TV Reviews : A ‘Labor Day Show’ That Really Works

The very idea of a television special celebrating this oxymoron of a holiday, Labor Day, sounds off-putting to the happily vacationing viewer: Won’t a show about work be, uh, laborious to sit through, after all?

Happily, it’s no chore whatsoever to watch the breezy PBS presentation “The Labor Day Show,” airing at 7:30 tonight on KCET Channel 28 and at 8 on KPBS Channel 15. It’s a delightfully fitting way to end the three-day weekend that itself unofficially ends summer.

A well-connected melange of dramatized comedy bits, documentary visits, literary readings, vintage film clips and musical numbers, the 90-minute special provides a sure way for the proletariat and power broker alike to gently ease back into the week.

The interstitial material of the show is a fictional late-night Labor Day visit to a real New Jersey roadside diner, where Margaret Smith, the hilariously deadpan comic often seen on “Late Night With David Letterman,” is the unflappable head waitress.

Her bored customers and co-workers--played by character actors such as Austin Pendleton--magically turn into monologuists, giving impassioned readings on the subject of work from E.L. Doctorow, E.B. White, Studs Terkel and a variety of oral traditions.

Most of the program, though, is straight docu-fare, from the man-on-the-street interviews where folks recount their worst jobs ever (washing bedpans, picking stems out of apples) to the holiday-related segment on “Men and Their Bar-B-Ques” (“The true barbecuer will not use gas,” claims one suburban expert) to the quick visits to more actual workplaces than you can shake a union card at.

Best irony of many in this smart, charming hodgepodge: A montage interspersing a manufacturer of small books who sets type and prints each volume by hand with a young man who works as part of USA Today’s massive satellite transmission printing process. Neither is any less proud than the other. Workers of the world . . . tonight.