TV Reviews : Koppel’s ‘News From Earth’ Is Mostly Negative

Earth is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

That’s the word from ABC’s “The Koppel Report: News From Earth,” an electronic time capsule, airing at 10 tonight on Channels 3, 7 and 10 and presented in the form of a message about our planet directed at alien cultures.

Although handsomely mounted and very watchable, the Ted Koppel-anchored “News From Earth” is overwhelmingly bad news, a series of brief status reports ranging from environmentalist Jean-Michel Cousteau on ecological suicide (“What we throw away does not necessarily go away”) to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaking from a land where racism is as institutionalized as the Ten Commandments.

The driving theme here is one of potential extinction, if not the quick way through nuclear destruction, then a slow, agonizing planetary death resulting from our misuse and abuse of Earth. All true, of course.

What’s largely missing from “News From Earth,” however, is joy, the beauty of personal relationships, of kindness and caring, of people in love and being loved.

“Some things about this world are quite wonderful,” Koppel says. But these fleetingly arrive only at the end of the hour like someone squeezing into an elevator an instant before the doors close.

“News From Earth” is who we are, but happily, not who we are everywhere all of the time.