TV Review : A Grueling ‘Day With Dan Rather’ on PBS

“A Day With Dan Rather” is mislabeling in the extreme. Actually, the documentary (11:30 tonight on Channel 28) amounts to only 30 minutes with Rather, offering about the same depth as his nightly newscast on CBS or its counterparts on the other networks. Just like those newscasts, however, “A Day With Dan Rather” is highly watchable.

Rather allowed producer Andy Friendly to have him fitted with a wireless mike and trailed by a minicam on Oct. 4, 1988, as Rather participated in the planning of “The CBS Evening News” that he would anchor in Omaha, Neb., preceding that night’s tense televised debate there between vice presidential candidates Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen.

There’s self-consciousness here that belies the program’s cinema verite style. One assumes that Rather was always fully aware of the mike and camera and knew that everything he said and did would be beamed to millions of viewers. So much for TV purity.

What “A Day With Dan Rather” does provide, though, is a sense of how a network newscast is built, story by story, and the grueling day that Rather puts in, especially one like this on the road, capped by a late-night follow-up to a breaking news event. Ratings aside, he earns his fortune.