TV REVIEW : ‘Life & Times’ Profiles Riot Area Residents

“Exit King Blvd.,” a “Life & Times” special 90-minute episode airing tonight at 7:30 on KCET Channel 28 (repeating Saturday at 3 p.m), is a laudable attempt to fulfill the series’ stated mandate: “to reflect the attitudes, goals and accomplishments of the people who make up the diverse cultures of this vast community.”

Laudable and timely but, unfortunately, this profile of some residents and merchants from the area near the intersection of Western Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a neighborhood that was in the center of the recent riots, only partially meets those goals. We do get a decent sampling of “attitudes” and such but this just isn’t enough to make for compelling or even interesting viewing. “Exit” merely strings together mini-interviews intercut with riot footage and riot-related images and music--the result is an unfocused, long 90 minutes.

The “diverse cultures”--African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans--are a reflection of the neighborhood, and there is a cross-section of individuals ranging from religious leaders to shopkeepers, from a policeman to the now-obligatory former gangbanger spouting poetry. It is a scattershot approach that, despite the producers’ intentions, doesn’t add much to the post-riot dialogue. There is much invoking of the sacred buzzwords unity and power and the like but the mini-interviews in “Exit” are overly familiar and ultimately tedious.

The producers of “Life & Times” are scheduled to go back to the same turf during the next 18 months to see how those working to rebuild the neighborhood are faring. Let’s hope the upcoming batch of shows is worth the return visit.