TV's New Notions

Newcomers Murder One and

Space: Above and Beyond

outshine some tired TV favorites

By Broos Campbell

Television pulled a fast one this year. There's too much good stuff available to take it all in on one TV set. For starters, Space: Above and Beyond, Fox's new high-ticket, explosion- and gizmo-laden sci-fi shoot-'em-up, takes the genre back into the action-adventure format, and it's a blast.

In 2063, believing that humankind is alone in the universe, Earth sends out the Vesta Colony to a distant star system and is caught with her pants down when the colony is wiped out by a previously unsuspected race of warlike aliens. The fate of the nation--or the species, in this case--rests in the hands of dedicated but poorly equipped soldiers whose most effective weapon is their own sense of honor and responsibility.

Six jarheads form the core unit, all likable in their own way. Each is a pain in the butt in a unique way, too. Nathan West (Morgan Weisser) joined the Marines to find his girlfriend, one of the lost Vesta colonists. He's tortured, self-righteous, bigoted--and sadly uncharismatic. A point in his favor: he resembles the young Tony Perkins (Psycho).

Shane Vansen (Kristen Cloke) is the group's natural but surly leader, haunted by the murder of her parents years before. (The murder has conspiratorial overtones that may seem familiar. Space was created by James Wong and Glen Morgan, former co-executive producers of Fox's cult-gone-blockbuster, The X-Files.)

In an egregious dig at affirmative action, Cooper Hawkes (Rodney Rowland) is an "in-vitro" (or "tank," as they are disparagingly called), one of a subspecies, bred as workers, who are beginning to get political recognition. Translation: unfair advantages mandated by law. The "real" humans hate the tanks--in the future, the N-word begins with T--and Hawkes thrives on it. He joined the Marines only to get out of jail, and disavows any allegiance to humanity. He and Vansen are by far the most engaging characters.

There's also an Asian man (Joel de la Fuente) and an African woman (Lanei Chapman), but they haven't done much yet.

Rounding out the central characters is battle-scarred McQueen (James Morrison), ex of the elite Angry Angels combat team. Ex, because the Angels went up against the bad guys and got creamed. A comradely hostility is developing between him and Hawkes; one guesses that McQueen--shhhh!--is an in-vitro as well.

The two-hour pilot was enlivened by Lee Ermey as the team's drill instructor. Ermey is the real-life Marine fountain of insults who played the D.I. in Full Metal Jacket. It's a testimony to Marine ingenuity that a master sergeant can be so intimidating without ever once using profanity or touching his maggots.

Space isn't entirely free of problems. The costumes look like they were bought off the rack at Mervyn's. Adults probably will stick with 60 Minutes, CBS's powerhouse that has owned the time slot for a generation. And despite the superb special effects, Space often comes across as a revamp of Battlestar Galactica, itself a weak-tea version of Star Wars.

If Morrison starts moonlighting for Alpo, look out.

The X-Files continues to fulfill its promise, despite ending the premiere episode with another to be continued. And sure, Native Americans are groovy, but did we really need yet another out-of-body experience?

The third installment of the trilogy threw in some promising twists, though. Cancer Man is about used up and looks to get bumped pretty soon by his controllers, a shadowy cabal of homicidal suits. But if Chris Carter and company don't calm down and get back to the meat-and-potatoes task of filling in a few sinkholes, they're going to end up with The Twin Peaks Files.

Speaking of underachievers, The Simpsons' who-shot-Mr.-Burns gambit was a bust. It shouldn't have been Maggie--in a whodunit the least likely suspect is as automatically eliminated from suspicion as the most likely suspect. Bah. It should have been Burnsie--who else was mean enough?

Speaking of Simpsons, the Trial of the Century II has thrown a major kink into the whodunit puzzle. This year's hot courtroom dramas aren't based on how the detective will figure out the solution by the last commercial break, or how the wily district attorney will triumph over the forces of evil. (Have those pikers on Law & Order won a case cleanly yet?) The tension now rides on how the culprits' lawyers will get them off.

The brief with the bazoongas this year is Steven Bochco's Murder One, whose plot hinges on one trial. It's an odd move, building in obsolescence like that. Unless there's a hung jury when the final gavel comes down at the end of the season, boom, that's it, we're outta here, goombye. As Daffy Duck says when he wows the theatrical agent by blowing himself up, it's a great trick but you can only do it once.

Can American audiences wait the whole season for resolution? Sure they can. They gave The Fugitive big numbers through its four-year run, waiting for Richard Kimble to catch the one-armed man. Allowing for deflation, one year seems about right for 1995.

In Bochco's trademark Anymegalopolis, U.S.A., people follow trials the way other people follow sports. Lawyers are bigger than movie stars. Strangely enough, however, all of them are ham-and-eggers except Theodore Hoffman (Daniel Benzali), the human billiard ball who leads the defense team.

The plot's broad enough: A 15-year-old girl has been found murdered, wearing nothing but ropes and a blank look. Arthur Polson (Dylan Baker), a fanatical, Mark Furhman-style cop, has a couple of suspects in mind. That's it so far, really; everything else is smoke. No need to worry about coming up to speed after missing an episode or two. The first 90 seconds of each segment are devoted to synopsis, packaged as a Court TV-style show-within-a-show.

The two (so far) suspects (Stanley Tucci as millionaire Richard Cross and Jason Gedrick as punk actor Neil Avedon) are each properly slimy, and so is Hoffman by association. He puffs out his chipmunk cheeks and freezes friend and foe alike with his tiny but chilly eyeballs. We get to see him at home with his loving wife (who's beginning to show signs of discontent) and doting daughter (who's discovering the mixed joys of being sucked up to, now that her already famous father has turned into a superstar). We see him shutting up obnoxious drunks with a hiss and a glare and playing the news media like a saxophone.

Somebody had better give Hoffman some kind of endearing quirk, though, or let him smile now and then. Otherwise he's quickly going to become a one-note bore. The Polson character is problematical, also--he's all venom and no rattle, too predictable.

ABC has stepped into the water gingerly with this one, despite knowing it's their best show--the best show--this season. On Oct. 12, Murder One switches over to 10pm Thursdays, going up against the previously untouchable ER.

ER is still fine stuff--and I still can't understand a word Bob says. Only slightly more comprehensible than Bob is Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business, one of the new season's better documentaries. Much got lost in translation here; sometimes that makes it more interesting, but often it's just perplexing.

When filmmakers Helena Solberg and David Meyer concentrate on Miranda, this is a fine piece. When Solberg mutters darkly about yanqui imperialism, and presents herself as a tragic figure because Miranda was exploited by Broadway and Hollywood (this is a surprise? and what's it got to do with Solberg?), it's merely irritating.

The program is worth watching, though, to hear Miranda's early samba recordings and to see how astonishingly beautiful she was before she buried herself in a series of "tutti-frutti hats."

Erik Barreto, a transformist, portrays Miranda in "fantasy" sequences. He's in good company--other transformers appearing in midriff skirt and platform heels are Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Mickey Rooney and Spike the bulldog, Droopy's foil in many a Tex Avery cartoon.

Some Philistines complain that documentaries are as exciting as watching grass grow. Well, David Attenborough, who introduced animal snuff films with Trials of Nature, offers just that with The Secret Life of Plants. It's six hours of watching grass grow, and it's tremendous.

Through generous doses of time-lapse photography, we watch hunter-killer vines traveling through the trees like pythons, and seedlings trying to shoulder their fellows aside to claim a spot of sunshine, and mobile plants and flesh-eating ones. Attenborough travels from the Arctic to the Amazon basin to the top of Mt. Kenya in search of weird plants--but when you look at plants as closely as he has, you discover that they're all bizarre.

With luck, however, Attenborough won't follow this up with a series about watching paint peel.

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Space: Above and Beyond airs 7pm Sunday on Fox (2)
X-Files airs 8pm Friday on Fox (2)
The Simpsons airs 8pm Sunday on Fox (2)
Murder One airs 10pm Tuesday on ABC (7, 11) before moving to 10pm Thursday
Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business airs 11pm Friday on KQED (9)
The Secret Life of Plants airs Monday and Tuesday on TBS, beginning at 5:05pm.


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