‘IN SEARCH OF CONSTITUTION’ A SPECIAL KIND OF LAW SHOW

How ironic that TV--one of America’s most spottily regulated industries--always gets an adrenaline high from the law. The surface fascination is obvious.

You couldn’t have Westerns without tin-starred lawmen. No cops and robbers without the law to support the cops and prosecute the robbers. No stereotypical stories about big business without lawyers to consult and the law to skirt. No Perry Mason without a patsy D.A. to embarrass. No local newscasts without trials to cover and lawyers to pop questions at as they emerge from courtrooms. No daytime without “People’s Court,” “Divorce Court,” “Superior Court” and “The Judge.”

How much of the TV landscape is law-oriented?

Besides the regular lawyer and cop series, Saturday night’s “California Stories” on KCET Channel 28 delivered a nicely done documentary on plea bargaining. Sunday night brought a trivialized legal mystery called “The Last Innocent Man” on HBO. And Tuesday (3 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8) brings a well-intentioned but heavy-handed and predictable “CBS Schoolbreak Special” about the inequities of the juvenile justice system. It’s called “Juvi.”

Broadly speaking, then, “In Search of the Constitution,” Bill Moyers’ 10-part PBS series marking the bicentennial of the Constitution, is a chip off the old block, another law show.

Specifically, though, it is almost unique, a series of hourlong documentaries (premiering at 10 p.m. Tuesday on KCET Channel 28) that demystify and blow the shadows and haze from a document that for most of us is probably vague, if not obscure.

We know that it’s there. We know that it’s significant and that there’s a Supreme Court to interpret it. We just aren’t sure what’s in it.

Separation of church and state? Freedom of the press? Surely the 55 delegates to the federal convention drafted more articles than that while meeting in steamy Philadelphia between May 25 and Sept. 17, 1787.

“In Search of the Constitution” also marks the return to PBS of that demanding and astute TV traveler, Moyers, after some distinguished years at CBS News, where he ultimately grew disillusioned. He is the series’ interviewer and executive editor.

Welcoming back Moyers should be like opening your garage to a Mercedes. Yet a number of the nation’s public TV stations--fearful that prime time is too valuable to squander on something as musty as the Constitution--are airing Moyers’ series so distant from the 8 p.m. Thursday time slot in which PBS scheduled it that you’d need a high-powered telescope to see it.

By far the worst are those airing the series in daytime, perhaps hoping viewers will confuse “In Search of the Constitution” with “Search for Tomorrow.” Channel 28 is far too smart for that, but the station does think it will get a more receptive audience at 10 instead of at 8. That may be true for adults. However, that hour also may put the show out of reach for many teen-agers, for whom “In Search of the Constitution” would be a valuable, illuminating experience.

On the first program, University of Alabama historian Forrest McDonald tells Moyers that the founding fathers drafted the Constitution in sweltering Independence Hall in absolute secrecy, sweating behind closed doors and windows.

What a difference 200 years make. In today’s world, the delegates would fight more than perspiration and body odors. They’d be hounded by lobbyists and special-interest groups, and ye olde TV crews would be camped outside Independence Hall, doing live remotes and speculating on what was happening inside. (“Back to you, Dan.”)

McDonald is one of three historians who sit separately with Moyers on the stage-setting premiere. It’s a rare thing for TV--two people in extended conversation without supporting pictures, a sort of constitutional version of “My Dinner With Andre” in which McDonald argues that government has now “lost the capacity to govern.”

Moyers wonders if we could fix things with another constitutional convention. “No bloody way,” McDonald replies. “There is so much incompetence in this country, they’d make a mess of it.”

Also interviewed are Olive Taylor of Howard University and Cornell University scholar Michael Kammen.

Our most dangerous misconception of the Constitution, Kammen warns, is that it is a “machine that would go of itself; that, somehow, this mechanism is so ingenious, so perfect, that it requires a minimum of citizen participation--that it will function successfully without people voting, without people being willing to accept or run for public office, without people being willing to serve on juries, or without people being willing to serve in government at the local level.”

The same words almost could apply to TV and our tendency to sit back passively and allow it to work on us the way government does when we choose observing over participating.

Because she is female and black, Taylor’s perspective is the most arresting. Her gender and race remind us that there were founding fathers but no founding mothers , and that the Consitution was drafted by whites for whites.

“You got a pretty bum deal in this room, didn’t you?” Moyers asks inside Independence Hall.

Taylor agrees, recalling her segregated youth. “I often wondered, growing up black, if they (the delegates) had the same fatherly attention for me that they did for the rest of America.” Obviously not. Taylor takes the scholar’s overview, however, insisting that the Constitution “still has a positive meaning for most black Americans” because it changes and bends.

Moyers’ second program is an invigorating return TV engagement for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, one that dramatizes the bizarre eclecticism of the medium.

Last time it was Blackmun on--of all shows--the syndicated “Superior Court,” squirting out a week’s worth of flat, fleeting commentaries that he could have mailed in on a post card, as part of the show’s homage to the Constitution’s 200th birthday.

“Superior Court” was a trivial marsh for the 78-year old Blackmun. It was Blackmun, after all, who spoke for the majority in the landmark Roe vs. Wade case that gave women constitutional protection for abortion, and it was Blackmun who wrote the dissenting opinion for the recent Bowers vs. Hardwick case upholding a Georgia law forbidding sodomy even within the privacy of the home.

Perhaps his willingness to be on daytime TV, sandwiched by detergent commercials, carried an unintended message--that beneath those judicial robes beats the heart of a populist.

With Moyers at his probing, perceptive best, Blackmun indeed comes across next week as intensely human and far more open and expansive about the court than was former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger when interviewed by Moyers on CBS last year.

“We are fallible up here, and mistakes can be made,” Blackmun says about his 17 years as a justice.

This is a wise and wonderful program, one that carries just a hint of a talk show on which an author makes an appearance to sell his latest book. From time to time, Moyers displays a small blue publication that the camera picks up. Only it’s not his book he’s advertising. It’s the Constitution.