Where’s All the Good Storytelling on Television? : TV movies: The art of drama specials has been forfeited to cable as the Big Three turn to more fast-buck exploitation films.

It’s hard to believe that the Big Three networks are the same companies that once gave us “Twelve Angry Men,” “Hamlet,” “An Early Frost” and “The Execution of Private Slovik.”

Except for rare network endeavors nowadays, the storytelling art of drama specials has been forfeited to cable television as ABC, CBS and NBC increasingly turn their attention to fast-buck exploitation films.

If the play’s the thing--and it is increasingly less so at the Big Three despite their flood of formula TV movies--you’re better off seeking out such cable channels as TNT or HBO, which tonight offers James Garner in “Barbarians at the Gate,” with a screenplay by Larry Gelbart.

The lines between the networks and cable were drawn more sharply this week as TNT, bluntly zinging the more mundane, headline-oriented exploitation movies on the Big Three, announced a lineup of coming specials that clearly aim for a higher level of creativity.

TNT’s future projects include Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” starring John Malkovich, and David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theater,” with Jack Lemmon and Matthew Broderick. On Wednesday, the channel offered Joanne Woodward and Brian Dennehy in the television movie “Foreign Affairs.”

In stark contrast to TNT’s announcement was last week’s NBC disclosure, in the season of Amy Fisher films, that it is planning three more reality drama specials in the near future, dealing with the World Trade Center bomb attack in New York, the cult standoff in Waco, Tex., and Hurricane Andrew.

TNT is another of Ted Turner’s cable channels--and once again he and/or his staff have been quick to spot network vulnerability and move on it. First it was news with CNN, and now, increasingly, it is drama with TNT.

The TNT channel also has in the works a series of dramas dealing with the historical experience of American Indians.

In recent years, occasional network dramas such as “Sarah, Plain and Tall,” “O Pioneers!” and the miniseries “Lonesome Dove” have reminded viewers what network television can do when it sets its sights on grand-style dramatic entertainment.

At the same time, alas, weekly drama series--another onetime mark of network distinction--have been replaced more and more by reality shows, which are generally less expensive and, in some cases, don’t require actors and screenwriters.

Here and there, signs emerge that the networks may suddenly be aware of just how much they are forfeiting in the decline of their drama specials. ABC has an Oliver Stone miniseries, “Wild Palms,” in May. And CBS’ planned miniseries include “Return to Lonesome Dove.”

Significantly, however, another opponent of the Big Three--the Fox Broadcasting Co.--is moving next week into the arena of ambitious original drama that the networks have been abandoning. On Tuesday, “Tribeca,” a one-hour anthology series co-produced by Robert De Niro, debuts on Fox with “contemporary urban tales about New York City’s downtown community.”

The Big Three, which once thrived on original stories and wide-ranging tales, have unimaginatively relied in recent years on a string of fact-based specials that were sometimes worthwhile but too often formulaic: disease-of-the-week movies, women in jeopardy, abuse themes and stories of violent crime.

It became a kind of parasitic storytelling--frequently grabbing a headline and running with it. Viewers might well have been asking: Whatever happened to entertainment? You know, applying real standards of art and creativity to the stories at hand, including those that are “fact-based,” and giving us the jolt of fresh thinking.

We saw it in years past on the networks in such works as “Friendly Fire,” “Marty,” “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittmann,” “Eleanor and Franklin,” “Death of a Salesman,” “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” “Little Moon of Alban,” “Elvis,” “My Sweet Charlie” and “That Certain Summer.”

Not to mention “Something About Amelia,” “The Days of Wine and Roses,” “Judgment at Nuremburg,” “Gideon’s Trumpet,” “The Price of Tomatoes,” “A Christmas Memory,” “The Homecoming,” “Playing for Time,” “A Woman Called Golda,” “Tail Gunner Joe,” “My Body, My Child,” “Patterns,” “Brian’s Song,” “The Miracle Worker” and “Love Among the Ruins.”

Many of these are from TV’s earlier years--but that’s the point: They helped make the networks special. Yet now the Big Three are deserting another of their strengths at their own peril. As the modern era of television dawned, HBO saw the opening. And starting in 1983, its original dramas began to challenge the Big Three, finally surpassing them in range and ambition.

The ambition was marked by such efforts as “Sakharov,” “Murrow,” “Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8,” “Mandela,” “Waldheim: A Commission of Inquiry,” “Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story,” “Age-Old Friends,” “The Josephine Baker Story,” “Citizen Cohn” and “Stalin.”

Not all succeeded, but the Big Three are trying very little that is comparable in range. Soon we will be getting a major HBO work about AIDS that failed to make the networks, “And the Band Played On.” An HBO spokesman says another drama is in the works about the late CBS chairman William S. Paley.

And “Barbarians at the Gate,” which deals with a true story about big business, shows how you can do something imaginative with a fact-based tale.

TV storytelling is mostly in its dramas. As the Big Three weaken their commitment to real storytelling in favor of reality shows, the term “lowest common denominator” takes on a new and more ominous meaning--for the networks more than for us. After all, viewers have a wondrous panoply of storytelling alternatives: PBS, film channels such as American Movie Classics, videocassettes, HBO, TNT and various other cable networks.

We are watching a very sad phase of the history of the Big Three--not just their financial pressures, but the collapse of glorious dreams that gave us “The Winds of War,” “Roots,” “The Day After,” “Wallenberg,” “Shogun,” “Holocaust,” “Centennial,” “Macbeth,” “The Invincible Mr. Disraeli,” “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” “The Neon Ceiling,” “Fear on Trial,” “Duel,” “The Glass Menagerie” and “Victoria Regina.”

There was some grandness here. But now: Amy Fisher. In a hurry. Without art. There are other priorities these days.