Norman D. Golden II

When a pint-sized 8-year-old kid witnesses a murder he offers to help the police, if they make him a cop, too. Saddled with this streetwise sidekick, a hardboiled cop is forced to take his new partner seriously as they race the clock to bring the bad guys to justice.

Irish immigrant Tommy Shaughnessy leaves 19th-century New York City for Kansas and becomes a small-town sheriff.

Made especially for the HBO cable network, this well-wrought feature is comprised of three short stories by three noted black American authors, each of which is directed by a respected black director.

In the 1950s, the Ween family live and work on land that was promised to their family. The landowners, the Appletree family, use the promise of the land to keep the family working for them, putting the transfer of the land in doubt.

From Publishers Weekly The devastating story of brothers Lafayette and Pharoah Rivers, children of the Chicago ghetto, is powerfully told here by Kotlowitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter who first met the boys in 1985 when they were 10 and seven, respectively. Their family includes a mother, a frequently absent father, an older brother and younger triplets. We witness the horrors of growing up in an ill-maintained housing project tyrannized by drug gangs and where murders and shootings frequently occur.

The sole survivor of a lost whaling ship relates the tale of his captain's self-destructive obsession to hunt the white whale, Moby Dick.