TV Reviews : Dunne’s ‘People’ Offers a Diverting Story on NBC

Dominick Dunne has risen to eminence as chief chronicler of our social elite. He has great eyes and ears for wretched elegance, as witness his Vanity Fair pieces on Phyllis McGuire, Candy Spelling and Claus von Bulow. Dunne reached Boswellian heights with his biting novel on old-money, upscaled New York, “People Like Us.” People like them were consumed with conjecture over who was who. Now it comes to NBC at 9 Sunday and Monday nights. As such translations go, rewriters Mart Crowley and Kathleen Shelley simplified the intertwisted people and plots to TV taste, but it’s still a diverting story, with some delicious moments.

Central player is society writer Gus Bailey (played by Ben Gazarra), who is obsessed when his daughter’s ex-lover-psycho-killer gets a thin prison sentence.

(The key curiosity here, as in the book: Gus plots to kill the killer. In real life, when the man who killed Dunne’s daughter received a short term, did Dunne think about a murderous revenge? Is Gus Bailey really Dominick Dunne?)

Gus writes about the richly bored idle class, among them a socialite who marries a Jew, much to the impenetrable chagrin of her mother, Lil Artemus, who represents ancient wealth. Eva Marie Saint has been getting wimpy roles lately, but as Lil she is grandly bitchy and, ultimately, as her world collapses into shambles, she is a most poignant image of the perishing breed. It’s a singular performance, among her very best.