A Blurry ‘Television’

“Television” reminds you of television. It promises a lot and delivers far less.

That verdict is based on the initial three segments of the eight-part PBS series premiering tonight (8 p.m. on Channels 28, 58 and 15, 9 p.m. on Channel 50, 10 p.m. on Channel 24). A co-production of KCET Channel 28 and WNET in New York, the eight hours were inspired by and utilize a 13-hour series by Britain’s Granada Television, also titled “Television.”

The American producers say their series retains only 35% of the British series, which was naturally heavy on British TV but which also had a global perspective that seems to be largely lacking in the American version, hosted and narrated by Edwin Newman. That’s ironic for PBS, which relies so heavily on British imports to fill its schedule.

The first two episodes of the new “Television” are disappointing. The third--which should have been the first or second--is utterly intriguing. Drawing almost exclusively on the British series, it looks back at the intense competition among many nations to be the first to develop TV.

TV is “as irresistible as gravity,” Newman says on tonight’s opener. But this hour is very resistible, starting with an introduction to the entire series, followed by a treatise on the impact of live TV pictures, then dissolving to a rehash of TV sports.

Those flickering pictures of early sports coverage--an electronic child trying to take its first unsteady steps--are amusing compared with today’s routinely stunning technology. This program is ultimately little more than retrospective time, however, a wheel of old and familiar clips, from ABC’s coverage of the Summer Olympics to “Monday Night Football.”

Viewers who’ve been asleep the last decade or so will be shocked to learn from ABC executive Roone Arledge that TV has transformed sports into an epic business and that the chemistry between Don Meredith and Howard Cosell made “Monday Night Football” work.

The second episode is on TV comedy, regurgitating clips like ticker tape, creating a blur of deja vu broken only by an occasional Newman comment or anecdote from one of the usual suspects.

Well, listen, if you have been asleep, and haven’t seen these before, you’ll learn that many of them are funny: vintage Sid Caesar, Lucille Ball, Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, “The Honeymooners,” “MASH,” “Laugh-in,” “Saturday Night Live” and so on. There are even examples of such hilarious modernists as David Letterman and Garry Shandling.

But what does it all mean beyond laughs? Where is the overview? Rarely is anything said about the attitudes--positive or negative--that shape the shows. Surely everyone is aware of “All in the Family” and its impact. Why not go a step beyond and compare it with “Steptoe and Son,” the British comedy that inspired it, to examine what worked there that didn’t work here and vice versa?

On American TV, Newman says, HBO’s “Not Necessarily the News” has been a “rare outlet for political humor.” All right, but why? Is there a reason for American TV’s general resistance to political satire beyond the monologues of Johnny Carson and Bob Hope?

Better things await in Part 3, however, as, in a comic way, the race to TV looms almost as large as the race for The Bomb. The major contestants--the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan--would become major players in World War II, in fact.

This is a devastatingly seductive and illuminating hour, using interviews and rare footage to convey the relentless drive of TV’s first purveyors--from iconoscope inventor Vladimir Zworykin to “mechanical” TV crusader John Logie Baird of Britain to electronic TV advocate Philo T. Farnsworth of the United States.

TV had already existed in various rudimentary forms. But it was the BBC, on Nov. 2, 1936, that began the first regularly scheduled TV service with high-quality pictures (an event that was captured in a BBC miniseries two years ago).

There are fascinating sights here--German ballet dancers performing on TV for the Wehrmacht during World War II--and also insights. Amazingly, for example, the propaganda-minded Nazis apparently didn’t sense the potential of TV for reaching and swaying large audiences.

Television, NBC Radio founder David Sarnoff predicted in 1923, will be “the ultimate and greatest step in mass communications.” There are other prophetic pronouncements from TV pioneers here, but none of them could have foreseen the awesomeness of the phenomenon they were racing to create.

A 1950 article in the London Daily Mirror had an early handle on the mind-shaping reach of the medium: “If you let TV through your front door, life can never be the same again.”