Louise Lasser delivers a masterful performance in the title role of Norman Lear's sublimely twisted soap opera, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman -- at once a parody of the format and a twisted satire of American media/consumer culture.

In the fictional town of Fernwood, Ohio, suburban housewife Mary Hartman seeks the kind of domestic perfection promised by Reader's Digest and TV commercials. Instead she finds herself suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune -- mass murders, low-flying airplanes, and waxy yellow buildup on her kitchen floor.