TV REVIEWS : Documentaries on Men as Beater and the Beaten

PBS and NBC offer documentaries tonight about men, but the programs have about as much in common as the Christian Science Monitor and the National Enquirer.

“Frontline” on PBS serves up the absolutely horrifying “My Husband Is Going to Kill Me” (at 9 p.m. on Channel 15, and at 10 p.m. on Channels 28 and 50), an incredible story of how wife-batterer David Guenther killed his wife, Pamela in 1987--just as he repeatedly vowed he would do and despite her intensive efforts to get police and the courts to protect her.

Producer John Zaritsky chillingly retraces a nightmare that has enough tragic twists and turns for a soap opera.

David Guenther--6-foot-5, 260-pounds--beat Pamela regularly for 15 years. Her close friends knew it. But she stayed with her husband, who was unemployed and apparently universally disliked. When she finally left David, Pamela took her two children and secretly moved in with her boss--who later became her lover.

David--who in 1986 killed a neighbor woman and wounded her husband in a bloody quarrel on the doorstep of the Guenther home in a Denver suburb--tried to kidnap Pamela in a doughnut shop parking lot and threatened her life repeatedly.

After she got a restraining order forcing him to leave their home so she could move back in, he forced his way into the house and held her hostage at gunpoint for four hours before surrendering to local police.

Yet, eight hours after David was arrested, he was out on $10,000 bail, charged only with burglarizing his own home--a fact that outraged Pamela’s friends and neighbors. He began stalking Pamela, who hid from him in a shelter for battered women and insisted upon--and got--police escorts to her supermarket job. A week after the hostage episode, David jumped out of his car in a parking lot and shot Pamela to death in front of their children. He is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder.

Pamela’s death, as one friend said, devastated everyone but surprised no one who knew her. In hindsight, and as presented by producer Zaritsky, it is obvious that the system failed Pamela.

But short of locking up David earlier, no one--including the shelter worker whose statement that “lots of battered women die” is never put into perspective or clarified--offers a concrete way to improve an imperfect system whose weaknesses include too-lenient judges, lax gun-control laws and police who are unable to prevent a dangerous man from carrying out his repeated threats to kill his wife.

NBC’s “Summer Showcase” series debuts with “Of Macho and Men,” an alleged documentary that, with a great deal of unintentional idiocy, tries to make the case that man is the latest victim of society (tonight at 10 on Channels 4, 36 and 39).

Supported by such evidence as clips from “Cheers” and interviews with a battered husband and a men’s rights activist, co-writers/correspondents Deborah Norville and Lucky Severson set out to demonstrate how men are increasingly being bashed, emasculated, discriminated against, psychologically befuddled and generally put-upon by a nasty, unfair post-feminist society.

What these two network victimologists do, however, besides setting the Men’s Movement back 100 years, is grab a few sociological and legal truths--such as that child-custody laws favor the mother over the father in divorce cases and that men are being unjustly accused of sexual harassment--and run with them.

Mostly amok.

Victims include a bummed-out man who had to quit his job when his wife was promoted and they had to move to Florida. We also meet a Arizona teen-age boy who was seduced (10 or 12 times, he says) by a female school librarian. She was never punished, yet a male teacher in the same state got 12 years for his sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl.

Such double standards should be removed, but it would be a lot easier to accept the purported psychological trauma suffered by the teen-age boy if we hadn’t already seen the previous 99% fact-free, hoot-filled 40 minutes.

After already having seen former NFL running back and All-Pro Ladies Man Jim Brown (!!!) interviewed for his “old-school” advice on how to handle women, it’s a little hard to take “Of Macho and Men” seriously, even when it’s stream of unconsciousness occasionally manages to dislodge a pebble of truth.