TV Reviews : Just in Time: a Thanksgiving Turkey

Surely, Mary Tyler Moore will never be involved with any project more tasteless than the uncooked turkey that is “Thanksgiving Day” (tonight at 9 on Channels 4, 36 and 39). Just in time for the holidays, this TV movie is like the drunken uncle with a lampshade on his head who won’t go away until he tells you every gag he learned from Playboy’s Party Jokes twice.

It’s a “black comedy,” the promotional material tells us; this, of course, almost inevitably means that someone will fall over in some food and die, with uproarious consequences for a side-splitting ensemble cast. The cuisine here is turkey, and the wacky victim is Tony Curtis, making a merciful early exit as the scion of a wealthy family that made its name in high-quality industrial gloves. (Tittering already, are you?)

Moore, as his widow, grieves, but not for long. “Even though your father and I only made love biannually, I’m starting to get horny,” she tells her three bickering children--a shiftless, bratty ne’er-do-well, a pale TV addict and an insecure lesbian. There’s a happy ending in store for everyone, though, including the wayward daughter, who meets ladies’ man Sonny Bono and straightens out.

Since one child has struck up a romance with a forgotten TV personality, poor, put-upon Moore also attempts to start a new life by going out with Morton Downey Jr., who shows up just long enough to vomit in the bushes. There are jokes aplenty about butch women and death and vibrators.

Sample dialogue: “I can’t believe Daddy’s gone. I’ve got a pain in my stomach that won’t go away.” Rejoinder: “Maybe if you stopped eating the pistachios.” Black comedy really doesn’t get much more irreverent than this, does it?

“Thanksgiving Day” (written and produced by “Revenge of the Nerds’ ” Steve Zacharias and Jeff Buhai) may indeed cause you to count your blessings, starting with being grateful that so very little TV is anywhere near this relentlessly moronic. Just say no thanks.

‘Amnesty Files’ True in Spirit to Activist Group

In attempting to dramatize what the human-rights activist organization Amnesty International does, the creators of the TV movie “Forgotten Prisoners: The Amnesty Files” have gone for a fictional treatment that lands squarely between “Mission: Impossible” and “Missing.” It’s probably the best possible approach they could have taken to the subject matter, and it nearly succeeds--but for a debilitating over-generalization. It airs three times tonight, at 7, 9 and 11 on the TNT cable network.

It was thought too risky to existing Amnesty operatives overseas to dramatize an actual case study, so the story is a composite, set in the country in which almost anyone would least like to be arrested, Turkey. Knowing that weakens the viewing, because “Forgotten Prisoners” would be more compelling if it were a real-life tale. As a homogenized one, true in spirit but not in characters, the case seems a bit too generic.

Writers Rex Weiner (whose L.A. Weekly story provided the basis for the teleplay) and Cindy Myers do flesh out their two leads, Ron Silver and Hector Elizondo, with likable quirks. Silver, an American attorney on his first mission to document cases of government torture, keeps a sense of humor amid his growing horror: “You won’t believe this,” he says into a pay phone. “They’ve got a guy watching me who looks like Tom Cruise. Yeah, Tom Cruise in Turkey.” Elizondo, as his Turkish liaison, playfully patronizes Silver, but the urgency of the situation is foremost; it thankfully never degenerates into a buddy movie.

Less intriguing detail is given to the political cartoonist (Chris Hunter) they’re trying to save via international pressure. He stands up to gruesome torture admirably and lengthily, and as such is a sort of Everyprisoner, but his plight never takes on the significance it might if we learned a little about his life as a free man and social antagonist. Good intentions are almost good enough for “Forgotten Prisoners,” which repeats Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday.