(dir.: Jeff Bleckner)
O miniserie de aproape o oră compusă din ecranizările a trei proze scurte de Cheever, un triptic cheeverian, ce să mai?, în interiorul căruia un volet, The 5:48, e semnat James Ivory, fără nici un titlu sonor la ora aia, deși avea în spate vreo 17 ani de regie. Întâmplător, tot în 1979 va scoate un lungmetraj (The Europeans) din nuvela lui Henry James (scenarizată alături de colaboratoarea sa de cursă lungă, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala), pe care l-aș tot revedea datorită magicei Lee Remick.
The 5:48 este una din povestirile lui Cheever despre fete submisive & tipi macho (mai mult sau mai puțin deștepți) din publicitate, pe care mai apoi Matthew Wiener le-a adunat & ranforsat în faimosul serial Mad Men. O spune/confirmă și Susan Cheever în prologul unei biografii recent scrise (de fapt rescrise, că mai are una, ceva mai veche) a tatălui ei, When All the Men Wore Hats:
„Sally Draper is one of dozens of characters in our twenty - first - century world who originated in John Cheever stories, stories largely drawn from the facts of my family’s life as I was growing up. I watched my father write them in the dark guest room of our house in Westchester County, wearing a ragged crew neck sweater and hunched over his typewriter next to a pile of cheap yellow paper. I recognized community gossip he used in them. A girl just like me also appeared in them. They often reflected his reading - novels and stories he would read, hand off to me, and then want to stay up late at night discussing. I was happy to oblige. He poured another nightcap. Homework went undone. The stories have been televised, dramatized, and paid homage to in poems, in songs, and in hundreds of pages of critical writing. The English philosopher Roger Deakin, delighted by the story «The Swimmer», founded the spiritual wild swimming movement. Raymond Carver wrote a sequel to «The Five - Forty - Eight» and more recently, Emma Cline’s novel The Guest was inspired by «The Swimmer.» (...) Most famously, Mad Men creator Matt Weiner based seasons of his series on my father’s stories. I am Sally Draper twice removed.
[...]
Weiner, who used the book [The Stories of John Cheever] as a kind of writing bible, has said that he read and reread my father’s preface to the stories for inspiration: «These stories seem at times to be stories of a long - lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light», the preface reads, «when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning (...)”
Cel mai sonor nume din acest proiect este Sigourney Weaver (se lansase deja primul Alien): apare în două episoade ca același personaj (Marcia Lawton).