Bakkers and Beach Boys: It Must Be Sweeps

Sunday--the first blockbuster night of the May ratings sweeps--brings the good, the bad and the box office.

Coming under the “good” category is the CBS movie “Caroline?” The “bad and blockbuster” covers NBC’s movie about Jim and Tammy Bakker and ABC’s movie about the Beach Boys. They air opposite one another at 9 p.m.

NBC’s “Fall From Grace” is a lot like Tammy Faye Bakker’s songs. After the first verse, everything sounds the same.

Jim works. Tammy sings. Jim spends. Tammy works. Jim works. Tammy takes drugs. Jim spends. Tammy cries. Jim cries. Tammy spends. Jim collapses. Tammy collapses. Jim worries. Tammy recuperates. Jim collapses. Tammy sings.

You cry.

This botched movie (on Channels 4, 36 and 39) about the rise and decline of America’s most notorious televangelist couple features entertaining performances by Kevin Spacey and Bernadette Peters in a thin story devoid of insights but long on tedium.

In a sense, the muted “Fall From Grace” is the antithesis of the Bakkers, who have been many things, but never dull.

Ken Trevey’s script presents Tammy as ultimately the stronger of the Bakkers even though she becomes a spendaholic and pill popper in response to marital and other frustrations.

It’s fair to say that Jim Bakker’s PTL betrayed its followers both spiritually and financially. Yet he emerges here as an essentially benign character whose biggest failure is being an impractical dreamer and poor manager, not a poor human being. He’s well-in tentioned, merely making a few bad decisions while attempting such good works as building a popular TV ministry and shaping Heritage Village, U.S.A. into a gaudy, evangelical Disneyland.

We get the spendthrift Jim: “Christians are going to go first-class. Nothing chintzy. Nothing cheap.” The baffled Jim: “Why does everyone want to nail Jim Bakker to the cross?” The self-righteous, self-deluding Jim: “Nobody is defrauding anyone. I am doing God’s work.”

“Fall From Grace” does the Bakkers’ work in depicting them as nice kids who go a little overboard and then become victimized by the Rev. Jerry Falwell and others they trusted.

In this Karen Arthur-directed story, it’s Jim’s associate, the Rev. Richard Dortch, who questions the Bakkers’ addiction to luxury, and it’s Tammy, of all people, who questions Jim’s extravagance.

Meanwhile, the movie opens with the 1980 incident with Jessica Hahn, which becomes a latent undercurrent that later surfaces and helps devastate the Bakkers.

We have the real Bakkers--whose memorable interviews with Ted Koppel were excerpted for last Tuesday’s “Nightline” retrospective on ABC--as indelible points of comparison with Sunday’s performances. Spacey and Peters surmount this obstacle on a surface level, intriguing us with their enjoyable aping of the Bakkers, who remind you of Siamese twins joined at the pocketbook even as they bicker and grow apart.

Peters, in particular, captures both the tinniness and sadness of Tammy in a showy role that allows her to give a full-blown impression of her chirpy subject. But even Tammy’s squeakiness gets old and is a poor substitute for a story that has something to say and protagonists who genuinely deserve our sympathy. This one doesn’t.

In 1989, a jury found that Jim Bakker had kept $3.7 million in PTL contributions for his personal use, and he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiracy and fraud. Tammy Bakker was never indicted, apparently because she had no official status with PTL.

While merely recalling and softening old headlines, “Fall From Grace” never confronts the broader issue the Bakkers represent: Was their conduct--and the trickery of Jimmy Swaggart and other powerful TV evangelists touched by scandal in the 1980s--an aberration or symptomatic of a larger hypocrisy within the movement? What is it about these God-cloaked performers that is so seductive and inspiring of trust as they reach into America’s homes via TV? Is it them or the technology of the TV pulpit that makes the circus?

“The story seems to just get bigger and bigger,” Jim Bakker told Koppel in 1987. Indeed it does, but not on Sunday, when we’re served up such narrower realities as the detail-obsessed Bakker making electronic memos about his Christian theme park on his tape recorder: “The bulb in the men’s shower room is too dim.”

“Fall From Grace” is too dim.

Finally, a TV movie you can dance to.

Watching it proves more difficult, for ABC’s “The Story of the Beach Boys: Summer Dreams” (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) is such a chaotic jumble that all you know for sure is that the surf’s up.

The movie carries this disclaimer: “Tonight’s film is based on an unauthorized biography of the Beach Boys. Dialogue and scenes interpretive of this material have been created for dramatic purposes. The music in the film is not performed by the Beach Boys.”

Otherwise, this is their story.

The unauthorized book is “Heroes and Villains, the True Story of The Beach Boys,” by Steven Gaines. This ABC version offers nice performances by Bruce Greenwood and Greg Kean as brothers Dennis and Brian Wilson, and Arlen Dean Snyder as their tyrannical father, Murry Wilson. Murry is blamed here for the emotional miseries behind the self-destructive behavior of Dennis, who drowned in 1983, and Brian, the Beach Boys’ creative spark.

Charles Rosin’s script traces the Beach Boys’ meteoric rise in the 1960s, collapse in the 1970s and comeback in the 1980s. Along the way, Dennis, the group’s brash, playboy drummer, and Brian, its shy, insecure innovator, drown themselves in drugs and booze.

Director Michael Switzer is unable to give cohesion to this lethally disjointed story whose pop-up characters often intermingle confusingly. The music of the Beach Boys is simple, this movie muddled.

“Caroline?” is a swell little mystery and human-interest story airing on CBS Channels 2 and 8.

The setting is Atlanta in the 1950s, where the structured existence of the wealthy Carmichael family is jolted by the sudden appearance of a woman (Stephanie Zimbalist) claiming to be the daughter of Paul Carmichael (George Grizzard) from a previous marriage. The problem is that Caroline was thought to have perished in a plane crash 15 years earlier.

The woman looks like Caroline and knows enough about her to convince Paul and others. But is she really Caroline or, as Paul’s skeptical present wife, Grace (Pamela Reed), believes, is she a fortune-hunting imposter?

Director Joseph Sargent shapes this “Hallmark Hall of Fame” drama suspensefully. But what equally drives Michael de Guzman’s story (based on a novel by E. L. Konigsburg) is the tenderness between Caroline and the two Carmichael children, 12-year-old Winston (Shawn Phelan) and Heidi (Jenny Jacobs), a physically impaired, disruptive 10-year-old whose emotional development has been gnarled by her mother’s pampering and sheltering.

Although the two children battle each other, their relationship is also deeply moving. This human element and the mystery are smoothly merged, and except for its soft ending, “Caroline?” is an interesting, complex, emotional story.

The excellent performances don’t hurt.

Zimbalist is persuasive in a catalytic role that sparks enigma while revealing that the true dysfunctional here is less Heidi than the Carmichael family as a unit. Yet it’s the fine work of Phelan as the sensitive and introspective Winston, and Reed as the smothering, defensive, narrow-thinking Grace that you remember most.

The even bigger star of this Barry & Enright production, though, may be independent casting director Shari Rhodes. It was Rhodes who, with the blessings of Sargent and producer Dorothea G. Petrie, sought only children with disabilities to audition as Heidi. And it was Rhodes who, after a four-city search, hired 1982 Cerebral Palsy Poster Child Jenny Jacobs in Chicago.

Jacobs, 13, does nicely in her first professional acting job, demonstrating that it made good sense creatively to hire someone whose disability paralleled Heidi’s.

“If I hadn’t have done that, I couldn’t have lived with myself,” Rhodes said recently. Not to do it, she added, would have “violated the trust of the piece.”

Viewers should note also that the actress playing the adult Heidi walks with a limp that appears genuine. It’s Barbara Britt’s legacy from childhood polio.

Rhodes very easily could have cast an able-bodied actress with a fake limp for this tiny role, but instead chose Britt, whom she met while teaching an acting class in Dallas, where the actress lives.

Although it seems like only a small thing that Rhodes did, it’s a big thing in Hollywood, where narrow-mindedness, not their own bodies, is the foe of actors with disabilities.