President Needs a Script Doctor

It would be impossible to overstate how serious this is and how fast this is moving.

--Dan Rather, commenting on impeachment on “The CBS Evening News”

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It’s time for television to step in.

What is Christmas if not an excuse to indulge in happy endings? The spirit even crept into Tuesday night’s somber “NYPD Blue,” an explosive hour of the ABC series whose volcanic seething erupted when Det. Andy Sipowicz and his boss, Lt. Arthur Fancy, bloodied each other in a fistfight.

It was about race. Sipowicz, whose bigotry is one of many demons he battles, is white. Fancy is black, and prejudiced against intolerance.

The two have long been Vesuvius waiting to happen, and their differences here seemed as deep, raw and irreconcilable as those between President Clinton and the members of Congress who want him out of office. Three-fourths through the episode, it appeared that armistice was coming, especially as “NYPD Blue” is not known for knotting its loose ends.

Yet ‘tis the season. . . .

When Sipowicz and Fancy were last observed together, they were shaking hands warily, not as friends but as adversaries who had thought through their conflict and concluded each was to blame and there was more to gain from making peace than war.

If a little too pat, it was something for Americans to chew on this week.

As was the uplifting message Monday when all seven members of the Camden household bore a personal crisis throughout an episode of WB’s sweet little series, “7th Heaven.” A homeless guy staying with them had a crisis, too. That made eight.

By hour’s end, these dilemmas had vanished, gone zippo like a snowman melted by the sun, with Tim Conway delivering one set of remedies as a stand-in Santa just before the credits rolled.

If Bill Clinton had been visiting the Camdens instead of the Middle East, the show’s writers would have made his impeachment worries disappear, too.

The next hour brought Fox’s tender and goofy “Ally McBeal,” in which a man who lost his job for saying he saw a unicorn found a sympathetic ear in Ally who, of course, had seen a unicorn herself.

“The people who see them share some of the unicorn’s traits,” he told her. “They’re lonely with virtuous hearts.”

The man got his job back, naturally, for Christmas and mistletoe were bound to win this day no matter what, and Ally’s former boyfriend told her, “It was you who made me believe in things I couldn’t see.”

If not elusive unicorns, perhaps a Perry Mason ending is in order for the gloomy presidential crisis facing Americans.

One version: Clinton buckles from the intense pressure, bites his lower lip and admits to the cameras, “I did it. I lied under oath. I perjured myself. I obstructed justice. I’m everything my foes say I am. I’ve disgraced myself, my family and my office. Americans deserve better. Here’s the key to the White House, I’m history.”

Another version: Independent counsel Kenneth Starr calls a press conference to admit his saccharine smile is phony, his heart is stone and his tenacious pursuit of Clinton was politically motivated and produced no credible evidence of illegality. “You didn’t know what Clinton was like,” Starr would add, copying Perry’s broken courtroom targets by trying to excuse the inexcusable. “He was always so smug, so smarmy, so slippery.”

If not Perry Mason, then the present CBS series “Touched by an Angel.”

“Why are we here?” the earnest angel Monica (not Lewinsky) would ask. “To help God perform a miracle,” her mentoring angel, the all-wise Tess, would reply.

“For whom?” Monica would ask. “For that man there,” Tess would say, nodding toward the troubled figure in the Oval Office.

“The president?” Monica would ask, incredulously. “That’s right, baby,” Tess would say. “If he doesn’t change his ways before it’s too late, he, his family and the entire nation are going to be in even bigger trouble than they are now.”

“And God’s going to help him?” Monica would wonder. “No, baby,” Tess would say. “God’s gonna help him help himself.”

Next comes Andrew, the show’s angel of death, on a mission to zap the congressional Democrat or Republican of your choice.

Cue theme, grab hankie.

Where is a cliche or stock ending when you really want one? When the nation really wants one?

If only the intersecting fortunes of Clinton and the U.S. could be resolved in a manner as facile as the endings so routinely grafted onto TV stories. If only a writer were available to create one of these cure-all, fix-everything-before-the-final-credits, everyone-goes-to-bed-happy conclusions that television is famous for.

More likely, Thursday’s historic House session on impeaching Clinton will careen as turbulently as a Fox special. It could be titled “World’s Wildest Congressional Hearings,” its chaos to include hot-footing, de-pantsing, bra snapping, strangling with mike cords and other malicious pranks recalling last week’s House Judiciary Committee hearings that featured the whoopee cushion of political partisanship.

Something is wrong with this picture. Where are the unicorns this season? Where are the virtuous hearts?

Clinton’s “split-screen presidency,” as some were calling it, continued this week. That included Monday when he received a standing ovation from the Palestine National Council in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinians took to the dusty streets waving Old Glory and shouting praise for the man whose presidential obituary was being written back home.

It remained to be seen whether Clinton’s trip to Israel and Palestine would solidify the volatile status quo or lessen tensions between these two peoples. In any case, the striking parallel of that conflict with the one facing him at home was impossible to miss.

“Wouldn’t it be something,” a friend mentioned on the phone, “if he was impeached and won the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year?” That would be the bitterest of ironies in a period of irony culminating to date with Thursday’s impeachment hearing.

Although set to be widely televised, its audience may be small even by daytime standards, given that fewer than half of those eligible to vote bothered to cast ballots in the 1996 presidential election. Some believe this public apathy extends to the present impeachment wars, which polls indicate many Americans are not greatly concerned about.

Or perhaps, steeped in holiday fervor, they’re taking for granted a happy ending before the closing credits.