Thomas-Hill: Docudrama Couldn’t Do the Real Drama Justice

Jay Leno put it best. The government, he told his “Tonight Show” audience this week, missed a great opportunity to wipe out the national debt: “They should have put the (Clarence) Thomas hearings on pay-per-view.”

Perhaps not since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 has a TV event seized the nation as emotionally as the Senate testimony of Thomas and Anita Hill, whose sexual harassment accusations marred his ascent to the Supreme Court.

Most big TV stories--even the 1973 Watergate hearings--are about people far removed from our own experience. We watch in fascination--but it’s all about them . This was about us --the ultimate workplace story, the ultimate water-cooler story.

For days, Americans watched with visceral reactions--angry, upset, bitterly divided, torn, drained and, finally, exhausted. The country needed a long weekend to recover.

So who’s going to play Thomas in the TV movie? And who’s going to portray Hill?

Nobody, if TV is smart.

Past experience has shown that no TV movie, from the Ollie North story to the recent ABC special about the Gulf War--”The Heroes of Desert Storm”--has a chance of matching the home-screen impact of the real thing that the public has just seen.

Even films that deal much later with TV events etched in our memories--Watergate, the slayings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Challenger disaster, the era of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy--fail to approach the gut-wrenching intensity of the actual moment.

No actor on Earth could match the performances of Thomas and Hill as they battled for public belief before a mesmerized nation. A lot of years will have to pass before the memory fades.

Opening day of the Thomas-Hill showdown was watched by network viewers in nearly 21 million homes--and that doesn’t include PBS, CNN or C-SPAN, with their extensive coverage.

C-SPAN, which covered the hearings gavel-to-gavel, reported an “unprecedented number of first-time callers” to its live phone-in programs last weekend. There were nearly 700 callers, more than 440 of whom were phoning the channel for the first time.

The “emotional intensity of many callers’ comments (was) remarkable,” says Susan Swain, senior vice president of C-SPAN. Many callers remarked that “they had never before called any television or radio network on any issue,” the Washington-based channel reported.

Once upon a time, before the networks deserted the documentary form, we could expect a flood of informative, well-reported, prime-time news programs following up and going behind the scenes of the Thomas hearings.

But docudramas don’t have a chance to compare with what we have seen on TV of the 1989 China uprising, the collapse of communism in Europe or the historic interview with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that ABC only recently brought us.

Reality began asserting itself over fiction on TV from the earliest years of the medium.

In 1951, for instance, the nation was transfixed by the hearings on organized crime conducted by Sen. Estes Kefauver. The dramatic effect of these hearings was not lost on Congress.

In 1954, the Army-McCarthy hearings, which helped write an end to the witch-hunting senator, became another landmark TV event. When NBC broadcast the drama “Tail Gunner Joe” in 1977, with Peter Boyle as McCarthy, it was still weak tea compared to what happened a quarter-century before.

There was electricity in the air when President Kennedy went on TV in 1962 to face down the Soviet Union over its sending of missiles to Cuba. In 1974, TV brought us a dramatized version of that story, “The Missiles of October,” with William Devane as Kennedy. It was good, but the icy fear of a nuclear apocalypse during the real crisis is what we will always remember.

Nothing that TV has ever attempted dramatically about Vietnam could hope to match the reality that the war brought into our homes every night on the news. The best Vietnam drama, in fact, was set in the United States--the 1979 special “Friendly Fire,” with Carol Burnett as a mother determined to find out about the death of her son.

The 1973 Watergate hearings and the 1974 resignation of President Richard M. Nixon were phenomenal TV events. And in 1979, CBS attempted the miniseries “Blind Ambition,” with Martin Sheen as Nixon’s attorney during the crisis, John Dean. It was pretty dull stuff.

In 1989, Lane Smith was remarkable as Nixon in ABC’s “The Final Days,” about the President’s White House departure. But Nixon remains more remarkably complex than any actor who tries to capture him.

The idea that anyone could be more dramatic than the real Oliver North during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings on TV was idiotic. Yet CBS insisted on doing a dead-in-the-water miniseries about North, “Guts and Glory,” in 1989, incredibly going ahead with the show even as a jury was deciding his fate.

North may provide some more fascinating viewing Monday and Tuesday on Ted Koppel’s “Nightline,” when he sits for a two-part interview to plug his autobiography.

TV is probably best suited to attempt docudramas of long-past historical figures or news stories that we see only in bits and pieces--from the Roe vs. Wade abortion case to the 1989 Carol Stuart murder, both of which were made into prime-time films.

Even when it comes to trivia, such as the Jim and Tammy Bakker story, TV rewrites aren’t as good as the vivid originals. NBC tried to cash in on the Bakker tale with the 1990 film “Fall from Grace.” But nothing could beat seeing the lovely couple themselves on TV--at work, or on “Nightline.”

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, as a nation of stunned TV viewers could testify this week.