HBO Takes Road Networks Fear to Tread : Television: The cable channel mines the rich terrain of TV history, a subject avoided by ABC, NBC and CBS.

Network TV, expert at churning out ripped-from-the-headlines dramas, has been notoriously deficient in recording the story of one of the great social forces of our time: itself.

There are certainly specials about TV on network TV--but they tend to give superficial historical looks at the medium, from the Emmy Awards to reunions based on old hit series to, say, a drama about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

Once in a while, something special about what network TV has meant to this country--for better and worse--pops up, usually elsewhere. PBS had a terrific series in the 1980s marking the medium’s first half-century. Ken Burns’ 1992 documentary “Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio,” also on PBS, dealt with, among other people, TV visionary David Sarnoff, who headed RCA, former parent of NBC.

CBS recently presented a prime-time special about Edward R. Murrow’s showdown with Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy. The same network aired a tribute to its former chairman, William S. Paley, when he died in 1990.

Yet TV is so much a part of our lives, from presidential elections to the freeway chase of O.J. Simpson’s Ford Bronco, you would think that network creators could devise more than just a few substantial programs about the major and fascinating stories involving the broadcast organizations themselves and the impact of their decisions and corporate inner workings.

Passing series, from sitcoms to dramas that deal with TV--from “Buffalo Bill” to “Murphy Brown” to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”--don’t really fill the bill, despite their often-trenchant comments on the state of the business.

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But the larger scope is generally missing, despite such great potential yarns as the emergence of Fox Broadcasting Co. and the attempts of colorful entrepreneurs Ted Turner and Barry Diller to take over CBS, not to mention such significantly related tales as the creation and success of CNN.

The list goes on and on. But the networks, for obvious reasons--competition with each other, the preferences of advertisers and a simple lack of imagination--rarely, if ever, look at themselves in the mirror.

Enter HBO.

A pay-cable channel that doesn’t rely on advertisers, HBO has found rich terrain in the networks, their shenanigans and their history, from the comedy “The Larry Sanders Show”--a wickedly wonderful backstage spoof of a late-night talk program--to several dramas about famous figures and events of the medium that alternately repel and fascinate.

HBO has already, for instance, presented a drama about Murrow. And, Robert Cooper, head of HBO Pictures--which virtually swept the 1993 Emmy nominations for best TV movies--gave a status report the other day on two more films about network television that he has in the works.

One is “The Late Shift,” based on Bill Carter’s recent book about the battle between David Letterman and Jay Leno to succeed Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.” The other is based on Sally Bedell Smith’s 1990 book “In All His Glory,” which detailed the public and personal life of Paley, one of the mammoth figures of television.

“The Late Shift” is being produced by Ivan Reitman, whose motion pictures include “Dave” and “Ghostbusters.” And Barry Levinson (“Avalon,” “Diner”) is a producer of the saga of Paley, who died at 89.

The film “Broadcast News” showed that the public can be won over by backstage dramas about TV, and HBO seems to have gotten the message far more clearly than the networks.

Cooper, whose best-known HBO films include “And the Band Played On” and “Barbarians at the Gate,” thinks it is part of his channel’s strategy to tackle subjects that networks won’t--like themselves.

“We should be different from network TV. We’ve got to have something worth paying for,” he says. “My job is to fill in the spaces that they won’t. We can take greater risks, not because we’re more courageous, but because there’s no intermediary (sponsors). It’s just us and the people at home.”

Cooper says the script of “The Late Shift” is being written and that, unlike other HBO films that took a number of years to develop, “I think it’s something we ought to make soon” because of the timeliness of the Letterman-Leno story. He says that the planned film could be on the air around the end of 1995.

Reitman cracks that although it’s a “one-in-a-million” shot, he’d like to ask Leno and Letterman to play themselves. As for talk about who would be good to portray them, he says movie stars carry their own baggage of personality: “It’s better to just get good actors. I don’t think they have to be absolutely unknown, but you don’t want Clint Eastwood.

“I just think that it’s a great human story,” adds Reitman. “It’s different because they (Leno and Letterman) are in our bedrooms every night. So from a ratings standpoint, I guess that makes it attractive to HBO. This was the lifelong dream of both guys and they both deserve it. There’s no bad guy in it.”

Cooper says the latest script of the Paley drama came in several weeks ago and “they’re now looking for a director.” Among other things, he says, the story deals with the CBS leader’s competition with Sarnoff, his relationship with Murrow and what Paley “said he did and what he really did and didn’t do.”

Gail Mutrux, a producer involved in developing the Paley drama for Levinson’s Baltimore Pictures, says that HBO wants the film done by the summer of 1995. She says that Levinson thought the story “was a good way to tell the history of broadcasting in the United States.”

Has CBS called her about the drama? “No,” says Mutrux, “but we’ll see what happens when I ask them for clips.” Smith adds, “I haven’t detected any animosity” from CBS.

When Smith’s book about Paley first came out, a CBS spokesman, noting that HBO had already done the Murrow biography, said: “HBO seems to find CBS lore good television.”

Indeed it is, just like the lore that comprises the history of the other networks. There can hardly be a richer bounty of popular American culture just ripe for the picking. But you won’t find much of it in the networks’ prime time. Or perhaps, after Paddy Chayefsky’s dark film satire “Network”--which gets frighteningly truer each year--they just don’t like what they see in the mirror.