TV Reviews : ‘Grass Roots’ Needs a Sprinkle of Sanity

Let us count the ways to concoct a potboiler. There’s politics, sex, white supremacy, rape, assassinations, homophobia, nymphomania, evangelism, suicide, the CIA, the FBI and the local sheriff.

NBC’s untidy “Grass Roots” (at 9 tonight and Tuesday on Channels 4, 36 and 39) has them all.

At least they’re spread over four hours.

Naturally, all this gothic horror and chaos happens in a small town in the Deep South, which writers and moviemakers consider more ill than the rest of the country. The show continues the Southern saga of the Lee family, which was introduced nine years ago in the six-hour miniseries “Chiefs.” That was about racism and a deranged killer.

“Grass Roots” is too.

The best way to watch the production--the only way--is loosely. That is, kick your feet up, take nothing too seriously, keep some trash literature by your side and let the show distract you, like a gossip column or a comic strip.

Two story lines intersect in Derek Marlowe’s script from a novel by Stuart Woods: (1) an ambitious lawyer (Corbin Bernsen) is defending a white youth (James Wilder) accused of raping and murdering a black woman, and (2) a programmed, ramrod supremacist (John Glover) is hell-bent on ridding Georgia of blacks, Jews and homosexuals.

Glover eerily delivers the bizarre goods as the maniacal angel of death, and Bernsen and CIA agent Mel Harris anchor the action as sensual, secret bedmates and the story’s nominal sane people.

Meanwhile, director Jerry London (reunited with executive producer Martin Manulis from “Chiefs”) struggles to give the hurtling story fragments a sense of cohesion, and in the concluding hour of Part 2, he succeeds well enough.

Raymond Burr, Katherine Helmond and Reginald VelJohnson are among the supporting players, but the performer who makes one of the most vivid impressions with the smallest part is Donzaleigh Avis Abernathy. Granted, her role as a rape victim is loaded, but she’s testament to the fact that some actors need only 20 or 30 seconds to nail down a character and propel the story at the same time.