A WEEKFUL OF DRAMATIC REAL-LIFE TV

Adam’s wedding was violently aborted on “Dynasty” after poor Alexis had run her car into the drink. And Diane made a melancholy exit from “Cheers” by postponing her wedding to Sam.

There were more profound disruptions to ponder on television this week, though, for, as always, real life made the best TV, culminating Friday with front-running Gary Hart’s emotional withdrawal from the chase for the Democratic presidential nomination.

What an extraordinary week it was--at once titillating and troubling--as Americans got a front-row view of an extended soap opera/morality play that had them buzzing about sex and the ethics of church, government, political candidates and the press.

The week focused on the cracks in seemingly indestructible institutions.

The defrocking of a maligned and disgraced Jim Bakker seemed to put a temporary cap on the controversy over the ailing PTL ministry while leaving unresolved the future of TV evangelism.

On a broader TV front, the heated-up Iran- contra hearings--televised live since Wednesday by only PBS and cable’s CNN--was something to behold after a somewhat sputtering start. Thursday’s testy verbal duel between retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord and cross-examining Senate counsel Arthur Liman was simply electrifying. It was “High Noon,” pure and unfiltered, revealing another side of Secord.

It also dramatized what “60 Minutes” executive producer Don Hewitt referred to recently when he recalled the pioneering live coverage of the 1952 political conventions: “There was this great fascination of watching something happening as it was happening.”

This was also a week in which the morality of the Iran-contra affair shared a harsh spotlight with the morality of Hart, who dropped out of the presidential race following days of furor over his alleged liaison with a Florida woman.

For once, it was a newspaper and not TV that became the early focus, as the controversial Hart story was broken by the Miami Herald. Inevitably, though, Hart became a TV story, with live coverage, newscasts and interview shows soon building the print accounts into an avalanche.

CNN’s cameras went live for Hart’s speech in which he refuted the Herald account of Donna Rice having spent an evening with him while his wife, Lee, was out of town. NBC provided live coverage of Hart answering questions about the Rice story. There was more damaging footage of Hart refusing to say if he’d ever committed adultery, then footage of Lee Hart stoutly defending her husband. Later, there was advance word of a Washington Post story about another extramarital relationship by Hart.

Then came Hart’s withdrawal speech in Denver Friday morning, preceded by flat-out predictions that his candidacy was dead.

ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN carried the wake.

Hart strode to the podium and faced the cameras and the throng of reporters. He related how he had planned merely to walk in, utter a short withdrawal statement and quickly depart. Then he added: “I said to myself, ‘Hell no!’ I am not a beaten man. I’m an angry and defiant man!”

Hart’s supporters cheered and applauded, apparently believing that he had decided to remain in the race. As it turned out, though, he meant only that he had decided to give a fuller statement.

And that eloquent nine-minute statement, in which Hart characterized the news media as largely being predators seeking prey at any cost, recalled an earlier, self-pitying, scapegoating Richard Nixon, who told the press after losing the California gubernatorial election in 1962: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

In reality, though, Hart self-aborted. And TV coverage of his political destruction has helped focus the nation’s attention on virtue: the importance of morality in a presidential campaign and the ethics of the press in aggressively reporting on that morality.

Geraldine Ferraro, who got her own dose of negative press as Walter Mondale’s running mate in the 1986 presidential campaign, told Dan Rather on CBS Friday that she felt Hart’s private life should remain private, candidate or not. The only issues of morality that should concern the electorate in a presidential campaign, she added, are those “that affect people and humanity and the future of the world.”

Here’s another view:

If a significant number of Americans believe a candidate’s private life is a factor in their decision of how to vote--and apparently that’s the case--then the press has an obligation to disclose information about the private lives of candidates. What’s more, if a President does have extramarital affairs and doesn’t want them exposed, doesn’t that make the President in question vulnerable to various degrees of blackmail and other pressures? And, if so, isn’t that President’s private life something the public should be informed about?

From Jim Bakker to Gary Hart: the “Dynasty” of real life.