Tube Notes

By Mike Hughes
Gannett News Service

Tonight's Must-See

"The Laramie Project," 6 p.m., HBO. Amid the aftershocks of the Matthew Shepard murder, something extraordinary emerged. A theater group went to Laramie, Wyo., with an open mind. It emerged with a play and then this stunning movie. To the outside world, Laramie had become a synonym for evil. Two guys had brutally beaten a gay college student (Shepard), then left him for dead. What the theater people found, however, was much deeper. They found decent, small-town people, trying to grasp the horror that had happened in their town. That's brilliantly captured here by Moises Kaufman, who also directed the play. He gets extraordinary work from such people as Janeane Garofalo, Joshua Jackson and Camryn Manheim.