TV REVIEW : Principal Reforms School in ‘A Town Torn Apart’

Hollywood’s portrayal of American high schools has generally veered between the Hell’s Angel image (“Blackboard Jungle” to “Lean on Me”) to stories that actually dramatize the process of learning (“Stand and Deliver” and “Dead Poets Society”). The latter, like good teaching itself, are rare and inspiring.

Joining the narrow field of visionary dramas about kids and their teachers is “A Town Torn Apart,” the true story of a New Hampshire high school principal who entered a nightmare world of graffiti, vandalism, dropouts and despairing faculty and miraculously turned a slum of a school into a bastion of educational reform (at 9 tonight on Channels 4, 37 and 39).

A bushy-bearded Michael Tucker (“L.A. Law”) stars as the real-life Dennis (Doc) Littky, a free spirit who flees the pressure of New York City schools for the tranquillity of a small town in New England. When he lands, by default, the principal’s job at Thayer High in Winchester, N.H., he shocks students and their parents by showing up for work in sandals and open collar and insisting that the kids call him by his first name or, preferably, “Doc.”

Much like Robin Williams’ character in “Dead Poets Society”--and planets removed from Morgan Freeman’s baseball-bat-wielding principal in “Lean on Me”--producer-director Daniel Petrie’s production mirrors an ongoing debate in American schools: drastic, even threatening classroom reform versus a stern-fisted return to the three Rs, accompanied by harsh discipline.

Refreshingly, Littky doesn’t have a budget deficit to worry about. Money’s no problem. The issue here is how to improve teaching, not whether to strike and hit the bricks. (That alone makes it a movie of ideals.)

Yet Littky, whom Tucker turns into a lovable Pied Piper, must fight for his very job when the wrath of conservative parents comes down on him with a vengeance and tears the town in two. Forget that the students have found respect, are actually enjoying learning and that once-cynical teachers are eager to teach again: Hell hath no fury like angry parents threatened by change (led here by the frosty Carole Galloway).

But Littky has plenty of firepower too, from a young convert of a teacher who runs for the school board (Tucker’s real-life wife, Jill Eikenberry) to students who soar from delinquents to achievers, notably a muralist (Nicholas Van Burek) who turns a dreary classroom wall into a beautiful painting of Pegasus--a winged metaphor for dreams taking flight.

The affecting teleplay by Anne Gerard is based on the book “Doc,” by Susan Kammeraad-Campbell.