TV Tackles the Uneasy Teens : ‘TV 101’: What Kind of News Is This?

So this is how the Eyewitness News Team got its start?

Kevin Keegan (Sam Robards) has been hired to teach English and oversee the student paper at Roosevelt High School, his alma mater. Instead, with the tentative blessing of his own former high school journalism teacher Emilie Walker (Brynn Thayer), who recruited him for his new job, he decides to turn the paper into a weekly TV newscast.

Why? “I want to get these kids in front of the lens so they can’t hide what’s inside,” Kevin says.

Mmmmmmm. Yes, well, anyway, that’s the premise for “TV 101,” the CBS drama series premiering at 8 tonight on Channels 2 and 8. Can’t have anyone hiding “what’s inside.”

Introducing teen-agers to the potential and excitement of video technology is not only an interesting variation on a youth-slant theme, but also makes sense given the exploding impact and widening global environment of TV news. The recent presidential campaign alone offers ample evidence that TV is the monster medium of our time, shaping, influencing and dictating agendas.

Yet Kevin’s cavalier dismissal of the school newspaper as musty and obsolete and his celebration of verbal and video skills over print never gets beyond the glib cliche stage, leaving the impression that he is heroic merely because he seems to worship electronic pictures for their own sake.

“That sense of reality is something the old student newspaper couldn’t touch in a million years,” Kevin assures Emilie. What reality?

A sense of reality--along with a sense of coherence--is precisely what the premiere of “TV 101” fails to achieve, from its formulaic characters to its routine story by co-executive producer Karl Schaefer.

First, Kevin is surely the fastest study alive, having achieved guru rank by the age of 29 in earning a teaching credential for English and also accumulating both the journalism experience to be all-wise in TV news production and the life experience to be all-knowing and all-empathetic in dealing with teen-agers.

Then there’s the matter of the TV equipment that Kevin’s youthful video commandos swiftly master to turn out a quasi-state-of-the-art newscast in practically no time at all. Some of it was donated by a cable company, and the rest left over from his “have-video-will-travel days,” Kevin says. Whatever that means.

And just how will the student body be watching this renegade weekly newscast, anyway? On Walkmans? No. It will be beamed “to all the classes” through the school’s closed-circuit TV system, says Kevin. Oh, that’s rich. No matter what they’re doing, apparently, the classes will stop to watch the high school news: “We interrupt this biology test to bring you. . . .”

In any event, Kevin has to arrange for the first newscast to be telecast on a cable public-access channel to circumvent the school’s heavy-handed principal (Leon Russom). A pat character if there ever was one, the rigid and pompous administrator insists on editing or zapping stories that “exceed the bounds of good taste.”

One of these--”Catastrophe Hits School as Hundreds Die of Boredom”--isn’t a story at all, but an opinionated satire, a student-performed dramatization worthy of “A Current Affair.”

That this should be somehow passed off as news reporting in a TV series about junior newscasters gives one pause.

Meanwhile, Kevin’s most rebellious student--dope-smoking Vance Checker (Andrew White)--has a personal crisis that is resolved predictably and with oozing, manipulative sentiment, as Kevin urges Vance to pour his heart out in front of the camera.

Theater as news and vice versa.

Of such moments future anchormen are made, but not memorable TV.