The Endings Are Always Happy in TV Land

Would Hollywood’s myth spinners dare to make a movie that created a cheery ending for the Los Angeles riots of 1992? Don’t bet against it.

Robert Altman’s terrific new film “The Player” uses devastating humor to ridicule the entertainment industry’s propensity toward capping even the most downbeat stories with something upbeat. Heartwarming is the operative word here. The “Hallmark Hall of Fame” production “Miss Rose White” demonstrated that recently. And on ABC Sunday night, so did “Sexual Advances.”

“Miss Rose White” was a poignant 1940s story about a young Jewish woman who emigrated to America from Poland with her father, a rigid man who later became enraged upon learning that she had anglicized her family name in order to assimilate. It appeared that the story would end with father and daughter irreversibly estranged, a melancholy but reasonable and acceptable conclusion given their shattered relationship.

It wasn’t to be, however. In the story’s final minutes, the bitter father turned away from his daughter toward a window, ignoring her, refusing even to acknowledge her presence, to say nothing of her wish to reconcile. But a few sweet words melted granite. The father pivoted and the two embraced. Tears in, fade out.

The father was out of character; television was very much in character.

For years now, affixing smiling faces and magic resolutions to dramas has been TV’s prevailing procedure, the assumption being that viewers would not tolerate complexity or ambivalence. Too bad. It’s not that every drama should be so bleak that viewers would want to slash their wrists--we get enough of that from the crime-laden late news--only that some stories demand more than the inevitable smoothing of all bumps.

They were smoothed very late in “Sexual Advances,” which starred Stephanie Zimbalist as a happily married careerist who was sexually harassed at the office by her immediate superior. William Russ played the miserable slug who tormented her with the tacit approval of the company’s smarmy male president.

“Sexual Advances” put a realistically grotesque face on sexual harassment, unflinchingly depicting the kind of workplace horror and humiliation imposed on probably more women than we’ll ever learn about. The Russ character’s coarse, lewd behavior was much more an expression of power and control than lust. Other males in the executive suite winked at his conduct, and the Zimbalist character’s female colleagues were unsympathetic to her plight, increasing her sense of isolation. Thus, within the confines of television, “Sexual Advances” could not have been more convincing.

Until the final few sequences.

Just when it appeared that the victim would be bought off with a settlement and unfairly drummed from the company for complaining about her mistreatment while her nemesis stayed behind and continued to flourish, whimsy intervened: The perpetrator got what he deserved, his target got her satisfaction. You sighed, relieved on one level, disappointed on another.

The outcome was awkward. It was artificial. It represented what actually happens in probably only a small fraction of real-life sexual harassment cases, where, despite the consciousness raising of the last few years, “Rocky” endings for the good guys are infrequent.

But it met the prime-time standard. It made you feel real good.

“Sexual Advances” could have ended with more integrity by having the woman decide to take legal action against her company, leaving the rest to chance. But even that single loose end was apparently one too many.

There’s something to be said for closure. It’s satisfying. It’s the way we’d like things to be. But television’s department of feel-good endings goes too far. Life is not tidy. It is loose ends. We should encourage television that’s uplifting, but not at the expense of honesty.

A friend of mine--a victim of sexual harassment herself--put in her two cents. “The guy who did it to me used to ask me if I had sex with my boyfriend over the weekend,” said my friend. “He’d ask me what color underwear I had on. I’d make a perfectly ordinary remark, and he’d make a lewd remark out of it. You know, you’re at the Xerox machine and you’re doing your job and your boss comes up and says you’ve got great breasts or a cute rear end. If it’s some guy at the dry cleaners who says it to you, it may bother you, but it’s different because he doesn’t have power over you.”

One day her boss mentioned that he believed there was no such thing as date rape, that if a woman knew the man, it wasn’t rape. “He looked right at me when he said it. What was I supposed to think?”

Did she complain to anyone about him? “No. I felt there was nothing I could do. He was the supervisor. I was told by other women he had been doing it for 25 years. He did it to them, too. And you know, the funny thing is that he gave me two promotions. The women that did complain about him didn’t get promotions.”

Her story largely parallels “Sexual Advances,” except for those last sequences. She, too, eventually left, but without a happy ending pulled from a hat. “He was told to stop doing what he was doing,” she said. “But he never lost his position. And I heard last week that he started to bother another woman.”

One could argue that the ending for “Sexual Advances” delivered a motivational message that women needed to hear, that victory over sexual harassers is possible. An even more compelling argument, however, is that the ending distorted what usually happens and, in doing so, detracted from the compelling realism that preceded it.

The Exploiter: The title this week goes to cable’s TNT network, which, surely motivated by the recent turbulence that ravaged parts of Los Angeles and reverberated throughout the country, moved the 1990 movie “Heat Wave” into its Monday night lineup. “Heat Wave” is about the 1965 Watts riots.

Baton-swinging cops and African-Americans duking it out on television? Now? With emotions from the 1992 riots still smoldering? Yes, just what we all needed.