TV REVIEW : ‘Brokaw’: Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

Bang bang, you’re dead.

Tonight’s edition of “The Brokaw Report” (at 9 on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39), “America the Violent,” hits you like a drive-by shooting. It whooshes by, with random, scattershot fury, firing at any available target. And with about as much thought.

This is super-caffeinated television on a supercharged subject-- subjects , really, for host Tom Brokaw tries to cover every sensational aspect of our violent culture: gangs, cities’ impotence in the face of exploding crime, the rampant spread of firearms, the politics and culture of gun owners, the violence-driven sounds of heavy metal and rap, the movies’ addiction to blood and guts, the parents’ fight to curb it all. All faster than the speed of sound, or the speed of our brains to absorb it all.

Of course, any one of these topics would fill an hour’s air time and would not be exhausted. Take, for example, movie violence, which a growing number of critics are blaming for bloodletting outside--and inside--theaters. It raises a complex debate involving censorship, aesthetics and theorized, unproven notions that movie activity directly influences human activity. Here, we see nothing but frantic snippets of film clips (Clint Eastwood’s “Make my day . . . “) and frantic snippets of comments involving no film experts, who might have pointed out that one of the first American film images was a cowboy shooting point blank at a camera in “The Great Train Robbery.”

The program’s not-so-hidden agenda is vaguely pro-gun control. In a blatant attempt to make them appear ridiculous, one gun-totin’ family is shown dressing up in cowboy togs and even riding little wooden horses during their weekend shooting outing. Brokaw lamely tries to balance this with images of gun-user safety, but it’s the silly Clint wanna-bes you remember. The hyperactivity rushes to an end with a concluding seven-minute discussion pitting three gun critics--Brokaw, public health expert Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith and Baltimore police official Col. Leonard Supenski--against the Colt Co.’s Ronald Stilwell. Underlying social causes get lost in a lather of rhetoric and, once again, network news has cast more heat than light on a tough issue.