The Washington Post, by Tom Shales

And Onto Your Screen, Courtesy of CBS

Bustin' Dustin, his limbs tied in knots, lies face down in a battered heap, blood running from his nose. Basket Casey dribbles his own severed head across the gymnasium floor. Screaming Mimi is being chased and stung by a swarm of bees, Travellin' Travis has been crushed under the wheels of a car, and Well Done Sheldon, shot full of arrows, is being burned at the stake.

These are some of the "Garbage Pail Kids" pictured on a popular strain of bubble gum trading cards that have sold in the millions to American children since they first appeared in 1985. Now CBS has announced that it will introduce a new, animated version of "Garbage Pail Kids" in its Saturday morning kiddy cartoon lineup starting this fall. The series -- produced, like many TV cartoon shows, in Taiwan -- will air immediately following "Pee-wee's Playhouse," when very young children are the target audience.

While CBS insists that the TV series will not feature the mutilations, torture and disfigurement that have made the cards a strange, sick-humor sensation among American youngsters, the network does promise in publicity that the series will be "unorthodox, wild and wacky" and offer "short comedy blackouts straight from the offbeat humor of the cards" -- such gags as "Fried Franklin's discovery of electricity."

Children may find this good news. Parents may not. That a major network has decided to produce a cartoon series derived from drawings of mangled and deformed children dramatizes the violent and grotesque lengths to which children's television can now go.The FCC holds networks and stations to virtually no standards with regard to children's programming.

And so, "Garbage Pail Kids" goes on the air in September.

"This is particularly insensitive of CBS," charges Thomas Radecki, research director of the National Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV). "I think it's a real mistake. The cards are extremely sadistic. They take the most intensive, sadistic fantasies from war and horror movies and turn them into entertainment for young children."

Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children's Television (ACT), says the cards ridicule children who are physically impaired. "The idea that you take handicapping conditions and make them funny, and have to go to that kind of humor on children's television, I find outrageous," Charren says.

"Nothing about the content that's targeted to children surprises me any more," adds Charren, but she chides the networks for "looking at the creepiest toys children play with and turning those into programs." She says the humor of "Garbage Pail Kids" might be all right on "Saturday Night Live" but that "it is not appropriate for Saturday morning."

At CBS, Judy Price, vice president for children's programming, concedes that plans for the "Garbage Pail Kids" TV show have elicited angry mail from parents and concern from worried CBS affiliates. But she insists the program will not deal in the kind of gross-out humor common on the cards, which are manufactured by Topps Chewing Gum Inc.

"We don't go to some of the extremes of the cards," Price says. "There are some of those cards that make my stomach turn. On the cards you see acne, mucus, throw-up, children hurt. You're not going to see that on our show."

"I'm sure they could not possibly make the cartoon the way the cards are," says Radecki. "The cards have things like a little boy chopping off people's heads, a little girl trapped inside a blender, a baby with a huge safety pin through its chest and abdomen. These images are really more brutal than the stuff you see in the worst of the horror movies."

Price says five major characters will star each week. None sounds as grisly or gory as the worst characters on the cards. But, as described by Price, they don't sound particularly innocuous, either. Of heroine Terry Cloth, Price says, "Her face is on her hand," and as for Eliot Mess, "He's a little messed up. Let's just say his body parts are not in the right order."

Children will not be chopped up, decapitated, squished, stretched or otherwise mangled, as they are on the cards, Price promises. "Of course not. We're not going to do anything that is violent. That would be outrageous and gross and irresponsible."

But Radecki thinks the show sounds outrageous and gross and irresponsible anyway. "I can't imagine it being nonviolent," he says. "The whole purpose of the cards is to assault the viewer. By their very conception, they're violent.

"I'm sure CBS will have to tone it down for Saturday morning television, but in a very powerful way, it's giving major social sanction to the cards and their extreme and brutal sadism for young children," Radecki says. "It gives out the message that the cards are appropriate for children, and that leads to even further desensitization to violence."

Price claims the program will remain "within wholesome entertainment boundaries" and says that while "it delivers on certain expectations of youngsters" who've seen and bought the cards, it is nevertheless "not in poor taste."

Does the program break taboos in children's TV? "It does in some ways, yes," Price says. "But not bad-taste taboos. Things that are on the edge of slight irreverence. It's not antisocial, but neither have we turned the characters into Care Bears. If we do, then we are not going to have an audience."

Price dismisses the argument that her supposedly nonviolent program nevertheless promotes, and will help sell, the clearly violent cards. "I don't find that an issue I'm concerned about," she says, "because they've already sold a billion copies. This is very much a part of our popular culture."

Topps had to be talked into licensing the characters for a TV show, Price says. CBS, unlike the other two networks, does not enter into coproduction deals with toy and novelty manufacturers to base TV shows on their products as a way of promoting them; CBS is paying Topps a license fee (undisclosed) for the TV rights to the characters.

"In fact, it was very difficult to convince Topps to do the show," Price says. "I had to chase them and chase them."

"I don't think that's quite accurate," says Topps spokesman Norman Liss from the company's Brooklyn headquarters. "We're delighted that they're doing it. It's just one of our licensing things." A movie is also in the works, but CBS is not involved in that.

Liss won't confirm Price's claim that a billion cards have been sold but says, in answer to criticism of the cards from parents' and antiviolence groups, "Millions and millions of people have been buying this product. Certainly those people were expressing their opinion and their approval. If we thought anything was too gross, we wouldn't put it out."

And so the marketplace speaks again, this time in favor of bubble gum cards (five to a pack, plus gum, for 25 cents) that feature such cartoon characters as Rutherford B. Hay, a pudgy child scarecrow whose left eye has been plucked out by a bird, and Unzipped Zack, a little boy who unzips his face to reveal a demonic skull underneath.

These characters may not appear on the CBS show, but the sensibility behind them is clearly what CBS has bought for its young audience -- or rather, for the advertisers (mostly of sugary cereals, fast food and candy) who want to reach them.

Radecki says children's television has become increasingly violent again, after a few years of seeming reform, and both he and Charren blame, in part, former FCC chairman Mark Fowler and his laissez-faire attitude toward children's programming. During Fowler's reign, TV cartoon shows built around, and promoting, current toys, including violent ones, proliferated. Charren calls these shows "program-length commercials" that are disguised as entertainment but relentlessly pitch products to kids.

The District Court of Appeals is expected to rule soon on a suit ACT filed against the FCC for its failure to protect young viewers from such sustained commercial assaults. Radecki is pushing for legislation that would, among other things, ban commercials for violent war toys and require networks and stations to air antiviolence public service announcements aimed at kids.

Radecki says that while one may laugh off a phenomenon like "Garbage Pail Kids," it contributes to increased desensitization to violence in American society and thus to an even more violent culture. "It's a gradual process," he says. "We get desensitized to one step and then take the next step before we realize it. You find increasing acceptance of brutality and sadism as socially appropriate forms of entertainment.

"We all need to take this issue more seriously," Radecki says.

What CBS takes seriously is the proven child-luring power, and revenue-earning potential, of the cards. CBS finished the 1986-87 TV season in second place in the Saturday morning ratings, behind NBC, and would love to move up. Will "Garbage Pail Kids" help bring that about? "I think," says Price gleefully, "we have a very strong chance of having a hit."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

CBS Unleashes A Grating Gabfest

Some TV shows seem to call less for a review than for an exorcism. Such is the case with "The Morning Program," CBS' new, daily, 90-minute dawn-breaker that premiered yesterday in a time slot abdicated after years of dutiful Titanic launchings by CBS News.

Watching it was like waking up and finding the house overrun with last night's party guests, most of them stewed to the gills and gabby as all get-out.

Think about it: Does television really need a program for viewers who find the "Today" show on NBC and "Good Morning America" on ABC too intellectually demanding?

"The Morning Program" has two tiny news inserts prepared by CBS News, which does its best to keep its distance, but mostly it is huff, puff and fluff, produced by CBS Entertainment and served up before aclap-happy studio audiencein New York. Mariette Hartley, actress and star of TV commercials, made a spectacle of herself as the hyperkinetic cohost on the premiere. Jumpy as a marionette, Hartley did her best to upstage everybody, including cohost Rolland Smith, who plays Mr. Sobersides to her Ms. Fidget, and the show's resident dog, Daisy. Yes, it has a dog. Yes, it's Hartley's dog. Yes, Hartley practically petted the poor creature into a pulp on the first show.

Among the other dubiously innovative features of the program are video personals, in which men and women advertise their need for companionship right smack there on network TV. The premiere featured Chris D2-WI, Brenda D2-WI and Al D2-WI. They don't all have the same last name; the code is for those who wish to write in and make a date. Chris wants someone who is "first a friend and then a lover," Brenda wants a man with "good morals," and Al desires "an attractive, intelligent lady."

To try to finesse the ghastly bad taste of this unseemly gimmick, the writers gave Smith a solemn intro to read for the segment. Smith said of the video daters, "In some cases, you may feel their cry, be embarrassed by their vulnerability and be reminded what loneliness felt like, if you've forgotten." What one may also have felt was the desperation of TV producers who would come up with such a tacky bit and then try to dress it up with that kind of sudsy rationalization.

Everybody on the show tries to be funny, with the possible exception of Smith. The weatherman, Mark McEwen, is large and likable, but when he tries to crack a joke, he only reminds a viewer how much better at that Willard Scott (of "Today") is. The announcer, Bob Saget, is a comedian, but the few humorous remarks he was able to inject during the premiere were squashed by the marauding Hartley.

Occasionally Hartley did try to be serious. Freshman Rep. Joseph Kennedy II was asked by Hartley for his views on gun control. She felt the compulsion to personalize the question, though, by saying there was "kind of a violent unexpected death as a result of guns … also in my life." She did not elaborate. During an egregious sequence visiting a baby born, at the NYU Medical Center, the same day as the show, Hartley asked the mother, "Are you going to breast-feed?" When the mother said yes, Hartley said, "Oh, wonderful."

If there are heights of inanity, this show scaled them, and if there are depths, it plumbed them.

Other segments include financial advice, health advice -- the same kinds of things the old "CBS Morning News" and its competitors have offered -- and a "Comedy Club" segment. Although the segment had been taped, there is something faintly obscene about a comedian getting yocks from a crowd at this hour of the morning. It's overkill. It's creepy. Hartley said, "We want to be your friendly wake-up call," but one was reminded of Irving Berlin's musical vow, "Some day I'm going to murder the bugler; some day they're going to find him dead."

Bob Shanks, the executive producer, has a long and mostly happy record in television, and he obviously had an uphill fight here, since the record of failure for CBS at the early hour is awesome. Even so, about the most that can be said for the program is that if it were done any better, it might actually be worse.

One of the best things about the show is its set, a sprawling yet comfy kitchen. However, even here some grumbling is warranted, since it's the kind of set on which "Kate & Allie" would be just as comfortable as the stars of "The Morning Program" were. The musical theme by Marvin Hamlisch is irritating, even among such an array of irritants.

The sorry history of CBS News and its attempts at competitive morning programming have been excessively documented virtually everywhere. CBS News yesterday unveiled its own new 90-minute program, yet another version of "The CBS Morning News," which is an admirably straightforward hard-news broadcast, airing from 6 to 7:30 a.m. and anchored by the capable team of Forrest Sawyer and Faith Daniels. Sawyer and Daniels were cohosts of a previous "Morning News" until CBS News, chafing under low ratings, abdicated the time period to the Entertainment Division.

CBS News probably does not want to be associated at all with "The Morning Program." At the end of "The CBS Morning News" yesterday, Sawyer and Daniels did not ask viewers to stay tuned for the next show on the schedule, although each appeared in one of the two-minute news inserts on the program. Their faces materialized on a monitor on the set so as to separate them physically from the glossy, frilly show around them.

Nevertheless, there is some crossover. Dr. Robert Arnot, a health expert, will apparently appear on both programs. Some staff members of the old "Morning News" now work for "The Morning Program." Robert Krulwich, the merry economist, will continue to be a part of "Morning News," even though he's easily as entertaining as anything that "The Morning Program" could come up with. So the lines are blurred, but that's the least of the problems CBS has with its new program.

A feisty competitor, Steve Friedman, executive producer of the "Today" show, said yesterday that he found "The Morning Program" to be "a major disappointment" and "just a sad show." Friedman said that while CBS promised a new and different broadcast, "they did what everybody else did, but not as well." He said one problem with the show is that "they hold the viewer in contempt. They are terminally cute. And Mariette has to decide the guests are more important than she is."

Summing up what he saw on CBS, Friedman said, "Anyone who pretends to be a journalist had to be offended by that one."

Of course the first day of any new show is very likely to be its worst, and one can count on Shanks and his crew to make improvements where necessary, perhaps the first of them being banishment of the studio audience, at present a repulsive intrusion.

Whether the broadcast was offensive or just dithering could be debated. But the unhappy part is to find CBS, always so proud of its history and prestige, to be the network that takes the lowest road in the mornings.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

ABC's Controversial Miniseries: A Daring, Grim Voyage

"Amerika" has its little problems. Its script is uneven, its direction is arch, it succumbs too frequently to stupefying lulls, and its leading man gives a performance so wooden you could make a coffee table out of it.

Not to mention that it has been condemned in advance for alleged gross insensitivity by, it would seem, much of the western world. Ted Turner compared it to Nazi propaganda. Carl Sagan has called it a "laughable embarrassment." Citizens for This and the Committee for That have rushed to trounce it for supposed Cold Warmongering.

After all that, is "Amerika" worth watching? Yes. It is even worth enduring, and indeed seems at times to constitute a virtual viewer endurance test.

The seven-part, nearly 15-hour ABC mini-series, premiering tonight at 9 on Channel 7 (and concluding a week from tonight at the same time), was written, produced and directed by one man, Donald Wrye, which alone makes it distinctive among long-form television programs -- even most short-form ones. But the real novelty here, of course, is the premise. "Amerika" is set in a subdivided and subjugated United States of 1997 that has spent 10 dreary years under Soviet occupation and control.

No one in the movie seems to remember precisely how the Soviets accomplished the dastardly feat of takeover back in that naive year of 1987. There is talk among the populace of the Soviets' having nuked Seattle, but mostly as a demonstration of power, not as the spearhead of an invasive assault. That the mini-series imagines a World War III fought without the use of nuclear weapons has ticked off some of the peace groups making war on it.

All political balderdash aside, "Amerika" deserves credit for its daring grimness, practically unheard of along the prime-time midway; for tackling tough subjects like national morality and human rights in sometimes subtle and affecting ways; for an intense and thoughtful sobriety that is unyieldingly consistent; and for showcasing a few fine, strong, moving performances.

These include Christine Lahti as Alethea, an embittered, acerbic schoolteacher; Cindy Pickett as Amanda, the conscience-stricken wife of a Vietnam vet co-opted into serving as a Soviet factotum; and the handily compelling Richard Bradford as Ward Milford, brother of the movie's hero and a worried, assertive pragmatist.

Such potent contributors help offset the fact that the central character, resistance leader Devin Milford, is played in a dazed, somnambulatory blur by non-actor Kris Kristofferson. There's never been a soggier firebrand than this supposedly galvanizing one-time presidential candidate and former Democratic senator from Massachusetts.

Wrye hasn't given Kristofferson much help. In Part 1, Kris has an entire paragraph of dialogue. The suspense derives from waiting for him actually to speak a sentence. But Kristofferson is a body-language illiterate, too. Looking into those blank, squinty little eyes, one is reminded of lyrics from the rock opera "Tommy": "What is happening, in his head? … Ooo-ooh, I wish I knew!"

In part two, Sam Neill as Col. Andrei Denisov, a top Soviet honcho, watches old videotape of Milford and declares, "If I could understand this man, I could understand America." That's the biggest insult to America that "Amerika" could deliver. The episode ends with a Soviet-controlled Lincoln Day celebration at which Kristofferson thrills and mobilizes a crowd just by staring at them.

"Amerika" takes place mostly in Milford County, Nebraska, which is being assimilated into a five-state Soviet Socialist Republic called "Heartland," and in Chicago, Ill., now capital of the "Central Administrative Area." In tonight's premiere, Devin Milford is released from "an American gulag" in southwest Texas, after six years of imprisonment and brain laundry, and makes his way, oh so very slowly, back to his namesake home town of Milford, where as an internal exile he is required to remain, but doesn't.

Throughout the mini-series (the first 10 hours of which were available for preview), the action switches back and forth between Chicago and Milford County, with the occasional scene in Washington, where a puppet government set up by the invaders goes through parliamentary motions and a satrap identified as "the last president of the United States" exists only as an impotent transitional symbol. In Part 6, the Soviets will blow up the U.S. Capitol as a way of reminding the populace who's boss.

In poor old Milford, now desolate and crawling with desperate refugees, the Soviets tighten their grip as the mini-series goes on. In a harrowing, 13-minute sequence near the end of Part 3, tanks and helicopters level an exiles' shantytown in the surrounding countryside, crushing women and children in the debris. During one scene from tonight's slow-to-start premiere, breakfast patrons of Herb and Betty's diner are complaining they must settle for soybean cakes and molasses instead of Aunt Jemima pancakes and syrup; by Part 4, Betty herself is being hauled away in a Soviet truck.

Whereabouts of Herb unknown.

Among the Milfordites are Robert Urich as Amanda's husband, the earnestly compromising Peter Bradford, who has been serving as "county administrator" in Milford when the story begins and who is later entreated by the Soviets to become the first "governor general" of the new Heartland region. Urich is sullen much of the time, and his jowls sag mightily and poutily, but his performance is acceptable in a TV-movie way.

The two families whose lives interact in Milford are the Milfords and the Bradfords (to confuse things, the most dynamic of the Milfords is played by a Bradford: Richard). Pickett is strikingly good as Mrs. Bradford and has a real Dorothea Lange populism about her. But it is Lahti, as Devin Milford's sister, who repeatedly awakens scenes from the dead and projects a spirited, earthy insouciance that makes her character vivid and believable.

Unfortunately, in Part 3 she must recite a long, painful monologue about having been raped by occupying soldiers that doesn't seem credible or relevant. Worse, Lahti disappears entirely through all of Parts 4 and 5, returning in Part 6, a victim of Wrye's blundering miscalculation.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, Mariel Hemingway plays Kimberly, a simpering dimwit of an actress who stars in underground theatricals -- including, as a Wrye touch, "The Fantasticks," a scene from which opens the mini-series, the point being perhaps that yesterday's innocuous bonbon can be tomorrow's forbidden fruit (or that literally nothing can close "The Fantasticks"?). Kimberly also serves as obedient mistress to Col. Denisov, and it takes her the longest, longest time to see a certain duplicity there.

Based on the way Wrye depicts women, it's feminists, not peaceniks, who should be angriest with him. Most of the women in "Amerika" are helpless drones to sexual desire; they sort of like being occupied. The characters played by Lahti and Hemingway are both sleeping with the enemy, and the wily and lively Wendy Hughes, who plays Devin Milford's traitorous ex-wife Marion, worked her way up through the ranks of the puppet regime in the beds and bathtubs of a particularly sinister Soviet general. Hughes plays Marion just evilly enough to stir memories of the only other mini-series about America under foreign occupation, NBC's "V," in which the invaders were lizards from outer space.

Sexual encounters seem invariably to be initiated by women. The Bradfords' teen-age daughter keeps coaxing her rebel boyfriend mattress-side. Brainless Kimberly goes horizontal at nearly every glimpse of her leaden loverboy. Lahti's Alethea grovels in kinky masochistic subservience to a sadistic East German. You could boil "Amerika" down to the bedroom scenes, put them on an adults-only videotape, and peddle it as "These Women Want It," "Hotski to Trotski" or "Sex Slaves of the Kremlin."

Impressionable viewers may want to investigate the potentials of soybeans as a female aphrodisiac.

Wrye is entitled to harbor regressive male fantasies but not to populate a mini-series with them. One could draw the conclusion from what's seen on the screen that whatever Russian men have, American men don't, and American women crave. Maybe the Soviets gained control just by seducing their way in -- Invasion of the Commie Hunks!

Now as for the political discussions, the whither democracy stuff, it is there in abundance, and some of it is intelligently provocative. "You lost your country before we ever got here," Neill tells Urich. "You had political freedom, but you lost your passion," he says later. Americans were "self-absorbed and dispirited" when the Soviets moved in, it is declared -- also, "weak and divided."

Wrye's most quixotic pontificating is contained in the speeches made by Devin Milford when, we are told, he ran for president in 1988 (he didn't win because his wicked wife betrayed him). Milford announced his candidacy at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, saying, "Many of us lost our faith in the vision of the country" because of Vietnam and lecturing, "We don't need troops to tell us we've lost our vision … Americans have allowed themselves to become immobilized by their own selfish concerns."

These selfish concerns, Milford says, include "minority" issues and those that pit "women against men." At points like this, Wrye's thinking gets woefully muddy. He wants people to participate in democracy but, it would seem, not to speak out for their own interests.

On the other hand, elements of this convoluted litany are reflected in the real-life uproar over the approach of "Amerika" -- the notions that we are squishy-soft and constantly bickering among ourselves, for instance. One frequently voiced criticism of "Amerika," by TV reviewers and protesting groups alike, is that it's boring. It's not enough fun. Who wants a dour old civics lesson? Soviet conquest of the United States oughta be entertaining.

If we are squishy-soft, it's television that has helped make us so, endorsing at every juncture the idea that we are entitled to 'round-the-clock frivolity and sport. NBC is entreating viewers to watch the usual witless inanity tonight -- in this case a movie called "The Facts of Life Down Under" -- with the implied promise that, unlike that killjoy "Amerika," it makes no demands whatever on the mind.

Bickering special-interest groups, meanwhile, have veritably tumbled out of the woodwork in the rush to condemn "Amerika," quibbling and haggling over its ostensible threats and dangers before any of their members had glimpsed a single frame. It's almost as if they were striving to validate the movie's contention that we have become a nation of self-absorbed crybabies. Or whinebabies anyway.

If we are a pack of bickering brats, "Amerika" itself may not make the point as well as pre-reaction to "Amerika" has. As for the complaint that "Amerika" is beastly to the Russians, that's a phony. Wrye seems to have gone overboard to de-nationalize his villains. They aren't Russian stereotypes. Wrye wanted them to work as generic symbols of oppression, and they do. They may remind a viewer of a superintendent, instructor or editor, for example -- one or more of the petty bureaucrats encountered every day.

Among the most telling details in Wrye's detailed canvas are the little portraits of those who are not that uncomfortable under totalitarian rule, who like the sense of order, who even thrive under the rigid new codes. You can walk down a street and pick such people out of a crowd, or see them in footage on the evening news, urging that books be banned from classrooms or that some other freedom be curtailed.

The Russians may be offended by the portrayals even though they're low profile Russianness. Well isn't that a pity? Isn't that a crime? The Soviets don't look good in "Amerika," no, but they don't look so hot in Afghanistan, either. KGB agents didn't look cute roughing up Russian Jews and snipping the cable of an ABC crew in news tape aired Thursday night on U.S. TV, either. All part of the new "openness," of course.

It's been widely alleged that "Amerika" is intended partly as an apology for "The Day After," ABC's 1983 shocker about an imagined nuclear attack. The program irritated conservatives nearly to the degree that "Amerika" has inflamed liberals. If anything, "Amerika" seems more an apology for last summer's egregious "Liberty Weekend" pageant, also seen on ABC. Viewers beheld this horrendous Las-Vegas glitz orgy and imagined that it had some incomprehensible relationship to democratic values and love of country.

Watching 200 Elvis impersonators or a fireworks display is about as serious as many people want to get about patriotism. Wrye asks more -- more of the citizenry than is usually asked, and more of viewers than television usually asks. Part of what's required is patience at waiting through the long empty stretches, but another part is a willingness to confront material that at its best is challengingly complex and densely textured and relatively free of snap answers.

Often deficient as drama, not uniformly sophisticated in its political noodling, unbearably slack at times, "Amerika" is nevertheless commendable for its seriousness. ABC's and Wrye's motives have been trashed by agitated detractors, but if anything, "Amerika" is a good deal less exploitive than the typical TV pander,and clearly has higher aspirations.

It does make you think (and gives you plenty of quiet time to reflect upon) pertinent fundamentals, matters of citizenship and conscience, in ways that few entertainments have tried to do. So bring a snack. Bring a pillow. Bring another TV set if necessary. But try to drop by. "Amerika" needs you. And in some curious, elusive way, America may even need "Amerika."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Television looks better than ever. Honest! Program content may not have improved an iota, but form is definitely thriving. A supposedly visual medium is becoming dynamically visual at last. If there still is little worth watching, there now is more worth seeing.

It used to be that scant care was lavished on how something looked on TV, unless it was a plate of fluffy mashed potatoes in a commercial or an anchorperson's equally fluffy hair. Television programs tended all to arrive on the screen brandishing the same styleless style, factory-made anonymousness marked by flat lighting, humdrum art direction and lackadaisical composition.

Then something happened. A few somethings happened. One was "Miami Vice," perhaps the first prime-time entertainment show in history to be pitched to viewers largely on the way it looked. Another was MTV, the cable network, which displays its high-fashion music videos in a showcase full of witty, gleaming animated graphics.

Suddenly, television was pretty. And getting prettier. An old law of TV maintains that only the worst trends proliferate, but here, something encouraging seems to be growing increasingly popular. The result: Video Nouveau, television of the '80s, arguably empty but wrapped in a coat of beguiling deluxe gloss.

"Miami Vice" may have spearheaded the trend in primetime, but now other producers have grabbed the baton and are running with it. The latest and most obvious example is ABC's inventive "Max Headroom," a wizardly mishmash set "20 minutes into the future" and lavished with the kind of production details that TV producers usually consider frivolous, or simply beyond reach.

"Max" has visual density. There may not be a lot more to it than what meets the eye, but what meets the eye has detail and complexity far beyond that of most mortal television entertainment. You feel there's almost too much on the screen to take in, a rare sensation when it comes to TV watching, but one that viewers are becoming increasingly comfortable with because of all the theatrical movies they consume on pay-cable and their VCRs.

As a practical matter, TV producers cannot mandate for their shows, no matter how high the budgets, the kind of care and time expended on the production design of a top-flight movie. But ways can be found to enhance the visual texture of a TV series and give it a distinctive consistency. At that, the producers and craftspeople behind the grinning and stammering Max, scheduled to be a Newsweek coverboy tomorrow, have succeeded to a happily spectacular degree.

One young viewer told me after a recent edition of "Max" that the visual content was so heavy it gave him a headache. What a compliment to the producers! Way to go, Maxie baby!

Several years ago an ABC program executive decreed that the reason a hilarious satire called "Police Squad!" failed to attract adequate audiences was that the show was so fast and clever, viewers were required to pay too much attention to it. This dunce, since departed, was offering a tacit admission that most TV shows are designed not to be watched so much as glanced at. You don't partake of TV; you just have it "on" like the light in an aquarium.

That executive got the heave-ho, but his philosophy hung around. Now television may be developing a bit more self-respect. You do have to pay attention to "Max Headroom" or you really might miss something -- if not something germaine, at least something diverting, and very likely something enigmatically picturesque. What has to be reinvented is not only television but the way we watch it.

Other shows could be lumped into the Video Nouveau genre. NBC's colossal-to-stupendous flop "Amazing Stories" may be a bust as mind-expanding fantasy, but the show has a very rich look, perhaps the richest on TV now that the revived "Twilight Zone" is kaput. NBC's "L.A. Law" is a high-content and high-impact weekly drama, but it has a shimmering visual luster that is highly tactile. The program is shot on film but, as is increasingly the custom, edited electronically, on videotape. The same network's dour, failing "Crime Story" is covered in supple velour.

ABC's "Moonlighting" has included visual satire of old movie styles, but what predominates are the fuzzy-wuzzy lenses used on glamoroso closeups of star Cybill Shepherd. One episode, however, was filmed in black-and-white as a film noir homage (TV has yet to see a true tape noir production). It says something about the growing sophistication of the audience as well as of the producers that such knowing asides can be brought off in prime time. A few years ago, network executives would have insisted that such flourishes would go right over viewers' heads and therefore weren't worth doing.

Only one nonfiction television program could be shoehorned into the Video Nouveau category and that one is, of course, "West 57th," the forward-looking magazine-format production from CBS News that is the bouncing brainchild of Madison Avenue-bred maverick Andrew Lack, executive producer. Lack went into this assignment determined to summon forth a TV magazine for the TV generation, not the print generation, and when "West 57th" returned recently for its third run on the network, its visual credentials were intact.

At first derided within the division for its youth-baiting hyperglitzics, even dubbed "Yup to the Minute" by one veteran producer, "West 57th" (named after the street on which CBS News is headquartered in New York) brandished such an emphatic, nearly nihilistic, kind of newness that initial critical and professional reaction to the program was largely, and sometimes vehemently, negative.

People were suspicious of a news production that looked this good. Of course they hadn't been paying attention. In recent years the physical appearance of "The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather" had been upgraded dramatically; the editing pace within stories had been accelerated (sometimes excessively) and the art of electronic photography, on tape rather than the increasingly anachronistic film, was being perfected before our very eyes, and the CBS eye as well.

CBS has always enjoyed an enormous advantage over the other networks in terms of design. Cofounder and former chairman William S. Paley made good taste, at least in graphics and artwork, the eleventh commandment. The impeccable CBS art department has unfortunately been among the divisions devastated by budget cutbacks and layoffs dealt by new CBS chief executive Laurence A. Tisch, the domed avenger. But so far, no decline is evident in the CBS look on the air.

Compare this year's CBS Super Bowl with last year's NBC Super Bowl; the CBS trappings were incalculably more handsome. A tiny detail like the animated graphics and music that open the brief, nightly "We the People" segments on CBS (the "Bicentennial Minute" concept updated for the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution) reaffirms that CBS still has the best eye in the business. How long this image of excellence will prevail is problematic; the gap between CBS style and CBS substance, as far as prime-time entertainment programming goes, has grown embarrassingly wide. Yawning even. Yeah, yawning.

Soon, one fears, CBS may be like Madame Tussaud's. It will have the best-dressed stiffs in town.

MTV's rock graphics are currently the flashiest on television -- even its promos bubble with kinetic esprit (not to mention panache) -- and the music-video network's influence is spilling out into the cable spectrum, inspiring such money-losing propositions as the Lifetime Channel to upgrade at least the look of what is offered to viewers. MTV's graphics and animated logos are the state of the art in television and have inspired healthy imitation.

One winces on behalf of MTV when its gorgeous visual hum must be interrupted for something as tacky as a Civil War chess set commercial or one of those 532-greatest-hits record blurbs. And yet the style consciousness of MTV is so high that, in context, even these blemishes take on a mild pop-art allure, as if they were parodies of importuning ugliness instead of the real thing.

Once it was axiomatic that if one went looking for innovation in network television, prime time was always the last place to find it. As the networks have been forced into competition with cable and with the home programming facilitated by VCR's, that has become less the case. NBC Entertainment Brandon Tartikoff may put style and appearance low on his list of program priorities, but at least they're there somewhere, and other networks have had to follow suit, if slowly.

In the fringes of network time, meanwhile, is where most provocative experimentation goes on. "Late Night with David Letterman" may be chiefly notable for its host and guiding spirit, one of the greatest and most ingratiating natural wits of our time (you know, that goofy-looking guy with the rigatoni hair), but the program has a delightful visual verve as well. The general funkiness of the studio setting comes across as charming, and the photographic "bumpers" that precede and follow commercials ("Late Night" delivery service, "Late Night" delicatessen) are attention-getting award-winners.

The Letterman show is infused with a sensibility that is carried over into all details. It's hand-made, not machine-made, TV. The same is true of the most visually stylish program currently on any network, "Pee-wee's Playhouse," a new classic of kid-vid and hip-vid that CBS airs on Saturday mornings. Ostensibly children's fare, "Pee-wee" obviously attracts a sizable adult audience (sizable adults, and normal ones). Not for nothing does CBS run promos for Dan Rather's newscast right there in the middle of Pee-wee's funcast.

From the opening sight of an animated beaver chewing on a sign, through the artificial woods through which one must traipse to get to Pee-wee's place, "Playhouse" is a trip to the circus every week, and sometimes you may feel as if you're seeing it all from inside the calliope. A mesmerizing amalgamation of theatrical, cinematic, and electronic effects, "Pee-wee's Playhouse" is an incomparable romp ripe to be heaped with art-director honors.

The design concept of the playhouse -- the magic screen, beatnik puppets, genie-in-a-box, and the living popsicles and ice cubes that skate and cavort inside the fridge -- expands and glorifies Pee-wee's conceit, that of being a kid reluctantly imprisoned in an adult's body. The brilliant artwork lends just enough concrete detail to the program's alternately zany and warm evocations of childhood musings.

Ironically, "Pee-wee's Playhouse" uses television to celebrate the pre-television fantasy life of children, as well as spoofing the long tradition of pandering kiddie-show entertainments.

"Pee-wee's Playhouse" and "Max Headroom" are probably the two most design-intensive programs on commercial TV right now. "Miami Vice" hews to its style -- even if producer Michael Mann's famous "no earth tones" edict has since been retired -- but the program seems terribly passe somehow. That may be a problem for style-conscious TV shows. The very styles they set can change. They're picked up by others, like those ever-alert stylists on Madison Avenue, and grow tired.

"Max's" ambiance and decor clearly owe a lot to "Blade Runner" and the "Road Warrior" movies, although it should be pointed out that one of the first pop entertainments to depict the future as looking rather junky was "Star Wars," with its seedy cantina bar and rattletrap Millennium Falcon. The old image of the future as being sleek, shiny and germless has been supplanted in pop fantasies by a more cynical one.

Peter Wagg, executive producer of "Max Headroom" both here and in its earlier incarnation on England's Channel 4, says a "tremendous amount" of effort is exerted to give "Max" the right look. "We want to maintain a depth of production value that keeps people coming back week after week," says Wagg from Lorimar Productions in Hollywood, where "Max" is made.

Attention to detail has not often been a preoccupation of TV producers. Just getting the darn thing finished on time took precedence. Wagg says a new "non-television attitude" is surfacing in television which involves making mere TV shows look as good, or almost, as movies. The look does not come cheap. "Max" reportedly comes in at around $ 1.4 million an hour.

"I tell everybody, 'Every idea you've ever had, and people have told you you can't do, bring over here,'" says Wagg. "This is a very challenging show for everyone concerned -- including, hopefully, those watching." Because no one anticipated "the sheer magnitude" of producing Max for weekly network TV, Wagg says, "casualties are falling all over the battlefield at the moment" because "people are literally burned out" from the extra work it takes to push "Max" to the max.

In fact, the network asked Wagg for three more shows in addition to the original six it ordered for this season, and Wagg had to decline. If ABC picks "Max" up for the fall, some scaling down seems inevitable, but the wily Wagg is determined to sustain as much of the production sheen as he can.

If "Max Headroom" succeeds, it will be good for television, just as the success of MTV and "Miami Vice" and, yes, "Pee-wee's Playhouse" have been good for television. As production design and art direction are upgraded, so the more substantive aspects of program-making are likely to improve. An audience that starts taking visual excellence for granted is less likely to settle for the crummy and the shoddy however it manifests itself on the tube.

Not often when covering TV does one get to report on a change for the better. Video Nouveau may be one, and a change with wide-ranging beneficial potential. Seen any good television lately? It's increasingly likely that you have. One of the great things about TV is its infinite capacity for rejuvenation. Who knows but that its second childhood might even surpass its first.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Bakker Interview Caps a Run of Ratings Winners

ABC's "Nightline" is a news program, but last night its scheduled guests qualified the show for a place in entertainment history. The first major interviews with evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker since the PTL scandal broke promised to be a television event to rival the American debut of the Beatles on "Ed Sullivan" or Tiny Tim's wedding on "The Tonight Show."

"There's not a chance in the world we would turn this down," said "Nightline" anchor Ted Koppel prior to the broadcast yesterday. "There isn't a TV news program, magazine, or newspaper -- with the possible exception of the Christian Science Monitor -- that would have turned down the first interview with Jim and Tammy Bakker."

"Nightline" has been conspicuous at the front for the holy wars pretty much from the beginning.

Koppel, television's premier interviewer, personally persuaded the Bakkers to agree to appear last night, but did not accede to their request that they be told his questions in advance. "I refused to give them any kind of assurances," Koppel said.

Jim Bakker appeared in a brief taped interview on the program Tuesday night as well, charging evangelist Jerry Falwell with coordinating a takeover of the now-foundering PTL empire. The continuing and flabbergasting PTL saga -- rife with tales of sexual as well as financial misconduct -- has been unfolding like a great American novel, with lurid developments and crazy new characters at the turn of every page.

Sinclair Lewis might be envious.

Koppel and "Nightline" executive producer Rick Kaplan both say the PTL story is one of considerable importance because of the millions directly affected by it. But they also concede that its entertainment value, hyped as it is by allegations of almost infinitely varied sexual shenanigans, has helped make it a certain ratings-booster for "Nightline."

"Of course it's in the back of our minds," Koppel said of the guaranteed high Nielsen. "When we can do the right program on the right day and get extraordinary ratings on top of it, that's the icing on the cake."

Koppel said that doing big-draw shows like the PTL broadcasts makes it possible for "Nightline" to do many other shows on drier topics for which the ratings "go into the toilet."

"I make no apologies for doing these programs," said Kaplan, from New York. "This story is a real piece of this country, a scandal of enormous proportions. I'm not going to sit here and make excuses because this story is interesting as well as something that affects a lot of people."

"I feel no guilt about doing any story that is a first-class news story," said Koppel. "Any front page of any newspaper in the country would love to have that interview."

"It doesn't even occur to me to have guilt, actually," said Kaplan.

Not to spoil the fun, and it has been fun right along, but is the story anywhere near as important as it is entertaining? Can all the time "Nightline" and other news media have given it be justified in journalistic terms? Koppel says that while "interest," as opposed to national importance, is "the key factor," the story has importance, too. "It is one of the most enduring scandals in some time, and one that for some reason has captured the American imagination," he said.

"I really wish the story was boring as hell, because then I'd still do it, and nobody would call me," said Kaplan. "God, I hate this. I'd really love to be just left alone." Kaplan said he had more than 100 phone calls yesterday from reporters inquiring about the "Nightline" scoop and from news organizations requesting permission to use clips from Koppel's interviews.

Kaplan was still formulating a policy about how much of last night's exclusive to release to competitors, and when. The Cable News Network (CNN) would probably not be allowed to use any clips until after noon (eastern time) today, Kaplan said. That would be 9 a.m. in the West and ABC's "Good Morning America" would just have signed off.

Kaplan wanted "GMA" and ABC affiliates to have exclusive use of the material during the first several hours after it aired.

Koppel was asked if he didn't feel just a little bit tawdry dwelling on this story -- if he didn't sense an uncomfortable kinship with the tabloid press. "Sure," he said. "Those are painful questions. But would you feel I was being more dignified, more distinguished, more professional, if 'Nightline' had turned its back on this story, said we were above it, and not reported it?"

On Tuesday night, "Nightline" beat Johnny Carson in the ratings, as it has often done when PTL was the featured story (and on many other occasions). Several of the stations that normally delay "Nightline" until midnight, instead of airing it at its 11:30 network time, have been taking the show "live" on the nights it serves up PTL hot potatoes.

Perhaps one could say that PTL and its escalating scandal have been, in fact, a "godsend" to "Nightline." Koppel responds, "As much, or as little, as it has been for the Style section of The Washington Post."

As of the dinner hour last night, "Nightline" staffers were still drawing up contingency plans in case, for some unforeseeable reason, the Bakkers suddenly decided they did not want to appear. "My faith in God being what it is," Kaplan said, "I assume they will come on."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

A Slow Opener to the Hearings, Punctuated by Kennedy's Sparks

Talk about your pillow fights. Talk about your anticlimaxes. Senate hearings on the nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court made for slow going and sluggish television yesterday, all the advance hype about fireworks and histrionics notwithstanding.

Joseph Biden (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, does not run a tight ship. Maybe it will get tighter as the hearings proceed. But you could almost hear the network news departments twiddling their thumbs not long after they signed on at 2:30 p.m., having forgone a largely ceremonial morning session.

That hothead liberal Biden was so sweet and polite to that wildcat conservative Bork that a ballyhooed sparring session came off more like a waltz. When Bork began his opening statement by asking to introduce his family, Biden groveled and toadied and said, oh but of course, I meant to invite you to do that, please proceed, by all means, our casa is su casa, blah blah blah.

Thank goodness for Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). Teddy delivered a "scathing" greeting to Bork in the morning, Dan Rather reported; unfortunately, CBS declined to air it, or to reprise it prior to the afternoon session. Then, finally, at about 5 p.m., it was Kennedy's turn to question Bork, and he did so skillfully and relentlessly, at times even threatening to fluster the assured and articulate nominee.

Kennedy grilled Bork on his record and jostled Bork to the point where Bork was willing to admit having made "an intellectual mistake" when he wrote articles attacking civil rights legislation for The New Republic and the Chicago Tribune. The give-and-take was electric and instructive. This was what, it seemed, a confirmation hearing should be.

Kennedy was by far, as the TV camera revealed, the best-dressed and the best-coiffed person on the committee. Bork, for all his erudition and renown, looks scraggly and rumpled. If he can't grow a better beard than that, one wonders, why does he wear one at all? Ah well. Yale professors are entitled to their eccentricities.

Other than Kennedy's interrogation, the only other real highlight was a recurring colloquy -- practically a fixation -- on the relationship of jurisprudence to the use of contraceptives by married couples behind closed bedroom doors. Bork, in his response to Biden's probing about a Connecticut sex law that the Supreme Court overturned, made a reference to "competing gratification," which was about as graphic as the imagery got.

Another possible highlight: a shot of Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) that gave the impression he had fallen asleep. No one could blame him.

As soon as Kennedy finished, administration patsy Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) came forward, and the networks shot out of that hearing room in a flash. ABC News had already ended its coverage; CBS and NBC bolted when Hatch began his lavish Bork defense, singing the same tune he did at the Rehnquist hearings, claiming that Bork's "record is being distorted" by "unfair" opponents using "inflammatory rhetoric" and other satanic ploys.

Hatch rattled on about Bork being limited to "30-second bites" for answers to complex legal questions, prompting Biden to interrupt and ask Bork if he felt he'd been restricted in any way. Bork said no, but added that he did feel an obligation to a questioner "not to bog him down with long answers."

"Go ahead and bog him down," said Biden. He told Bork he could take an hour to answer a single question if he wanted to. "Do not feel at all constrained," Biden said. "Use as much time as you want," he continued.

Biden did everything but rush over to Bork's water glass with an ice-cold refill.

When it comes to bogging down, of course, senators don't need any help. Hatch, whose spiel proceeded on CNN and PBS (both offering complete coverage), plunged forward with his defensive and slightly pixilated crusade.

"As a matter of fact," Hatch said to Bork, after a string of encomiums to his judicial majesty, "I don't see how anybody watching this could doubt that you're an eminent scholar with a brilliant mind, who is in the mainstream of judicial life, who in sitting in more than 400 cases on the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has never been reversed, who has been within the mainstream with his liberal colleagues on the courts, if that's an appropriate term, as you have with your conservative colleagues and . . ."

On it went from there, twisting and turning and doubling back. It may be going on still. But Hatch didn't have a monopoly on talking much and saying little. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), in a so-called opening statement, did so much strenuous meandering as to lose even the most adoringly attentive listener. It seemed only a matter of moments before he absent-mindedly lapsed into French like Melvyn Douglas in "The Seduction of Joe Tynan."

Perhaps the real contest of the long day was, who could be slipperier, Biden or Bork? And who could be more unctuous to the other? "Bork and Biden" was a kind of TV successor to "Mork and Mindy." Maybe the gloves will come off as the hearings go on. But Biden is running for president and against his image as a loose cannon. So instead of Ali and Frazier, one gets Alphonse and Gaston.

The networks were appalled. They had billed this as the biggest battle since Oliver North met Arthur Liman. Correspondent Deborah Potter on CBS, interviewing senators during a break, noted that the hearings had been "a little dull" and "a little dry." Even Rather, normally tireless in his enthusiasms, allowed later as how there'd been "very extended dull periods in the afternoon."

Rather also told correspondent Bruce Morton, earlier, that the participants in the hearings had been "throwing case names around like confetti," but CBS News, and some others, thoughtfully provided slides summarizing cases and popped them up when they were mentioned in testimony.

How much time the networks will give the rest of the hearings is up in the air. Biden in his zeal to look reasonable and fair (after publicly prejudging Bork) has taken much of the expected drama out of the hearings, and drama is what TV wants, and what it has led the audience to expect. However he's doing as an "eminent scholar" and a convincing nominee to the court, as a new continuing character in television's pantheon of superstars, Bork's balked.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

On PBS, Telling Glimpses Of Seven '88 Contenders

What a chore to tear oneself away from "Aliens" on HBO for "Democrats" on PBS. But it turns out the Democrats were a good show, too, if not precisely a hair-raising thriller.

William F. Buckley Jr. invited the seven most likely Democratic presidential contenders to join him in Houston Wednesday night for a "Firing Line Special." Buckley, the gourmet conservative, announced that the program would be "unsparingly partisan but scrupulously fair" and had asked "Mr. Democrat," former party chairman Robert Strauss, to cohost.

The structure was looser and more productive than the rigid League of Women Voters debates that precede elections.

Surely only our hardiest pundits are already in a 1988 election mood. But the program offered enlightening glimpses of the Democratic hopefuls, enough to afford a preliminary fix not so much on what kind of president each would make as on what kind of campaigner each will make. And how great a communicator. Everyone knows how important that is.

The bright new star to emerge was Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois, who is also the most unassuming of the bunch. He seemed levelheaded, forthright and peppery -- as effortlessly folksy as Orville Redenbacher and, best of all, bracingly Trumanesque. Ronald Reagan never tired of comparing himself to FDR; maybe Simon could succeed Reagan as Truman succeeded Roosevelt. Maybe the country will want to go from head in the clouds to feet on the ground.

True, Simon looks a bit like Oscar Levant. He has oddly floppy earlobes. But these flaws are more like endearing badges of honor; Simon's neither simple nor synthetic. "If you want a slick, packaged product, I'm not your candidate," he said, stating the obvious and vowing to continue wearing those quaint bow ties no matter what.

Simon, who has such a rich baritone that he could be the announcer for the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, is the most engaging new eccentric to hit television since Alf. Not Alf Landon; Alf the extraterrestrial.

Bruce Babbitt, the former Arizona governor, has a touch of Jimmy Stewart about him, but he also has a touch of Jimmy Carter -- the lines in his face bring back Carter memories one doesn't want brought back -- and parading around in flannel shirts (each candidate was allowed to bring a 90-second taped autobiography) doesn't help.

Jesse Jackson, who has sought the office before, obviously has a tremendous oratorical advantage over other contenders. He was the only candidate on the Buckley show to rise for his final summation. Jackson was so eager to prove a grasp of foreign affairs that he may have slighted domestic matters. He definitely had the most fashionable lapels.

After Jackson prescribed medicine for America's horrendous trade imbalance, Buckley grinned and said, "I happen to agree, but I don't want to embarrass you." Ah, Bill, ever the sly boots. And sometimes the Cheshire rat.

Richard A. Gephardt, representative from Missouri, appeared rather wimpish and ineffectual. He casts a fuzzy shadow. When Buckley, as the first question of the night, asked each candidate to say which presidential portraits he'd post in the Oval Office, Gephardt was a poor sport and wouldn't play along, saying "the real issue" was blah blah blah and declaring he'd put the Constitution on the wall. A copy, presumably.

Couldn't he have just answered the darn question? At least Gephardt did have the guts to say, on the subject of a balanced budget, "What Ronald Reagan needs is guts."

Michael S. Dukakis, the Massachusetts governor, has a pleasing, cushioned television manner, very relaxed and conversational and, alas, not very exciting. Television calls for a politician to be easygoing and electrifying at the same time. It calls for that mainly because Ronald Reagan, in his prime, anyway, was able to do it.

Albert Gore, senator from Tennessee, reinforced his image as a plain, dull square. He looks like Clark Kent -- but a Clark Kent who would never dream of undressing in a phone booth. Nor perhaps anywhere else. Having a wife who sniffs out naughty rock lyrics hardly mitigates the impression. Gore opens his mouth and one feels a snooze coming on. But he was good sparring with, and getting the best of, Buckley during a tiff over "Star Wars" experts and projected costs.

Finally there is Joseph R. Biden Jr., senator from Delaware, and famous George Shultz tongue-lasher. Biden seems bright, tough and bold. Also very, very scary. One might even say terrifying. He has Rod Serling's upper lip, which is no shortcoming, but suggests maybe he should only be president of the Twilight Zone.

Like Gephardt, Biden refused to play along with Buckley's harmless, colorful opening question. The candidate appears to be overadvised and suffering from excessive consultitis. Worse, he comes across on TV as someone whose fuse is always lit. Unless we ditch television for the remainder of the campaign, Biden will never be president.

Except for some sluggish camera work, the program ran smoothly, but someone should have handed Buckley a cough drop, because he began the program loudly clearing his throat and kept that up through all two hours. Apparently he was ill. But a viewer might have interpreted all the noisy throat clearing as an intrusive rhetorical trick. Maybe Bill has been spending too much time out on the bounding main aboard his yacht.

He gingerly avoided asking the candidates for their reaction to Reagan's announcement of Judge Robert H. Bork to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. By repeatedly anticipating "Reagan-bashing" and the "torturing and dismembering of Ronald Reagan," Buckley tried to make the Democrats look as though they were being mean to the old boy, but there was no meanness at all.

Perhaps, actually, it's time for some.

Buckley's adversarial posture was probably helpful. It kept the candidates on the alert and helped prevent doldrums. Nearly everyone may be dreading the long campaign year ahead, but this "Firing Line Special," produced and directed by Warren Steibel, got it off to a promising start. It said to the viewing electorate, "Maybe this won't be as bad as you think."

It also indicated that maybe it's the other Paul Simon who will soon be known as "the other Paul Simon."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The freedom to avoid ponderous three-hour network encyclicals is a precious one. Viewers can exercise it with impunity when it comes to "The Blessings of Liberty," a three-hour ABC News report on the 200th birthday of the Constitution. Insufferably lengthy and, worse, arduous, the program rehashes much of ABC's three-hour 1985 documentary "45/85."

That program, justifiably acclaimed, had a relatively tight focus; it both summed up and summoned up 40 years in American political and social history. "Blessings of Liberty," tonight at 8 on Channel 7, recycles similar material in an attempt to sweeten and lighten an examination of landmark Supreme Court cases and constitutional amendments.

Despite, or because of, all the bangety-clang and firecracker kinetics, the show doesn't work. It seems more an inundation than a celebration. There's so much stock footage that watching "Liberty" is like being trapped overnight in a film library.

David Brinkley, Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel trianchor the report, speaking stiffly as they strut about the rotunda of the National Archives. During the on-camera narration, they repeatedly hand off rhetorical batons to one another, doing the shim-sham and the hokey-pokey across the rotunda floor. One begins to wonder why no choreographer is listed in the credits.

Jennings does his suave routine, looking as though he should be sipping cognac and occasionally bringing Roger Moore to mind. Koppel orates in loudest pontificalese; he was born more to ask than to declaim. And Brinkley looks elegantly mortified about just having to be there, as if he'd rather be sitting in a dentist's chair or under a sunlamp in Death Valley.

Even if he wrote them himself, Brinkley can't have been comfortable making such tritely trifling social observations as, during a look at the 1960s, "Hemlines were up, and so was the surf."

The producers were determined to keep a multimedia whirlwind spinning. There are chalk drawings, old newsreels, still photos, scenes from Hollywood movies (sometimes, as is a new tradition in TV news, not identified as such), film clips from "The Adams Chronicles," archival bric-a-brac and historical sound bites by actors playing important personages: Cicely Tyson as Sojourner Truth, E.G. Marshall as William O. Douglas, Roy Scheider in a scene from "Babbitt," Richard Kiley as George Washington, Louis Gossett Jr. as Frederick Douglass, and so on.

These interludes are poorly shot and directed (the Scheider scene begins with studied contemplation of a chair) and most grievously overemoted. F. Murray Abraham as Patrick Henry is sheer torture.

But the producers have daffier tricks up their sleeves. In the third hour, shots of the locked gate at an abandoned Lockheed plant are accompanied by the song "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue," and an empty factory in Maine is inscrutably serenaded with the old Bread ballad "If." The program seems as pantingly anxious to amuse as a fun-house ride at Disneyland.

In truth, that final hour contains formidable, worthy, compelling material, dealing with constitutional issues still being fiercely debated -- at the Robert Bork confirmation hearings, among other places. But most of what's in the preceding two hours is expendable and windy, as doggedly routine as a small-town politician's Constitution Day speech. Jennings, Koppel and especially Brinkley are demeaned by it.

There's one slightly catty moment, too. During a sequence on civil rights, Fred Graham appears briefly and is identified as a "former New York Times reporter" -- which ignores Graham's more recent, 14-year career at CBS News. Perhaps this was Graham's choice. He was a victim of one of CBS President Laurence Tisch's search-and-destroy missions and is now a local anchor in Nashville.

Minor quibbles aside, "Liberty" is a major disappointment. Just before each commercial break, one of the three anchors begins a tease by saying, "When we come back ..." Only three or four of these go by before a reasonably patient viewer feels tempted to respond, "Oh, must you?"

CBS Crimes Prime-time television has become a crash course in criminology and, from a network executive's point of view, the more crashes, the better. CBS has two new cop shows getting on-air "previews" tonight -- "The Oldest Rookie" and "Wiseguy" -- and both are CBS specialties: crashing bores.

In "Oldest Rookie," Paul Sorvino plays a chubby police department public relations man who decides, after 25 years on the force, and upon the death of a close friend, to become a regulation street cop, although he soon tires of that and gets his buddy the mayor to make him a detective.

His partner is, naturally, a brash young cop (D.W. Moffett), one who has a basketball court in his spacious loft apartment, which suggests that in this city, police work pays well. The two go through rudimentary cop-show scrapes and the producers let the tires squeal where they may. The chief is set up as a stock nemesis, so vicious and nasty that a month of Ann Landers columns couldn't straighten him out.

Something might be able to straighten out "The Oldest Rookie," but nothing would be worth the trouble.

"Wiseguy," which gets a two-hour inaugural at 9 on Channel 9, deposits blank-faced lump Ken Wahl onto the screen for a preposterous and desultory crime saga about a sullen undercover cop who infiltrates the mob and will spend each episode almost getting found out, but miraculously squeaking through.

Wahl, a dead (used advisedly) ringer for "Houston Knights" star Michael Pare', graduated from the academy of thespic subminimalism. Anything more than showing up on the set would apparently be a stretch for him. Ray Sharkey, a volatile and underused actor, is stuck with the part of the mob boss who, in a ridiculous pseudo-macho encounter, takes a shine to the young lad after being insulted by him at a restaurant and pummeled by him in a manly fistfight.

Inducted into the underworld fraternity, Wahl is given his own Porsche, the car of the year in TV crime circles (Margaret Colin drives one on "Leg Work," also on CBS). Some of the cops in "Wiseguy" appear to be as corrupt as the hoods are, though they are much less stylishly dressed and don't have Porsches. The implication is troubling, but would be more so if the life expectancy of "Wiseguy" didn't look to be one or two months at the most.

That will be one or two months too many.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

"Hooperman" and "The 'Slap' Maxwell Story," two weirdly wonderful ABC comedies premiering tonight, are so good you may not only want to watch them, you may want to buy each of them a drink. At the very least, a toast should be raised: to the good health of shows like this.

John Ritter stars as an unorthodox San Francisco cop, Harry Hooperman, in "Hooperman," at 9 on Channel 7, and Dabney Coleman plays downright uncouth sportswriter Slap Maxwell in his "Story," at 9:30 on Channel 7.

Together these shows make a great hour of misfit comedy that also serves as a barricade against that proverbial rising tide of mediocrity we're always hearing so much about.

"Hooperman" was created, and the premiere written, by Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher of "L.A. Law," and produced and directed by Gregory Hoblit. They all won Emmys the other night, for what that's worth. "Hooperman" is worth a lot. It's about a caring guy who is not a cliche' and who is willing to admit, every now and then, that life has gotten him down.

Life can get you down. The only people life never gets down, usually, are characters in situation comedies.

"You know your trouble, Hooperman?" growls a porky, Borky cop named Pritzger in the precinct house. "You're a liberal, snot-nosed, civil service lifer."

"That was just a lucky guess, Pritzger," Hooperman responds. In the role, John Ritter banishes memories of the tumbling goof he played for years on "Three's Company" -- now he's more crestfallen than pratfallen -- and creates an instantly likable rumpled hero.

To call "Hooperman" a sitcom demeans it. Some out in Hollywood are floating the term "dramedy" to describe the relatively new breed of show that "Hooperman" personifies -- comic in outlook yet 99 percent gag-free. Bochco and Fisher fall back now and then on their old trick of alternating pathos with farce, but "Hooperman" somehow stays grounded in a solid reality of its own.

Ritter is an unexpendable reason why.

In the first episode, Harry starts out on a typical day, waking in his plebe-chic San Francisco apartment house, exchanging morning chatter with his friend the landlady and trying to avoid her mean-spirited little dog. Later in the day, Harry learns that the landlady has been killed in a stupid, bungled robbery. Then he learns how close they really were; she has left him her apartment building.

Thus has the premise been set up with inventive finesse. When Harry is not beleaguered as a cop, he will be besieged as a landlord. Ritter pinpoints the sense of decency and the seasoned resignation that will help see Harry through.

The producers and writers did make a few mistakes. Bochco cast his wife, Barbara Bosson, as the standard-issue nasty nemesis police captain (the fact that it's a woman instead of a man hardly shatters the cliche'), and Bosson is annoying.

A running gag about a gorgeous woman cop (Sydney Walsh) who tirelessly pursues a firmly resistant gay cop (Joseph Gian), while having a certain bittersweet charm, seems anachronistic and naive considering the AIDS scare and the fact that the show is set in San Francisco.

But so many things have been done right. And righter than Ritter you couldn't get; he captures and ennobles Harry's battle-scarred optimism and makes him a true citizen of the '80s. He's especially adept at coaxing a potential leaper off a ledge with a dramatic demonstration that owes a little something to "Late Night With David Letterman" (as do we all).

Also adding considerably more than two cents' worth at the precinct are Felton Perry as Clarence McNeil and Clarence Felder as the supremely cynical Pritzger and, arriving on a wildly hopeful note at the apartment house, Deborah Mullowney as a living salvation named Susan Smith.

"Hooperman's" finest moment occurs near the fade-out. Harry succumbs to grief over the loss of a loved one, and that is something one rarely sees on prime-time television. Usually when characters die they disappear like blips from a video game. Harry quietly remembers.

At that moment, "Hooperman" goes from simply wow to oh-my-God.

If Harry Hooperman is rumpled, what is Slap Maxwell? Crumpled, actually, and just about at the end of his rope, except you get the feeling he was born there, too. With his portrayal of Slap, Dabney Coleman does more than add to his list of memorable characterizations. He achieves a metamorphosis of virtually scientific elegance.

Seldom in the history of popular entertainment has a broken-down old schlub had such towering stature. Slap Maxwell is a small-town sports columnist who's eyeball to eyeball with 50. And 50 is not blinking. Slap doesn't get respect, doesn't get understanding, can't even quite worm his way into qualifying for pity, yet the man has a heroism about him that borders on the mythic.

The Slapper, as he sometimes calls himself, is the creation of writer-producer Jay Tarses, and like Tarses' recent NBC experiment, "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd," the Maxwell saga is less a situation comedy than an unfolding, serialized novel. Tarses and Coleman teamed earlier on "Buffalo Bill," a show that never quite got its rhythms right.

It was easy to admire "Molly Dodd" and "Buffalo Bill," but hard to like them. That comes easier with " 'Slap' Maxwell," because although Tarses and Coleman have pushed their hero to the outermost limits of irredeemability, you can still see a spark there of something that merits attention and even, dare we say, devotion.

"Slap's" story is structured unlike any other comedy on the air. Scenes are long, speeches ramble on, sets are alarmingly drab and dreary. No one has even installed computer terminals at Slap's ragtag newspaper, The Ledger, from which he is noisily fired in Episode 1, but by which he is reluctantly rehired, thank heaven, in Episode 3.

One beneficial effect of "Moonlighting" is that it has made banter marketable on television again, and " 'Slap' Maxwell" is banter-intensive. Some of it is priceless. Slap has a relationship, of sorts, with Judy, the staff secretary, played as the Annie Oakley of zinger-flingers by Megan Gallagher. In an early scene, Slap fumbles another pass and gets what would seem the latest in a long line of rejections.

Judy: "You're ugly, and you smoke cigars."

Slap: "I'd quit cigars."

Judy: "Then you're halfway there."

Every scene is a potentially ego-crushing encounter for Slap, but the ego is the one part of him that hangs in there, and you honestly do root for it. Retiring to a bar and the solace grumblingly profered by the bartender, Dutchman (Bill Cobbs, clearly one who has heard it all), Slap philosophizes about getting sacked.

Slap: "You know, actually, this might be the best thing that could happen to me. New lease on life. It's a big world out there. Sky's the limit. There's a bus called Destiny waiting for me, and I'm going to ride it down the highway to tomorrow."

Dutchman: "Six cliche's in 10 seconds!"

Slap: "Was it six?"

Dutchman: "Takes your breath away."

Some of the best, choicest exchanges, though, are between Slap and his editor, Nelson Kruger (Brian Smiar), from whom malaprops drip like water off a duck's hat. In the third episode, Slap, his sports column having been taken from him, has written a feature story on hats, and Kruger eats it up.

Kruger: "I like it. It speaks of bygone days when life was simpler, before the world got all jammed up. You know what era it calls to mind?"

Slap: "The era of hats?"

Kruger: "Yeah. Snap-brims and derbies and skimmers; you remember them?"

Slap: "I do. Let's name all the different hats."

For the first couple of shows, Slap goes around telling everyone Kruger has a glass eye. Then he changes it to a peg leg. One of the salubrious side effects of " 'Slap' Maxwell" is that it dramatically reasserts the moral superiority writers, however lowly, have always enjoyed over editors, however lofty. " 'Slap' Maxwell" is a show about the joy of writing in more ways than one.

At every turn, Tarses steers away from the comfy sitcom staples. For instance, an extremely cute little Japanese girl, Slap's neighbor, shows up looking for her lost dog in Episode 2. Slap slams the door in her face.

Susan Anspach will be appearing, to great advantage, starting next week, as Slap's wife, who moved out on him 15 years ago but whom he still expects back. He comes muling around about his midlife crisis and does a whither-I-goest soliloquy at the window. "Your life is always in a crisis," she reminds him. "It's mother's milk to you. You thrive on it."

As Slap thrives on crisis, so there will be a certain kind of viewer who will thrive on "Slap." Even those who find it a bit mannered (each episode opens with someone punching Slap -- a nun does the honors in No. 2), surely will see the crazed power and the shaggy glory in Coleman's performance.

It's the stuff that dreams are made of, in the sense that so is a banana split before bed. I meant it about raising a toast: To Harry! To Slap! And even … to television! Takes your breath away.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

In the last half-hour of "Napoleon and Josephine: A Love Story," Josephine gets consumptive and is forced to take drastic action. She buttons her dress all the way up to the neck. Thus is signaled the impending conclusion of ABC's six-hour, three-night historical mini-series.

Until that moment, the magnum opus is really more of a sternum opus. The film, premiering at 9 tonight on Channel 7, is handily dominated by milady's cleavage. So much so that they might have called it "Napoleon and Josephine's." But then that naughty naughty The're'se (Stephanie Beacham) seems even more exposed than Josephine is.

Indeed, most of the ladies-in-waiting (and there's lots of waiting) wear dresses that, how you say, make zee poosh-poosh on zee bosom. It is not precisely a sea of troubles that greets the pint-sized emperor.

Josephine is played by Jacqueline Bisset, one of the most steadfastly uninteresting beautiful women in captivity, and she's certainly in captivity this time. She whispers and pouts her way through the most enervated and embalmed kind of historical processional, the sort of thing they were spoofing in "Singin' in the Rain" 35 years ago. And even before that!

We may never have thought this could possibly happen, but "Napoleon and Josephine" is so achingly dull it makes one long to see Norma Shearer in her Antoinette wig again. It's hard to decide whether this mini-series is creakier in concept or in execution. Either way, it's heavy creaking.

The notion of a Napoleon & Josephine act done by, say, Suzanne Somers and Billy Barty would have possibilities. It might have been the perfect comeback vehicle for Sonny and Cher. But here Bisset is teamed with, or against, Armand Assante as Nappy. Mostly what he does is log a lot of brooding time.

As the salient question provoked by the appearance of the actresses on hand is, how do they keep those dresses up, the one inspired by Assante's Napoleon has to be, how on earth does he keep those darn white pants clean?

Also lurking about is Anthony Perkins, looking incongruously Dickensian trussed up for the role of the manipulative scoundrel Talleyrand. Oh a saucy fellow was he! Or maybe just sauced. Perkins' eyes are perpetually popped open through the whole thing, as if Mama Bates has just rushed out of the fruit cellar with her butcher knife again.

Perkins looks craggy and venerable enough to be planted amongst the giant redwoods. Here is a new theory: Anthony Perkins is actually the picture of George Hamilton that ages so that George never does. Crazy, you say? You too will have such crazy thoughts if you sit through all 42, or was that six, hours of "Napoleon and Josephine"!

The movie opens badly, sending out reliable signals of dread. Even the credits, with their Polaroids of Nappy and Jo, are put-offish. They're followed by an establishing shot of Madame La Guillotine, we see the inscription "Paris 1794," and then, "The French Revolution." What one hopes to see next is, "Corner, Fourth and Main." But no, they're just feeling explicit, not playful.

So you've got your French Revolution and your Madame La Guillotine and here's a young upstart named Napoleon Bonaparte walking through a whole field of erupting explosions completely unfazed. Mon Dew! "You're very bold," a man says to him (quel cheek!), but soon the future emperor (of France -- see, that's where the French Revolution took place) has spotted Josephine, "the most beautiful woman I've ever seen," as well as "the most divine creature ever created."

A fun couple they ain't. Between her pouting and his brooding, you wouldn't want to get stuck between them at a dinner party or even a Rod McKuen concert. The complications tumble out, as do most of the ladies from their dresses. Napoleon's brothers denounce Josephine ("a female skilled in the arts of passion! steeped in treachery and guile!") but relent when he throws a fit right there in front of them.

Certainly this David L. Wolper production is rich looking. Money was definitely spent. However, the battle scenes are so suspiciously overpopulated that they may have been borrowed from other movies, perhaps including King Vidor's "War and Peace." To defray costs, an announcer notes at the conclusion of each night's chapter, "Transportation for Napoleon and Josephine was furnished by Air France."

Of course they mean "Napoleon and Josephine" and not the actual personages, but you can't blame a viewer for trying to wrest a little chuckle out of the thing. James Lee had the sad task of writing this extravagant anachronism and Richard T. Heffron directed, perhaps patterning his approach on the manner in which movies were directed in the 18th century. That's right; there were no movies in the 18th century! Somebody oughta tell Heffron.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)