“Daddy, we saw a naked lady!” That was the first significant on-screen dialog ever spoken by the actress Mary Stuart Masterson (as little Kim Eberhardt in The Stepford Wives). Don’t expect any such excitement from Ms. Masterson’s new TV show, Kate Brasher (Saturdays, CBS). Billed as an “inspirational family drama,” Kate Brasher does everything it can to deliver on the grim threat implicit in those three sinister words. Kate, we are told, is a “loving, hardworking mom who will do anything to give her kids every advantage.” This, presumably, is why she decided to name her second son, Elvis. When [...]

He was a liberal hero once, a brilliant policy wonk at the pinnacle of government. He was their martyr too, a victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy, the target of a vicious congressional witch hunt. In the end, he had to admit to perjury, but that was a petty matter, a trumped-up technicality designed only to save a vindictive prosecutor’s face. Now, at long last, liberal opinion is changing. There is new evidence that their hero was flawed after all, that he may indeed have been the crook that the Right always said he was. One by one, former defenders [...]