• May 18, 1992
• Vol. 37
• No. 19

Picks and Pans Main: Tube

Viewer's Choice

By David Hiltbrand

The riots in Los Angeles proved beyond any lingering doubt that we are the total television nation, a condition President Bush implicitly recognized in his prime-time address when he acknowledged that "we've seen images in the last 48 hours that we will never forget." Note he referred to "images," not "events." The American experience is now defined by what we see on the tube. And thanks to technological advances (zoom lenses, handicams, news helicopters, satellite uplinks), it all comes crashing in so immediately, so viscerally. The Los Angeles coverage (CBS was the most organized and thorough of the networks) was raw and graphic even for jaded news junkies—not just the violence but the unaltered language. (In the NBC prime-time special City Under Fire, for example, there was no attempt to bleep out the steady stream of expletives from a policeman one of the TV crews had ridden with the previous night.) The omnipresent TV cameras made for some surreal, video-incestuous situations. Rodney King, whose experience with baton-wielding Los Angeles police sparked the mayhem, held a news conference in which he appealed for peace and tearfully spoke of seeing "a security guard shot on the floor." That was the star of America's grimmest home video providing another striking TV moment as he reacted to what he'd seen on TV. And didn't it seem that a lot of people on the troubled streets were performing for the cameras—and were exceedingly comfortable doing it? As the images continued to blaze out of Los Angeles, authorities in cities across the country braced for violence of their own. That's because there are no isolated or even regional incidents anymore—not if they make it on the lube. It doesn't matter if the civil unrest is in Southern California or the abortion-clinic protest is in Wichita, we now all live in one big, unhappy video neighborhood.

CBS (Sun., May 17, 9 P.M. ET)

B+

In a miniseries that claims to be distilled from more than 600 "actual" accounts, Richard Crenna plays a respected Los Angeles psychiatrist who in treating two disturbed women (Mare Winningham and Daphne Ash-brook) comes to believe that they are both victims of alien abductions.

This two-parter, which concludes Tuesday, poses the usual government conspiracy keeping us from finding out how widespread these visitations from space are. But it also introduces the latest wrinkles in UFO lore: that aliens keep snatching the same people over and over again and even come after their offspring, all for the purpose of conducting sophisticated reproductive-genetic research.

Inevitably on the vaporous side but well acted (the strong supporting cast includes Susan Blakely, Alan Autry, Steven Berkoff, Ben Vereen and G.D. Spradlin), Intruders is absorbing whether you regard UFO stories as hog-wash or gospel.

NBC (Sara., May 17, 9 PM. ET)

B+

This miniseries is based on Joe McGinniss' best-seller about the 1988 murder of North Carolina businessman Lieth Von Stein—a crime that also inspired CBS's highly rated TV movie Honor Thy Mother last month. The theme hasn't changed: maternal devotion, which will not allow Lieth's wife, Bonnie (Blythe Danner), to grasp that her college-age son, Chris (Matt McGrath), might have planned her murder and that of her second husband to gain an inheritance. (Bonnie barely survived the brutal attack that took her spouse.)

When we first see the boyish McGrath in loose sweats and a generic blue baseball cap, he looks like Beaver Cleaver. Neal McDonough and Travis Fine play Chris's North Carolina State campus friends, Dungeons and Dragons playmates and criminal accomplices. Miguel Ferrer and Adam Baldwin play the cops. William Forsythe, who usually plays B-movie bad guys, is interestingly cast against type as the new police chief who lights a fire under the stalled investigation.

The two-night format (conclusion airs Tuesday) gives the NBC version greater depth and detail than Honor Thy Mother, but the mini has the same flaw that made Cruel Doubt the least involving of McGinniss' three true-crime books. Both present a long halting march toward a trial that is a foregone conclusion. What holds the attention here is a top-notch performance by Danner as a generous-hearted woman wrestling with unthinkable thoughts.

ABC (Mon., May 18, 9 P.M. ET)

D

Here's a cheap quickie about a woman who launched a thousand headlines. Lawrencia "Bambi" Bembenek is the former pinup girl and, briefly, Milwaukee policewoman who was convicted in 1982 of murdering her husband's ex-wife. After serving eight years, she escaped prison and fled to Canada. (Bembenek was apprehended in Thunder Bay in 1990 and recently extradited back to Wisconsin.)

Unimaginative and totally formulaic, the movie features Linda (The Exorcist) Blair as Bembenek's police academy classmate. For Blair, this dreamy project constitutes a step up in class. But for Lindsay (Mancuso FBI) Frost as Bambi and Timothy (thirty-something) Busfield as her husband, this is definitely slumming.

>ALL RIGHT, SO EVERYONE HAS BEEN fawning over Johnny as his nights dwindle down to a few. But for sheer unctuousness, no one has approached Bob (Full House; America's Funniest Home Videos) Saget, who always reminds me of a cross between Steve Guttenberg and Ichabod Crane. He presented Johnny with an on-air parting gift: a gold-plated commemorative watch inscribed THANK YOU FOR 30 AMAZING YEARS. Saget then gave identical timepieces to Ed, Doc and every guy in the orchestra. If it's not enough the guy has two prime-time shows, Saget also guest-stars on this week's Quantum Leap (May 13).

>A DUET OF MUSICAL MEMENTOS

TWO SHOWBIZ INSTITUTIONS ARE HONORED THIS WEEK. ABC HAS THE AMERICAN Bandstand 40th Anniversary Special (Wed., May 13, 9 P.M. ET). Yes, it has been four decades since this teen dance show first aired on Philadelphia's WFIL-TV. (A fresh-faced local deejay named Dick Clark replaced Bob Horn as host in 1956, shortly before the show went network.) Clark unspools a dizzying cavalcade of song bites, from Jackie Wilson to Prince, from Bill Haley to INXS, and caps it off with a bizarre jam session involving Gregg Allman, Frankie Avalon, David Cassidy, Sheila E., the Who's John Entwistle, Lita Ford, Donny Osmond, Joe Walsh and Bo Diddley.

A more homogeneous program is TNN's A Celebration of Eddy Arnold (Mon., May 18, 10 P.M. ET). The sharecropper's son with the mellow-as-buttermilk style has been performing for more than a half century, recording such hits as "Cattle Call" and "Make the World Go Away." Among the stars joining Eddy onstage at the Grand Ole Opry are Vince Gill, Chet Atkins and Anne Murray.

These two specials actually have three things in common: performances by Alabama, taped tributes from Garth Brooks, and central personalities with two first names.