‘Witness’: How Far Will TV Go? : Television: The NBC movie about a pay-per-view execution muddles its message and sidesteps the real question: Should these acts of public policy be televised?

The movie is “Witness to the Execution.” It’s 1999, when television’s 500-channel universe has arrived, bringing a pay-for-view telecast of a killer’s date with the electric chair. It sounds as bad as paying for New Year’s Eve with Howard Stern.

Sean Young is strapped into this largely witless NBC effort as a high-voltage TV executive who creates the Ultimate Program. Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace from a script by Thomas Baum, “Witness to the Execution” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 4, 36 and 39, affirming just how far television will go to make a movie about just how far television will go.

Not far enough, it turns out. “Witness to the Execution” fails on its own narrow terms by fogging its message and blunting the impact of its final electrical current. Nor does it address the broader issue of whether executions should be televised so that Americans can witness their public policy in action.

As a careerist said to have “slept her way to the middle,” Jessica Traynor (Young) is one of those familiar faces from Hollywood’s cookie cutter. So let’s waste no time getting her down to her black lace bra and panties. Much hotter, though, is the dilemma she faces as the new programming chief at Tycom Entertainment.

*

“We’re in trouble, Jess,” says the firm’s predatory CEO (Len Cariou). “Movies don’t work. Screen’s still too small. Sports is dying. The sex boom is over. Where the hell are we going? Why would anybody really pay to watch TV? What are they really looking for?”

Heads together now: There’s a coup in Cuba. “We can get the guerrillas for under a million,” says Jessica, sounding like warmed-over Faye Dunaway in “Network.” Borrrrrring. NASA’s Mars landing, maybe? Borrrrrring . What to do? Her face as blank as color bars, Jessica cocks her head and waits for the tiny light bulbs in her brain to click on.

Young’s skimpy performance is a one-channel universe measured against the grisly extravaganza that her character is about to stage. Tycom’s “Countdown to Justice” will be the big burn, a blockbuster execution headed for 20 million homes.

With polls showing most Americans fed up with violent crime and favoring capital punishment, “Countdown to Justice” is good business. Tycom will do death big, telecasting it live in prime time from someplace called the Megadome, preceded by the national anthem. It will be packaged like the Super Bowl, with promos, billboards, a pre-show hosted by a priest and a phone poll at $1 a pop.

Naturally the state gets a cut. After some haggling over rights, the governor settles for 30%, with some of the money going to put more cops on the streets. Another $5 million will be split between a comatose victim and the young daughter of the Death Row inmate whom Jessica picks from videotapes like a news director selecting an anchor. The condemned star-to-be is multiple slayer Dennis Casterlane (Tim Daly), a seductive manipulator with Ted Bundy charm and looks.

When callous Jessica begins believing in his innocence, everything changes.

Anyone who has been watching lately hardly needs to be told by “Witness to the Execution” the lengths to which some in television will go to attract and grip an audience. The line for acceptable TV behavior continues to move, frequently in the wrong direction. For striking evidence of spreading gunk, have a look at today’s tabloid TV, under whose mantle so-called legitimate media and the usual greasers are now merging.

So what’s the big deal? Instead of being jarring, this movie merely slams down another exclamation point, diverting attention from a more salient matter regarding executions: They should be available on free TV to a society that endorses them, instead of being abstractions, carried out almost clandestinely beyond public view.

As if they were a source of shame.

*

If the telecast of an execution is barbaric, what does that say about the execution? The point was last raised in California two years ago when public station KQED-TV in San Francisco was denied permission to tape murderer Robert Alton Harris’ death in San Quentin’s gas chamber.

If condemned people give permission, and their crimes and the pain they’ve caused are properly noted, why shouldn’t there be execution telecasts?

Terrible taste, you say? Sure, and gas chambers are good taste?

Said one media observer who witnessed the Harris execution: “There was a point when his face turned kind of red and a vein stood out on his forehead . . . and his cheek puffed out.” Thus, it’s possible that the gruesomeness of televised executions would bolster the anti-capital punishment crowd. Or they could go the other way, desensitizing viewers to the spectacle. Yet if capital punishment is the deterrent its supporters claim, then showing executions logically would strengthen that deterrent by putting an even heavier scare into potential murderers.

Whichever the case, executions deserve air-time. Shown late at night with proper advisories, they would render moot such fast-buck scenarios as the one depicted in “Witness to the Execution.”

Timidly straddling its own soapbox, this movie is a preacher with no lucid message. Ultimately second-guessing her own telecast plans, Jessica belatedly has a Deep Thought about Casterlane’s scheduled public death: “Is that going to keep people from killing or just turn them on?” That thought begets another: “We’re the problem . . . we’re the lunatics.”

Just who she means, executioners or telecasters, is not clear. Nor is a comically pretentious and overwrought finale that Young punctuates with a screeching fury that itself is almost lethal. Is it aimed at the execution or at the execution show? Or at herself for doing this clunker?