IN-DEPTH ‘STORIES’ DUE FROM KCET

The puff goes poof!

You’ve seen “Eye on L.A.” on KABC-TV Channel 7 and “2 on the Town” on KCBS-TV Channel 2? Good. Now you know what “California Stories” is not .

No travelogues or undies shows. No celebrity hosts. Also no relation to Kevin O’Connell’s mushy “California Living” that Channel 2 tried briefly recently as a news segment.

Instead, “California Stories” is KCET Channel 28’s most important programming step in years.

With one bold stroke, KCET has gilded the public in public TV and leaped far ahead of the city’s commercial stations in reporting in-depth on significant stories affecting Californians.

“California Stories” is KCET’s new half-hour documentary series at 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, each program devoted to a single topic. It premieres this weekend.

Once upon a time, KCET had a nightly news series that was gradually cut back and then ultimately eliminated while the station suffered through an identity and management crisis.

Although the news series sometimes provided the kind of local-story breadth and depth unavailable elsewhere, it also largely duplicated commercial newscasts.

Nightly newscasts are what the other stations do, for better or--more often than not--for worse. Even in this softened broadcast economy, they still have the financial resources.

“California Stories” is KCET’s opportunity to reshape its own public-affairs image and stretch beyond “KCET Journal” and “Turning Points,” a chance to regularly give news viewers what they can’t find on commercial stations.

The documentaries--combined with KCET’s new five-minute news summaries and investigative reports at 7:30 p.m. weekdays--represent an elevated commitment.

You have to admire that commitment, even if the first batch of documentaries is executed unevenly.

Saturday’s premiere is “Our Ocean . . . at Risk”: nice, but soft. The second week’s documentary reports on Koreans and blacks clashing in South Central Los Angeles: compelling, fascinating.

No. 3 follows public employees who confront hazardous materials and toxic chemicals: so-so. Week 4 brings “The Addicted Brain”: Wow!

Reported by Jane Petroff and produced by Teya Ryan, Saturday’s premiere is a course on ocean mismanagement, showing how the sea off California has become another casualty of the growing conflict between nature and humankind.

KCET goes to sea with a fisherman in search of swordfish. His businessman’s-eye view of the Pacific is a counterpoint to the concerns of marine biologists interviewed on the program, who believe the waters off Palos Verdes already may be irreversibly polluted.

How can something so vast, awesome and powerful as an ocean be so vulnerable? The program never fully defines the extent of the threat, unfortunately. Nor is the presentation very incisive.

As an intro to the series, the second program would have made a better premiere. Reported by Tom Thompson and produced by Steven Talley, “Clash of Cultures” is a sharply focused account of the city’s Korean/black tensions, with an undertone of the Watts riots that unleashed the fury of blacks against white merchants taking money from the community.

This is just one heck of a segment, an inspired mix of good reporting and storytelling, just the way it’s taught in the textbooks.

The third week’s “Toxic Squads” is a noble attempt by reporter Peter Graumann and producer Tex Fuller to define the perils of hazardous-waste accidents from the perspectives of those who combat the leaks and spills.

It’s a tough problem to solve--and report. Starting with a 1986 tanker accident on the San Diego Freeway, KCET delivers a sober, thoughtful segment that unfortunately is also more than a little dull.

Mark Jan. 31 on your calendar, though. That’s the date of “The Addicted Brain,” a splendid, award-worthy survey of scientific developments in the study of behavior.

You’re right; that looks absolutely arid on paper. However, producer-reporter-writer Roger Bingham has created an exciting half-hour about various forms of addiction, one full of colors and shapes and ideas that stimulate, well, the brain.

Credit Bingham with full, inventive use of the documentary form, an outstanding application of a genre that too often reeks of must. Drugs don’t contain highs, Bingham says, they trigger highs.

And, happily, so does the first month of “California Stories,” a series for viewers addicted to the news behind the headlines.