The system has worked like this: Voters cast ballots in primaries and caucuses, one candidate wins a majority, and the convention unfolds as a largely suspense-free television program.
What once shaped up as a week of desultory brinksmanship over a potential government shutdown has been largely drained of suspense.
Drama, suspense and emotion are largely absent.
But the fine suspense thriller Red Eye (2005), set largely on a plane, was positively Hitchcockian.
Her formula seems largely her own; she produces novels of legalistic suspense — composed in tidy ironies and florid prose — that, like the midcentury weepies "Stella Dallas" and "Imitation of Life," have the effect of questioning the redemptive value of motherhood.
The prince, disappointingly if not surprisingly, becomes not only Tiana's salvation but also that of the movie, largely by bringing some slapstick comedy and a touch of suspense into the proceedings, along with the expected romance.
In fact, United Russia was able to win largely because its candidates' challengers were unthreatening, the races generated little suspense and what little campaigning took place was muted.
There is a genuine suspense and thrill to the show now, but it succeeds largely as a treatise not on the tragedy of cancer but on the sheer monotony of it, the relentless waiting around.
With the usual internecine maneuvering largely absent, and Mr. Cheney already selected as the running mate, there was little suspense.
Suspense and drama ain't quite what it used to be, folks, owing largely to the degeneration of the collective intellect of previous 50 years.
In between space battles played as much for laughs as for suspense, many pages are devoted to a political debate about whether or not to return to an earth left largely empty by departing "posthuman" intelligences that were once computers.
