Ditching the Fail-Safe; This Is Progress?

CBS has seen the future, and it is the past.

Hoping to prove it’s not fossilized and out of touch, the jazzed, sleeked-up, greased-down modernist new CBS boldly moves Sunday to the innovative, avant-garde, groundbreaking, forward-thinking, envelope-pushing, visionary cutting edge.

Of antiquity.

Rudimentary live drama was the standard when black-and-white anthologies ruled the airwaves in TV’s infancy before the onset of videotape, and even the best talent was at risk of being embarrassed by the lens. Would an actor’s pants fall down as America watched? Would someone be caught picking his nose or scratching his butt? Would a corpse, unaware of being in camera range, suddenly rise from the floor like Lazarus and briskly walk off? One never knew or even much cared, because TV was still callow and experimental, and viewers infinitely patient with this risky early edition.

What great fun for those who enjoyed theater breathlessly on a high wire.

How ironic, then, that the first live-in-the-East CBS drama in four decades (but taped for airing here three hours later) will be a Cold War echo titled “Fail Safe.� That’s because live television itself is anything but fail-safe. Instead, it’s a version of the Knievels soaring across canyons on bikes without safety nets, titillating viewers with the prospect of calamitous malfunction.

In other words, Sunday’s live CBS remake of a 1964 movie about a U.S. bomber accidentally sent off to nuke Moscow is exactly what its producer-star and most forceful advocate, George Clooney, insists it isn’t.

A gimmick.

As was NBC’s “ER� in 1997, when with Clooney still in the cast as Dr. Doug Ross, it redefined backward as forward by airing a below-standard live episode that drew 43 million viewers after being sold to the public as a dramatic breakthrough.

A breakthrough only to amnesiacs.

In fact, it was a dramatic stunt, and phantom achievement. Ditto “Fail Safe,� whose sole reason for being performed live on two Warner Bros. sound stages--by a cast also including Richard Dreyfuss, Harvey Keitel, Brian Dennehy, Don Cheadle, Hank Azaria and Noah Wyle--is to nourish an aura of excitement and unpredictability. After all, says Clooney, “we could all screw up.�

Now there’s a reason to watch.

If not gimmickry, then why else present something in a way that circumvents production values and distracts viewers by putting them on glitch alert? Because TV drama that’s live is automatically superior to the film likes of ABC’s “NYPD Blue� or NBC’s “Law & Order� or HBO’s “The Sopranos,� whose season finale “Fail Safe� will air against at 9 p.m.? Because the drum roll building to Sunday’s possible Big Screw-Up on CBS beats anything on such carefully crafted film series as “The Practice� on ABC and “The West Wing� on NBC, where a U.S. president confronts a crisis nearly every week? Puleeeeze!

It’s no accident that, all in all, this era’s prime-time drama is the best in TV history and puts to shame the bulk of theatrical movies, despite misty-eyed tall tales from devotees of the medium’s mislabeled “golden age� of 40 to 50 years ago. Although live TV may carry the suspense of the unknown, quality almost always gets short-sheeted in the process.

That applies not only to entertainment but to news, where “LIVE� is now the blazing marquee luring viewers who are persuaded that information on film or tape is tedious and musty.

Such is the state of TV news, driven these days largely by zealous technophiles whose newscasts go live mostly not because it makes journalistic sense but because they can go live and it gives them a promotional tuba to blow loudly. Ever looming are the dangers, including the promise of being blindsided, the ultimate unhappy payoff coming two years ago when live TV news cameras here witnessed disturbed motorist Daniel V. Jones producing a shotgun and leaving his brains on a freeway overpass.

It’s not all that big a jump from this unscripted tragedy to scripted “Fail Safe,� not because the latter will be as shocking or will splatter real blood, but because the issue in both cases is control. The control is missing when TV goes live.

Re-shooting is out. Polishing is out. Editing is out. Safety valves are out. You’ll hear advocates of live TV drama liken it to the excitement of actors performing on the stage. The difference is that theater audiences are the oxygen of stage actors in an intimate symbiosis that only they can understand, contrasting with the great distance separating “Fail Safe� actors from those watching them from their homes across the nation.

Even though the U.S. president played by Dreyfuss isn’t likely to have his pants fall down Sunday while meeting with his Cabinet and advisors to avert the bombing of Moscow, the live new “Fail Safe� is an emperor without clothes.

Not that this would dim the ardor of CBS-owned KCBS, where the giddy 11 p.m. news anchor team on Wednesday introduced entertainment reporter David Sheehan’s taped interview with Clooney so effusively--anointing “Fail Safe� as “historic� and “a television milestone�--that you felt like nuking them. Added Ann Martin: “It’s gonna be super!�

Exactly. Despite the disclaimers, a super gimmick.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at [email protected].

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‘The Perfect Film’

* George Clooney explains why he wanted to make a live version of his favorite movie. F26