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TV Reviews : Thrills Extinguished Early in Banal ‘Fire!’

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If you want to clear a crowded theater, as everyone knows, yell “Fire!” If you want to clear a crowded living room, meanwhile, turn on “Fire! Trapped on the 37th Floor” (airing at 9 tonight at 9 on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42). Based on the spectacular high-rise fire in downtown Los Angeles in May, 1988, it’s as woozily banal as TV docudrama gets, about as thrilling as two hours of unabated smoke inhalation.

One can imagine what the script must’ve looked like: “He coughs.” “She coughs.” “He coughs again repeatedly.” As workaholic executives trapped on the titular floor during the late-night blaze, Lisa Hartman and Peter Scolari have little to do but exchange increasingly phlegmatic banter, trying not to pass out before the rescue team arrives. Viewers will succumb well before these two threaten to.

Outside the First Interstate Building, Lee Majors, as Capt. Sterling, does little but bark orders into a microphone, deal with Hartman’s distraught boyfriend, and look briefly pained when told of the fire’s lone early casualty, as if suddenly existentially aware that one man’s death diminishes us all.

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These nonentities, amazingly, are the three characters of any significance in this disaster of a disaster mini-movie. It’s not exactly “The Towering Inferno”; it’s so slight and ill-conceived that it hardly even registers as a real film.

Gil Melle’s inane score, which has the synthesized gracelessness of a mediocre jazz cat let loose after hours on the church organ, neatly underscores the sleepy cheesiness of Jeffrey Bloom’s awful teleplay and Robert Day’s equally smoke-damaged direction. Cough cough.

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