TV Reviews : CBS’ ‘Quiet Killer’ Taps Plague Fears

New York’s in trouble. It’s bad enough that the Democrats are coming to town for a convention in the midst of a garbage strike, but people are hacking, coughing blood and dropping dead. What’s killing them is the black plague, otherwise known as yersinia pestis, a fatal virus that has Gotham on the verge of annihilation in “Quiet Killer” (at 9 tonight on CBS, Channels 2 and 8).

As calamity movies go, this one races along in the genre-honored tradition of panic-stricken cities. Calm is followed by an isolated illness, death, skepticism, cover-ups, quarantines, more cadavers, public exposure and riots.

I. C. Rapoport’s teleplay (based on the book “The Black Death” by Gwyneth Cravens and John S. Marr) isn’t posed as science fiction. As Kate Jackson, starring as the city’s chief epidemiologist, says with biblical wrath to a skeptical mayor (Al Waxman), “half the world was wiped out by the black plague in 546 A.D.”

On another and more insidious level, the epidemic here, however hammed up, is far from being a disease of the week. It subconsciously connects with our real fears of a world afflicted with AIDS and the threat of chemical or nuclear poisoning. The Black Death may be old, but a plague is a plague.