TV Reviews : ‘Seeds of Tragedy’--Drama, Limited Caution About Cocaine

The drug-themed TV movie “Seeds of Tragedy” (tonight at 8 on Fox Channel 11) has such a nifty plot device you may wonder why no one’s thought to use it before: The story’s purely episodic arc traces the route of a shipment of cocaine, from the young boy who harvests the coca in Peru through the hands of various shady couriers on up to the dealers and users who are its final destination in Los Angeles.

Good idea, bad execution; “Seeds” is an appropriate title for a well-intended movie whose vignettes never sprout into ideas. Overwrought, glossy “grit” and inherent sermonizing do blossom, for by the time the white stuff reaches the United States, we can be sure that bullets, seizures and various forms of degradation will ensue. Trouble is, from its South American drug lords to its limo-driving L.A. street pushers, this often preposterous pastiche feels like the drug culture as imagined from newspaper accounts, not as lived.

Certainly the bare outline of the coke’s trail is credible, but too many of the details seem generic or false. To swallow this version, you’d have to believe a dealer who just knocked off half a dozen rivals would send his precious stash halfway across the country in the trunk of a car driven by an unknowing student--in unlocked suitcases. You’d have to believe that the cops who bust the pick-up men would brag that they plan to steal half the haul--within earshot of their handcuffed suspects.

You might also have to believe the round-table meeting/murder scene in Columbia wasn’t inspired by “The Untouchables,” or that the climax where the good kid dies for the bad kid’s sins on an L.A. street isn’t out of Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” video.

The danger accompanying the cocaine seems to grow the closer it gets to California, where the final seedy scenes are set amid the lowlife crack culture. It might have been more interesting to invert the risk and end the story among the jet set--to show people getting shot up in Peru for their cargo, followed by scenes of blase Beverly Hills partyers, blissfully unaware of the bloody trail their high took. But that would have been irony, not melodrama.

“Seeds of Tragedy” was executive-produced by always-adventurous Sarah Pillsbury and Midge Sanford, and structurally this effort bears their admirably chance-taking mark. Dramatically, though, it doesn’t add up to more than another cautionary tale for kids.