My Year with Meryl Streep: …First Do No Harm (1997)
A look at Meryl Streep’s Emmy-nominated TV movie!
I recently spent a whole year watching a Meryl Streep film every week, and I thought I’d share with you some of the reviews I wrote for her many classic films!
…First Do No Harm (1997)
Meryl has always been prolific in her career, often making one or two movies a year (sometimes even more), but she was really cranking films out in the second half of the 1990s, appearing in no less than seven in the span of just four years, between 1995’s The Bridges of Madison County and 1999’s Music of the Heart. While Before and After disappointed with critics, and Dancing at Lughnasa bombed at the box office, the film she made during this time that probably perplexed the most people was …First Do Harm, a made-for-TV movie.
It’s not that Meryl always shied away from television. She appeared in a significant role in the epic 1978 mini-series for NBC, Holocaust, as well the acclaimed 2003 HBO mini-series Angels in America, which won her an Emmy. But for her to appear in a lowly TV movie, one directed by the mastermind behind comedy spoofs like Airplane and who had never attempted drama before, probably seemed a bit of a head-scratcher to people.
