, such as the reactions of the astronauts' families. Seaborn is appalled by such an invasion of privacy, but the network exec clearly find Hutchins' approach more appealing, giving him more support while the older Seaborn is marginalized.

After the astronauts splash down to safety, Hutchins is shut out of a NASA press briefing for going after the astronaut families, and it appears the little weasel has finally gotten his comeuppance. Unfortunately not. A NASA official, unwilling to alienate the press, lets him back in. In a rather depressing ending, Hutchins gets the big story while Seaborn is phased out. I'm guess it was supposed to represent the honest Cronkite-types of the journalism world being replaced with the more sensationalistic ones prevalent today.

Aside from the dissatisfying ending, my main problem was largely that in a series depicting real people and real events, we had a conflict that never happened between two people who don't exist. Seaborn and Hutchins are completely fictional (if composites of real people). What does any of this have to do with going to the moon? Why should I care?

Ultimately, I can't fault Hanks, Howard, and company too much, since I really couldn't come up with a better angle that hadn't already been covered either. The irony is if the movie "Apollo 13" hadn't been as successful as it was, this mini-series almost certainly wouldn't have gotten made. Maybe the price was having this weak episode. That doesn't excuse the series' other weak episode "The Original Wives Club", however, but that's another story.

Transition

[GreggoWhitehead · 1/10 · 30 November 2020]

A story that can evoke emotion is a great story, and this is a great story, although sad. I was born in the 1950s, so my formative years were the 1960s and 70s. I grew up watching Walter Cronkite. He was the most trusted man in America.

This episode was about the change in news style more than the space shot. Cronkite gave factual "And that's the way it is." news. Around the time this movie is set, others in the "news" business started changing to a more "touchy-feelie" style of news. And this episode covers that well.

I don't know if Jay Mohr is anything like the character he portrays. He sure seems to play a lot of characters like that. He did a fantastic job playing that character, because it evoked such strong feelings against him. To this day, I won't watch anything he's in because I don't like those types of people.

I want to know that the sky is blue and the grass is green. I could care less what they neighbor thinks about the grass or how the pilot feels about the sky. As Jack Webb is reportedly reputed to say, "Just the facts."

If you want to know how the news changed into a touchy feelie style, this show's for you.