TV Reviews : ‘Descending Angel’ Recycles Timeworn Plot

Television is such a hungry puppy; it snaps up everything in sight to fill its stomach. So it often seems that the medium long ago ran out of plots and that the trick now is recycling them with a few new twists and some twisty characters.

In “Descending Angel,” which premieres on HBO Sunday night at 9, executive producer Freyda Rothstein, director Jeremy Kagen and writers Robert Siegel, Grace Woodard and Alan Sharp have turned to the old hidden-Nazi story.

Young lovers Michael (Eric Roberts) and Irina (Diane Lane) go to Michigan to see her dad, Florian (George C. Scott), and get his nuptial blessing. He’s a Romanian immigrant who survived concentration camps and now holds exalted status in Grand Rapids.

Or is Florian--as mysterious stranger Bercovici (Mark Margolis) claims--a Nazi collaborator who conducted the slaughter of 800 Jews in the Kayatsa camp?

Michael is taken aback: Can Florian be this monster? Is the whole Romanian community in some eerie conspiracy? Is Bercovici’s accidental death really an accident? Will adoring daughter Irina believe the unbelievable?

Good cast, good performances--but it doesn’t take long for the viewer to realize that the script should have been ground up. It’s so much puppy chow.