'Mo' Tenors' mixes music styles

You've heard (or heard of) The Three Tenors? Now try Three Mo' Tenors (PBS's Great Performances, check local listings). Victor Trent Cook, Rodrick Dixon, and Thomas Young celebrate not only opera and their classical repertoire, but also their African-American heritage of jazz, R&B, blues, Broadway show tunes, rock, gospel, spirituals, and hymns.

What is truly remarkable about their concert is how seamlessly they blend the various musical traditions. These beautiful voices make Gladys Knight and the Pips' classic "Midnight Train to Georgia" and Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" resonate with good wit and joy.

Puccini's "Nessum Dorma," sung with great power and refinement of feeling by Mr. Young, is enhanced by a soulful gospel hymn sung by Mr. Cook. And when all three sing a lovely, jazzy version of "America The Beautiful," they lend it new meaning.

"We've all been in the business a long time," says Young, who has sung opera for 30 years. "And we carefully considered how we could present these pieces we had been singing as a unified whole. We never took a hodgepodge approach."

Covering seven musical styles and 200 years of music takes sensitivity. But the show turns out to be witty, warm, and spiritual as well.

"No musician has to be told that the intuitive musical experience is a vehicle for truth and meaning. [Art] reveals to us where meaning might lie...," Young says. Art succeeds or fails in the heart, he says, "but we have to be able to receive it."

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The Odyssey Network is no more - it morphs into the Hallmark Channel this Sunday. Expect to see a lot more multipart series, first runs and repeats.

The extraordinary H.G. Wells, known as the father of science fiction, is the subject of the new channel's first miniseries. The Infinite World of H.G. Wells is based on six Wells short stories integrated into three interlocking two-hour segments (Aug. 5, 6, and 7, from 9 to 11 p.m.), each ending with a cliffhanger. The story opens in 1946 with Wells as an old man. A young reporter comes to visit him to ask about a famous scientist whom Wells knew in his youth. In flashbacks, Wells relates the story of "The New Accelerator" and outlines what might happen if we could speed up our lives.

In fact, all of these tales are cautionary - warning against tampering with nature, lust for power, and meanness of spirit and greed. Splendid acting, directing, and writing make this mini charming and vastly entertaining. But what really engages the imagination is the sense we get of Wells' practical moral spirit - what science fiction can most gracefully reveal.

When a railroad worker travels back in time with a newspaper in his pocket from the future, he is tempted to make himself and his friends rich, betting at the racetrack, only to discover that there is a price for fiddling with the future. When a gentle naturalist discovers a crystal egg propelled here from Mars, it is his shrewish wife who must pay the Martian for her nasty attitude. And when manufactured bacilli are stolen from a famous researcher's locked lab and dumped into the water supply, the strange delirium that overcomes London is more threatening than any plague - but only for those with something to hide.

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There are two things TV fiction can do better than movies: One is epic dramas like the H.G. Wells series, and the other is intimate stories that shine a light on dark corners of daily experience. Wild Iris (Showtime, Aug. 10, 8-10 p.m.) brings Gena Rowlands and Laura Linney together in tour-de-force performances as an embittered mother and daughter whose dysfunctional relationship threatens the very life of Iris's 15-year-old son, Lonnie.

"There are definitely advantages to working on television," Ms. Rowlands said in a recent interview. "Television takes on difficult themes. I am finding much better scripts on television than for the movies. There is an energy - you get on a trajectory and get into a strange rhythm. On a big movie, there are so many takes, so much wasted time.

"But I like acting on film," she says. "It became very precious to me when my late husband directed me." Rowlands is well known for the films she made with husband John Cassavetes. TV movies without commercials combine the best of both worlds, she says.

In her role as Min, Rowlands is the owner of a bridal shop that she runs with the help of her daughter, Iris. They work with an uncanny symbiosis on the father of a pregnant bride. But when they aren't working together, they undermine each other.

Iris blames Min for her own husband's suicide. Both women fail to notice Lonnie's decline into depression. It takes an emotional volcano to light a fire under Iris and get her to take responsibility for her life and Lonnie's.

At first, Iris's irritation with her mother seems self-indulgent and unprovoked. But by the end of the picture, Min's true nature stands revealed.

And though Min has qualities that are loveable, her darkness is deep.

"I'm fascinated by how people do mean things and don't think they're mean," Rowlands said. "They get so determined that their way is the right way that they lose all understanding or compassion...."

Rowlands talks about her character's virtues - hardworking, creative, independent - that make her a survivor. But it's her lack of compassion that is so ruinous to her daughter and her grandson.

"She is a woman who has found a way to keep living - she is strong, but she is selfish."