‘Revelations’ of America Won’t Be Seen in L.A. : Television: KCET calls the documentary, a view of the U.S. through the eyes of ordinary West Virginians, ‘mean-spirited.’ KOCE may reschedule the program; other PBS stations are broadcasting it.

It’s as American as Coca-Cola.

Yet viewers in Los Angeles may never have an opportunity to see what is arguably the season’s best documentary hour to date, one that many PBS stations either wisely aired Monday when it was distributed by the network or have promised to air in the future.

“Revelations”--a sometimes grim, often critical, but acutely honest and meaningful view of the United States through the eyes of ordinary West Virginians--is scheduled to air soon on public TV stations in New York and Boston, among many others.

But it’s been vetoed here by KCET Channel 28, whose director of broadcasting, Jacqueline Kain, finds the program “mean-spirited” and “condescending.”

Not on your life.

At once reflecting the throbbing ache and sinewy strength of America’s heartland, “Revelations” is art with an edge, giving resonance to voices rarely accommodated by television and taking viewers where they haven’t been taken previously. Isn’t that what public TV is supposed to do?

“Revelations” was scheduled to run tonight on KOCE Channel 50 in Orange County, then was preempted for a special “Frontline” documentary investigating the crash of Pan Am 103. Program director Roberta Smith said she would try to reschedule “Revelations.” “I’m looking over my February schedule now,” she said. But no guarantees.

What’s the fuss? Indeed. What is the fuss?

A high-achieving documentary arising not from such PBS giants as KCET, New York’s WNET or Boston’s WGBH, but bold little WNPB in Morgantown, W.Va.? WNPB deserves a medal, not a slap in the face.

KCET, for example, should be toasting “Revelations”--which has already aired in Britain, whose BBC co-produced it with WNPB--instead of condemning and withholding it.

Although the subject is intensely American, the guiding hand here belongs to the program’s British director, Paul Watson, head of documentaries for BBC Elstree, who has a critical eye for the absurd as well as the profound. Watson’s films have angered people in the past.

A documentary without narration, “Revelations” is laden with irony and symbolism, intercutting television’s daily onslaught of flim flam with the troubled realities of West Virginians trying to adapt to the changing world around them.

Center stage are state trooper Larry Smith, his wife Rhonda, their 17-year-old son Lacy, and Larry’s parents, elderly Jenny and Guy Smith. Although mostly shown passively watching a preacher on TV, Guy briefly weighs in on world affairs (“This Gorbachev feller . . . .”).

Much of “Revelations” is a sort of Appalachian “Our Town.” It’s about values--religious values, conservative values, life-affirming family values movingly expressed at Thanksgiving time. There are deep roots here, too, the continuity of generations visible at the local cemetery, where 10 of the Smith clan are buried. This Watson feller is respectful of their traditions.

For the most part, however, “Revelations” shows the dark side of rural America that Charles Kuralt leaves out.

“Corruption is everywhere,” Trooper Smith says while cruising on Interstate 79. “My father had to pay a politician to get a job. My sister worked for those politicians who were indicted.”

Rhonda: “You just don’t know who you can trust out here.”

Deep in the forest, “Revelations” also finds a group of orange-clad hunters, male comrades living out a cultural attachment to nature that is paradoxically manifested in the destruction of life. There’s lots of quick cutting: Hunters drag a dead buck through the woods. Click. Shoppers in Charlestown chatter in the climatically controlled atmosphere of a shopping mall. Click. Back to the hunters. . . .

This is National Rifle Assn. heaven, the deer slayers representing a segment of society for whom guns are considered a birthright. A stocking-capped, red-bearded hunter: “I think everybody ought to have at least one or two guns laying around. I’ve got a boy that’s 7 years old and I’ve got one that’s 3 years old, and both of ‘em have had guns in their hands, and the 7-year-old can come up here right now and shoot anything he wanted to shoot--even you!”

Not show this hour?

KCET’s Kain says she was “predisposed to like” the documentary before seeing it in Stockholm last May at the 1989 International Public Television Conference. “I look forward to cross-cultural viewing. But I found this mean-spirited and cliche-ridden. I also found it to take a condescending attitude toward the people it was depicting.”

Barry Stoner, executive producer for international production at KCTS in Seattle, is as critical as Kain, saying he finds the program “jaundiced, shallow and a cheap shot at American culture.”

It is anything but those, actually.

“You take from it what you bring to it,” said Harry Chancey, vice president and director of the broadcast center at New York’s WNET, which will air “Revelations” next month. “I didn’t see it as negative. Work like this just has to be given a chance. I look upon it as a new way of seeing things, a seminal work in experiencing the icons and the society we live in.”

“Revelations” was debated angrily at the public television conference in Stockholm. “It was 90% Americans arguing with Americans,” said WNPB’s Mark Samels, the co-producer and cameraman for “Revelations,” who originated the idea for the program and then two years ago recruited Watson to execute it.

Some Americans at the conference weren’t enthusiastic about a foreigner, Watson, controlling a program critical of America, Samels said. “One called Larry Smith an aberration. Another one said you can’t purport to make a show about America set in a rural setting.” And Stoner virtually begged European broadcasters not to show it, Samels said.

“These were high-level people from public-TV stations. What the discussion revealed was how intensely Americans need to be loved.”

WNET’s Chancey would like to see the “Revelations” concept extended, and he may get his wish.

The West Virginia station is now assembling a consortium of small-to-medium-sized public-TV stations for another BBC co-production that would be titled “States of Mind,” an eight-part series examining America from the perspectives of families in other sections of the country.

It sounds exciting, just as “Revelations” is exciting and exactly the kind of challenging and deeply indigenous work that fulfills the public TV mandate. Except in Los Angeles, apparently.