Looking at the News With a Skewed Eye : Television: Michael Moore doesn’t pretend to show events objectively. His ‘TV Nation’ takes a twisted, comical look at subjects from pets on Prozac to Avon ladies in the Amazon.

In the onslaught of reports on O.J. Simpson, the mainstream press has missed one angle that Michael Moore, a political activist, writer and filmmaker, plans to explore on his new NBC series, “TV Nation.”

“I’ve never seen a news story with more product placement,” observed Moore, 40, best known for his 1989 documentary “Roger & Me.” “First of all, you have a two-hour commercial on the Ford Bronco, seen by 95 million people across the country. In the newspapers and on the news every night, how many hundreds of mentions have there been of McDonald’s, where Kato and O.J. went to eat?

“Of course,” he added, “you’ve got to feel sorry for the guys at Ford watching ‘the chase,’ which was really a crawl. They had to be sitting in their chairs screaming, ‘It goes faster than 40 miles per hour! O.J., step on it!’ Can you see them pulling their hair out?”

Welcome to the mind of Moore, where conventional news stories take on an entirely different spin. He doesn’t offer any pretense of objective journalism--a practice Moore calls a subtle sham. All journalists act subjectively, he believes, by choosing what to present and how to present it.

“I don’t believe any journalist is objective,” he said. “But the traditional media has had to put on the air, create the illusion, that they are playing it straight down the middle.”

In “TV Nation,” an insurrectionary newsmagazine premiering tonight, Moore and his associates (who include “Roger & Me” cohorts and comedy writers for David Letterman and Spy Magazine, among others) take an unabashedly opinionated and comical perspective on their subjects, which include pets on Prozac, a real-estate broker pushing houses along a toxic dump site, a day with Dr. Jack Kevorkian and Avon ladies in the Amazon.

“I wanted to do a show like this because, for all the amount of reality TV, which is a ton, the one area you can’t get the networks to say yes to is reality TV with a humorous edge to it,” said correspondent Merrill Markoe, who used to write for Letterman when he was at NBC.

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Every segment of “TV Nation” has an agenda. In one entitled “Neighbors,” Moore rents a home in the quiet suburbs of Long Island, N.Y., and hires an actor to portray a serial killer living there. He paints “666” on the mailbox, fires off guns in the middle of the night, drags body bags in and out of the house in broad daylight, splashes the windows with red paint and blasts Mussolini speeches.

Through all this, his neighbors, whom “TV Nation” interviewed later, never called the police. Moore’s point was to illustrate the sad dissolution of the friendly neighborhoods he knew when he grew up.

“It’s what makes it work,” Moore explained of “TV Nation’s” subjective viewpoint. “You’re taking two forms that seem opposed to each other--comedy and documentary--and combining them. You’re guaranteeing everything you see is true. Everything you see is as we film it. Yet we’ve injected our point of view and our sense of humor into the piece, so it has a sort of subversive quality to it.”

That’s exactly how Moore got started as a filmmaker. He was sitting at home in Flint, Mich., collecting unemployment after losing his job as editor of the leftist Mother Jones magazine, when he saw former General Motors chairman Roger Smith on TV announcing more factory shutdowns. Moore decided to make a documentary, learning filmmaking along the way, that centered on his unsuccessful efforts to interview Smith and ask him why he was doing this.

Moore became a hot Hollywood property when “Roger & Me,” produced for $250,000, turned into the most profitable documentary ever, according to the trade paper Variety, with total revenues exceeding $30 million. Moore, a college dropout from a long line of factory workers, made out big because his deal called for him to receive a percentage of the profit.

In the time since, he has signed a feature-film deal with Warner Bros., started a foundation to support independent filmmakers and community groups, and directed a feature-film comedy called “Canadian Bacon,” set for release this fall.

When he was in Los Angeles two years ago hawking his “Canadian Bacon” script, he received a call from several NBC and TriStar Television executives.

“They asked me, if I was given an hour of prime-time television, what would I like to do on it?” he recalled. “When they put it like that, my first reaction was, ‘Well, are you sure you’ve got the right Moore? Are you sure you don’t want Roger Moore or Dudley Moore?’ ”

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With reality programming on the rise, NBC wanted to see if Moore could work his engaging “Roger & Me” magic on TV. “We’re looking at a television landscape that has an awful lot of reality programming--all forms of information,” said Warren Littlefield, president of NBC Entertainment. “But there’s not that many reality formats for comedy.”

Moore finished the pilot for “TV Nation” more than a year ago. NBC tested it in blue-collar Scranton, Penn., and received excellent feedback.

But NBC passed on it as a series last fall and then again this fall. Littlefield said NBC was waiting to secure some foreign deals. Once the British Broadcasting Corp. came in to share the show’s already bargain cost of $500,000 per episode, NBC finally ordered six episodes for a summer run.

“We felt, ‘All right, when is a good time to try something like this?’ It’s perfect for the summer, when there are a lot of series repeats,” said Littlefield, who will consider “TV Nation” as a midseason replacement series for the fall, if it does well.

Aside from a short “Roger & Me” sequel that aired on PBS called “Pets or Meat,” the general public has not heard from Moore in several years. In the overnight fame game, does “TV Nation” represent a critical juncture in his career?

“This is a question I’ve been asked since I was 18,” he sighed, referring to his news-breaking feat of being elected to the local school board as a teen-ager. “I understand the question well, but I wonder how many more things I have to do in my life before I don’t have to answer it anymore. I was one of the first 18-year-olds elected to public office. It was on the national news everywhere, because essentially no other 18-year-old had been elected before. It was kind of like, what do you do now for an encore?”

Moore went on to start his own newspaper, the Flint Voice, which eventually grew into the Michigan Voice and gained a reputation as one of the best alternative newspapers in the nation. He edited the paper for 10 years before moving on to Mother Jones.

“I’m not worried about what’s next, and I certainly don’t worry about making any money,” Moore said. “We lived on $10,000 to $15,000 a year in Flint. When you’ve done that for most of your adult life, you’re never frightened by the fact that the money may be gone tomorrow, because you’ve lived your life a certain way and you know how to do that.”

* “TV Nation” premieres at 8 tonight on NBC (Channels 4, 36 and 39).