NBC Can’t Just Rest on Laurels

NBC’s airing of “Schindler’s List” at 7:30 p.m., with its nudity and horrific violence intact--marks a maturation high for network television.

Critics of TV constantly accuse it of behaving excessively. Yet never within memory has one of the major networks shown such nudity or depicted so much violence so graphically as NBC did Sunday night in running Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film about Nazi war profiteer Oskar Schindler and his diverting of 1,100 Polish Jews from death camps during World War II.

To soften it for TV would have been obscene.

Although nearly every imaginable aspect of the Holocaust has been depicted in film, “Schindler’s List” arguably best accentuates how Nazis dehumanized camp arrivals through nudity, and also comes closest to capturing the arbitrariness of the terror and violence aimed at Jews and other victims. Approximating the full impact of the violence intensifies that message.

Two scenes stand out in that regard. Simply unforgettable is the cavalier way that Ralph Fiennes’ detestable camp commandant orders a female Jewish construction chief shot because her forceful manner irritates him. And later he uses his telescopic rifle to pick off Jews from his balcony for sport, as if they were empty cans set on a fence for target practice.

Although almost too horrid to watch, both segments are absolutely essential.

The showing of “Schindler’s List” also contributes to a contemporary dispute unrelated to the Holocaust. In giving the movie commercial TV’s first TV-M stamp (not intended for children under 17), NBC exposed a critical flaw of the content ratings recently created by the TV industry under pressure from segments of the public, Congress and President Clinton.

What the rating didn’t tell you was whether the content that warranted the TV-M was truly relevant to “Schindler’s List”--as indeed it was--or gratuitously shoved in for titillation.

There is nothing at all offensive about including extreme violence to accurately convey history in “Schindler’s List.” Yet applying milder, less specific violence frivolously in other cases is, indeed, offensive--the irony being that the latter could earn just a TV-14 (not intended for kids under 14) rating that, in some eyes, would stamp it as more worthy and less bothersome than something of greater integrity with a TV-M.

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Hand it to NBC for taking the “Schindler’s List” gamble. Americans are usually more comfortable with violence as a concept or in the abstract than when confronting it in a chillingly authentic environment like that of Spielberg’s 1993 film. Hence the surprise in some quarters that “Schindler’s List” not only produced brawny ratings but even grew in popularity against its splashy competition as Sunday night progressed, a testament to the magnetism of the story and the ability of Spielberg and scriptwriter Steven Zaillian to tell it.

Just when you were feeling good about NBC, though, that fun guy Don Ohlmeyer had to weigh in. Ohlmeyer, NBC’s West Coast president, saw the huge audience attracted by “Schindler’s List” as an opportunity to hang from his toes, beat his chest and renew his assault on critics of television.

“ ‘Schindler’s List’ is a movie about tolerance, something that appears to be on the decline in our society . . . ,” he said in a statement released by NBC Monday. Actually, it’s about intolerance, isn’t it, and one man’s resourceful crusade to circumvent and overcome that intolerance?

Sunday’s response to the movie, Ohlmeyer added, arriving at his central point, “is a clear indication that we as broadcasters should not be pressured into putting on bland, non-controversial programming to appease the over-zealous watchdogs who would like to control what the American public views.”

Watchdogs who include, of course, the American public itself.

In any case, what’s the relevance? There has been no public groundswell of opposition to airing “Schindler’s List” on TV. Instead, Ohlmeyer is linking “Schindler’s List” to the broad range of network programming that has come under attack from a variety of sources, misleadingly associating NBC’s own programs with a celebrated movie set in an arena of genocide.

Perhaps he sees himself as television’s Schindler, boldly saving it from its detractors. Perhaps he’s thinking of the “over-zealous watchdogs” who faulted NBC for accusing two teenagers of murder in its recent movie “Love’s Deadly Triangle: The Texas Cadet Murder” before either had been tried in court, an indictment made especially vivid by two sequences showing them committing the murder. Ah, well, can’t wait for the trials when ratings sweeps beckon.

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Meanwhile, how are high-minded Ohlmeyer and NBC carrying forward the banner of “Schindler’s List” this week? Well, Monday night brought its cheesy movie “Dying to Belong,” set on a college campus where no one went to class because they were too busy fixating on the mysterious death of a sorority pledge during a hazing incident that the cops were too hapless to solve and that school administrators were unwilling to look into for fear of bad publicity.

Another pledge, the heroic Lisa, had to battle a vicious campus conspiracy to get to the bottom of this incident. And it wasn’t easy, because those snarling snots of Pi Gamma Beta stopped at nothing--do you hear, nothing--to block her from learning the truth. That is, when they weren’t sitting around in their great clothes doing hair flips.

What a run of rotten luck for Lisa. First the sorority witches framed her on a drug charge. Then her own mother refused to believe her story about evil hanky-panky at the sorority house. Then her boyfriend got fired from his job at the college newspaper for trying to write the true story of what happened. Then some fraternity thugs beat him up. Then the same fraternity thugs abducted her and tossed her into an isolated stream. Talk about bad hair days.

Miraculously, her boyfriend found her wandering on a deserted road. And on and on it went until the sorority leaders, after being confronted by Lisa, violated their blood oath (might as well throw in a hint of Satan) and came clean, telling viewers what they already knew, that the dead pledge had fallen from the clock tower.

“Schindler’s List” and Ohlmeyer’s List: The compatibility is not immediately evident.