TV REVIEW : Premiere Probes Nelson Crash

After Rick Nelson died in a 1985 plane crash that also killed his fiancee and members of his band, there were rumors that he had been free-basing cocaine inside the craft, causing a fire in the cabin.

“What Happened?” That’s the pretentious title of an NBC series that opens at 8:30 tonight (on Channels 4, 36 and 39) with a probe of the crash. It concludes that Nelson--who became a fairly successful folk-rock singer after getting famous as a youngster on his parents’ “Ozzie and Harriet” TV show--was not doing drugs on the flight and that there were other reasons for the catastrophe.

Mixing re-enactments with interviews and actual footage, however, this overanalyzed, overcooked half hour hosted by Ken Howard oversells itself like some cheap tabloid. Instead of the hyped “real story of Rick Nelson’s last flight,” it offers little more than a theory suggested by an investigation undertaken by Failure Analysis Associates, a disaster research firm whose high-tech sleuthing underpins this series. And even Nelson himself likely would have done a second take at hearing himself described here as a “true American hero,” when, in fact, he was largely out of the public eye at the time of his death.

“What Happened?” concludes with a short but tediously technical examination of the causes of a dirt bike accident.

Mayday!