‘Fair’ Outshines 2 Debuting Series

NBC is introducing two series, but the weekend’s jewel is the new “Masterpiece Theatre Production” of “Day After the Fair” on PBS.

NBC’s new “In the Heat of the Night” has Carroll O’Connor and Howard Rollins. What it doesn’t have in its debut is a story worthy of these two fine actors.

“In the Heat of the Night” premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday (on Channels 4, 36 and 39) as a two-hour drama in advance of a Tuesday-night series whose starting date is March 15.

O’Connor and Rollins are reprising characters that Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier played in an Oscar-winning film about the uneasy pairing of a small-town Southern white lawman and a big-city black detective.

The 1967 theatrical movie had redneckish Chief Bill Gillespie and black Virgil Tibbs tenuously joining to solve a murder amid racist tensions (with Poitier’s Tibbs ultimately continuing through two movie sequels). The TV version opens with Tibbs returning to Sparta, Miss., from Philadelphia for his mother’s funeral and then being hired as Gillespie’s “chief of detectives” by an ambitious mayor who thinks a token black will boost his political stock.

Gillespie resists having Tibbs integrate his white department, but is overruled by the mayor. And then we get down to business.

The chief is a folksy, intuitive plodder, Tibbs an efficient professional. Complementing each other, they solve the murder of one of white Sparta’s “finest young ladies,” whose body is discovered in the black section of town. The implications are obvious in this community where boy continues to be the operative synonym for black man .

Rollins and O’Connor are very good. Their best work and the movie’s compelling moments occur early, with Gillespie and Tibbs eyeing each other suspiciously and Tibbs being confronted by the town’s racism.

James Lee Barrett’s predictable script gives away too much too early, however, and ultimately breaks down completely, climaxing with an inane gunfight and tidy confession a la Perry Mason.

“In the Heat of the Night” is the kind of surface social drama that’s easiest to get on TV, one that neatly and compactly reduces the issue of racism to its most obvious and stereotypical turf, the small, white-dominated Southern town.

Even in this environment, the story’s hard-core emotions are too easily softened. Gillespie is more pinkneck than redneck, and by the end of the two hours, he is so lovable that his camaraderie with Tibbs seems unshakable and his admiration for Robert E. Lee merely harmless and eccentric.

And so, it seems from an early impression, what “In the Heat of the Night” may lack most, ultimately, is heat, the fundamental tension between Gillespie and Tibbs that would lift them onto some higher ground beyond the TV cliche of innocently bickering partners.

The best thing about another new NBC series is a supporting character named Jetto who is played by an actor named Jacko. Otherwise “The Highwayman,” premiering at 8 tonight, is junko. And you have the feeling that whoever thought of this road warriorish hour was a bit blotto.

Sam Jones plays the Highwayman, a trucker who not only drives a wild-looking super rig, but is also a federal marshal assigned to the highways. Don’t ask why. Jetto is his tow-headed trucker pal and fellow marshal. Highway (which is what his friends call him) and Jetto get real mad when another trucker/federal marshal is bumped off and appears to come back to life. About this time you’re waiting for the story to come to life. And waiting and waiting.

Jacko, who also stars in battery commercials, is real good as Jetto. But Jones is a little stiff when Highway and Jetto have to blow away all the bad guys--almost as if the wimp doesn’t like violence. A character flaw.

I don’t know what’s in store for “Highwayman,” but some possibilities come to mind. A super episode featuring Highway against Freeway and Underpass against Overpass for the right to challenge Cloverleaf.

And now to another universe, a BBC adaptation of a Thomas Hardy short story that’s a dreamy, literate treat. The two-hour “Day After the Fair” (based on Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit”) airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on Channels 50 and 24, at 9 p.m. on Channel 15 and at 9:10 p.m. on Channel 28.

Set in Victorian England, “Day After the Fair” is hauntingly and sadly beautiful, the story of a lonely woman who briefly finds escape from her loveless marriage in an intensely romantic correspondence with the distant lover of her illiterate maid. She agrees to the ghost-written correspondence only at the behest of the maid, who wants to hide from her barrister lover the fact that she cannot write herself.

Soon the ghost writer is pouring her own long-suppressed feelings and emotions into the letters, and it is her elegant words and thoughts--not the maid’s--that attract the maid’s unsuspecting lover.

She is very much the female Cyrano, except that the ensuing triangle becomes far less comic and, in a sense, far more tragic than Rostand’s story.

Hannah Gordon is stunningly luminous as the woman who lives a curious, achingly frustrated double life as her maid’s surrogate letter writer, and Sammi Davis is perfect as the servant girl who is the other party in this mysterious entrapment.

Anthony Simmons directed and Gillian Freeman wrote the screenplay for these two hours, which shouldn’t be missed.