‘Coast Guard’? ‘Customs’? Let’s Get Real

Can the camera be a voyeur without altering what it purports to monitor? The question applies to both the O.J. Simpson trial, which is ending, and a pair of syndicated “reality” series, which are beginning.

More about the series, “Coast Guard” and “U.S. Customs: Classified,” shortly. First the trial.

All of the Angst about cameras ruining courtrooms belies the fact that America’s most celebrated fly on the wall, Frederick Wiseman, has been making documentary films for nearly 30 years that quietly observe U.S. culture while seeming to intrude only minimally.

In black-and-white, without narration, Wiseman’s videos verite can be as deadly as they are distinctive--his heavy-lidded peeping at the Panama Canal in “Canal Zone,” for example, hardly belongs on a screen for three hours. But most of his other documentaries--”High School,” “Hospital,” “Welfare,” “Meat,” “Model,” “The Store” and “Missile” come to mind--are not only valuable archives but also an extraordinary theater of the ordinary. Yes, Wiseman teaches, even minutiae can be seductive, especially when part of a larger picture.

Of course, even Wiseman’s camera can show only a reality that its presence has influenced, however slightly. And, unquestionably, the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial would have evolved somewhat differently had it not been televised nearly gavel to gavel. As late as Friday, in fact, Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark was accusing the defense of posturing for the courtroom camera.

Yet the camera’s advantage outweighs any negatives: How much better to view such pageantry through the prism of your own biases than merely to hear or read someone else’s. As for influencing the proceedings, moreover, criminal trials were stages for thespian attorneys and other hams long before Court TV’s pool camera began encouraging histrionics in the Simpson courtroom.

Although such trials are at times as tedious as the Panama Canal’s locks, their inherent unpredictability and potential for stagecraft account for their growing popularity on Court TV, even when the subject is not related to the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Many trials make their own drama. Televise a good one, and you can’t go wrong.

It’s elsewhere, from Fox’s “Cops” to the new syndicated “L.A.P.D.,” that the camera appears to flunk the reality test.

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Thanks largely to TV, “everything in America is an entertainment,” Ian I. Mitroff and Warren Bennis wrote in their book “The Unreality Industry.” The “increased use of entertainment as a substitute for dealing directly with our problems . . . has blurred the fine line at best between reality and unreality,” they correctly argue.

Just where do reality and unreality intersect in “Cops” and its numerous progeny, such as “L.A.P.D.”--series whose camera crews become an extension of law enforcement, in effect, by looking over the shoulders of police officers as they stalk, pursue and arrest suspects? What’s on the screen is actually happening, but it’s a tainted reality when participants are obviously aware of the camera and when such series are so dependent on the goodwill of the institutions they televise that a full and truly honest account is highly unlikely.

Even if that were not the case, though, would the “reality” on the screen necessarily be one you’d want to see? A TV promo for a coming “Coast Guard”: “Next week a fishing trawler takes on water. . . . “ Circle your calendar.

Who could have predicted that the 1989 arrival of “Cops” would be a seminal moment in programming, with so many imitators later getting chipped from the same block? At least “Cops” is entertaining. Because the medium constantly replicates itself to the extreme, though, more and more of television rests on the illusion that everyone who wears a uniform is fascinating. Or the belief that if not, whistles and bells can make them so.

TV’s fable-meisters undoubtedly will get around someday to taping and grafting hot music and tremulous voice-overs to the day-to-day routines of Explorer Scouts, postal carriers, forest rangers, bus drivers, sanitation workers and virtually every other walking uniform you can name:

Their world is perilous and unpredictable. They are . . . the Salvation Army.

Not quite yet. In addition to “L.A.P.D.,” however, the new season has indeed brought “Coast Guard” and “U.S. Customs: Classified,” the former a half-hour that mixes actual footage with training film, the later a withering hour whose actual surveillance footage and re-enactments--in which agents depict themselves--are juxtaposed in ways that stir a milkshake of homogenizing images.

And who should show up as host and narrator of “U.S. Customs,” all devil-bearded and costumed in black like an assassin, but none other than Stephen J. Cannell, whose own TV producing credits range from “Rockford Files” to “The A-Team.”

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Following intro clips of gunplay, men diving from a boat, chopper and speedboat chases, a sprinting agent and Cannell alighting from a chopper manned by heavily armed agents in battle gear, his new A-Team is shown silhouetted against a sunset while running to their choppers in “combat mode.” Their targets, drug smugglers, are taken by surprise.

There’s a chase. Cannell: “In the snake-infested waters of the rice field, the search goes on.” In fact, on and on and on.

Not that customs agents are necessarily sticks in the mud, understand, for the next segment is titled “The Gang That Couldn’t Smuggle Straight,” and features actual surveillance footage of screwball drug smugglers being unable to fit their stash into the garage they rented. The sequence is speeded up for laughs, and a twice-shown clip of a fat smuggler falling down becomes the segment’s punch-line.

The Custom Service’s funniest home videos are followed by segments on child pornography and a drug-sniffing dog inexplicably accompanied by a soundtrack of barking, even though the dog on the screen isn’t barking.

Much of the hour is juiced by pulsating music and titillating teases advertising a re-enactment that becomes the final segment. One shows a female undercover cop in a skimpy, body-hugging dress getting roughed up by a criminal (“But next . . . “).

Just as the teases are come-ons, she turns out to be a decoy in a sting that traps a smuggler who has a weakness for women. She nervously waits in a parking lot for this dangerous lover boy to show up. Cannell: “Minutes felt like hours . . . .”

In “Coast Guard,” there’s more throbbing music as an Oregon rock climber is rescued from a cliff, 150 feet above the water. Then, on a lake outside of Detroit, Coast Guardsmen pull over a boat operated by a hazed-over Popeye suspected of over-boozing. Asked to recite the alphabet, he sings it.

Finally, a family of four is rescued from a sailboat in stormy seas. Shot from a Coast Guard chopper hovering above, the pictures vividly depict the rescue’s perils to both the victims and their saviors, and benefit from being footage of the actual event rather than someone’s spin on it.

As for the rest of “Coast Guard,” and for “U.S. Customs,” well, you know how it is with such programs. Minutes feel like hours.

* “Coast Guard” airs Saturdays at 4 p.m. on KCBS-TV Channel 2. “U.S. Customs: Classified” airs Saturdays at 6 p.m. on KCAL-TV Channel 9.