The New TV Season : Two Drops in TV’s Fall Water Torture

Most new series won’t arrive for at least another two weeks. However, the fall TV season is already beginning to trickle out in small drops--sort of like a continuously dripping water torture.

Today is a two-drop day.

Both premieres are rescue series: tonight’s “Rescue 911” on CBS, and “The Joan Rivers Show,” a syndicated talk program that KCBS-TV Channel 2 hopes will rescue it from “Oprah Winfrey” and other competition at 3 p.m. After an hour of Rivers, however, you may be the one dialing 911.

Airing at 8 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8 and narrated by William Shatner, “Rescue 911” salutes people whose heroism has averted tragedy. These are real stories re-created by merging real footage, real actors and the real subjects of the stories.

At times, it’s real confusing.

An Arnold Shapiro production, “Rescue 911” was introduced in two prime-time specials last spring. At its best, it personalizes peril and bravery and occasionally fills the screen with spectacular sights, some of them re-creations, some drawn from actual news footage. Most of the time, however, the hour plays like an extended 11 p.m. local newscast that feeds TV’s hunger for action and conflict, except that the “Rescue 911” stories end happily.

Tonight, backed by suspense music, a teen-ager is saved from drowning, a sky diver is saved from a fatal fall, a grocery store’s employees and customers are saved from an armed robber, a mother and her unborn child are saved from disaster and, in the only segment excluding actors, firemen are saved from a fire.

“Actors have helped us set the scene,” but “most of the footage you will see was taped when this story happened (in 1988),” Shatner says about the actions of a fireman and others in rescuing the teen-ager from a flash flood.

The key word is most , for in this story and others tonight, the exact point where dramatic re-creation departs from reality is often unidentified. And the murkiness is intensified when subjects of stories take part in their own re-enactments.

Even in spending a July 4th with the New York City Fire Department--a deserved tribute to people who routinely face danger on the public’s behalf--”Rescue 911” asks us to believe that these firefighters are always oblivious to a TV camera and that the segment’s reality is not further compromised by having them, in effect, partially narrate their own story.

In its quest for warmth and human interest, moreover, “Rescue 911” tumbles into an abyss of predictability: Perils followed by rescues followed by updates on the rescued parties and rescuers, accompanied by oozy music.

There is still more potential for distortion here through omission. The uplifting nature of this series--and its devotion to the heroism and mechanics of the rescue--offers a narrowed reality that excludes a grimmer reality, one whose ending music is sometimes a requiem.

Although not always prominent, the emergency 911 line is an ingredient of every story here (“At 5:30 p.m., a call came in. . . .”), possibly creating the impression that this is a fail-safe system: You call, they arrive, happy ending.

That wasn’t the ending recently for Maria Navarro, however, who was murdered with three others, allegedly by her estranged husband, after a dispatcher for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s 911 emergency number failed to heed her call for help after concluding that her peril wasn’t life-threatening.

The Navarro tragedy raises serious questions about the limits of the 911 system as operated here, exactly the kind of questions that “Rescue 911” seems precluded from addressing as it shapes emergencies into entertainment.

She’s baaaaaaack . But neither “Oprah” on KABC-TV Channel 7 nor “Donahue” on KNBC Channel 4 would seem to have much to fear at 3 p.m. weekdays from Joan Rivers, whose new talk show falls somewhere between dumb and pointless.

“The Joan Rivers Show” precedes “Geraldo” on Channel 2, and both shows are from Tribune Entertainment. That makes Rivers a sort of “Geralda”, except that compared to her, Geraldo Rivera is Alistair Cooke. Lower than low brow, her show doesn’t even have a brow.

Re-entering the talk-show arena more than two years after flopping as the host of “The Late Show” on Fox, Rivers is welcomed today by an orchestrated spontaneous standing ovation. It’s an emotional moment.

Her celebrity guests are Guardian Angels matriarch Lisa Sliwa and country singer Loretta Lynn.

Rivers: “I’ve been reading about you and Crystal Gayle, who’s your sister. And I’ve been reading that you hate each other and you’re fighting, and I’ve read you’re suing someone over that. The tabloids came out and said terrible things and that you’re in the middle of a lawsuit.”

Lynn: “Over Crystal and me?”

Rivers: “Yeah.”

Silence.

Rivers: “No? Then what are you in a lawsuit over?”

Silence.

Rivers: “I know you’re suing some people.”

Lynn: “It’s not over Crystal and I.”

A few fuzzy sentences later, Rivers blurts out: “Now, I remember about the lawsuit. It was someone who said you were taking dope.”

The banal centerpiece of the hour, however, is Rivers’ brutally probing interview of three women who were “left at the altar” by their fiances. (“Did you sleep with him?”)

One of the women says she learned from her fiance on the way to their wedding that he was already married. They went on a honeymoon cruise anyway, where she learned that maybe he wasn’t legally married after all. But then she learned that maybe he was. Then to make peace, he bought her a lynx coat. Or was it a lox coat? No, the coat was lynx. It’s the show that’s a lox.