TV REVIEW : ‘Tutankhamun’ Doesn’t Quite Save Face

With its opening image of a shimmering gold sculp, “The Face of Tutankhamun” announces itself as a prestige production. Airing on the Arts & Entertainment Network Sunday through Wednesday at 9 p.m., this four-part documentary largely fails to make good on that promise.

Hosted by Jack Perkins, who turns up in seemingly random fashion to chuckle warmly and make sage observations, the series opens with the story of archeologist Howard Carter, who’s characterized here as a British Indiana Jones and doesn’t come off too well. A narrator speaks with disgust of the tomb robbers of antiquity who beat Carter to Tut’s tomb by a few centuries and left things in a frightful mess.

When Carter gets the chance, he does the same thing. On learning that Carter pried the king’s bones from the gold sarcophagus that encased them and tossed them in box, any sympathy you feel for this man and the sorry end he came to vanishes.

The second installment focuses on the excavation of the tomb, which Carter completed with the help of New York’s Metropolitan Museum. When the physical work in the tomb was done, Carter had no interest in writing the scholarly paper that was expected of him, and he died a short time later (in 1939) under strange circumstances: A mosquito bit him, he nicked the bite with a razor while shaving, and died of blood poisoning a few days later.

At this point the series veers wildly out of control into an examination of folklore surrounding mummies. “Curse or coincidence?” asks the narrator in a conspiratorial whisper, as he proceeds to tell us that Carter’s dog howled at the precise moment of his death !

From there, this silly segment looks at the resurgence of interest in mummification, the use of Egyptian design motifs in the 20th Century, and footage of Lenin’s burial--apparently there was something sort of mummy-like in the way he was buried. This weird mishmash reaches a crescendo with a clip of Steve Martin performing his goofy tune “King Tut” on “Saturday Night Live.”

The final episode, which features an interview with former Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Hoving, looks at the politics of conservation.

We see the Tut artifacts poked and prodded yet again and learn that the boy king’s erect, mummified penis was stolen by someone in Carter’s clan. You could call that the final indignity, but worse than this ugly bit of information is ghastly footage of an untrained Egyptian museum aide working on a ancient statue with crude tools. We watch as she pulverizes the piece she’s attempting to restore.

The series closes with the question: Who is responsible for preserving the world’s treasures? As can be seen in the saga of King Tut, there’s nobody minding the store at this point. “The Face of Tutankhamun” could have made this important point in half the time.