Littleton Falls Under Distorting Glare

Some stuff . . .

Split screens notwithstanding, television can cover fully only one breaking large story at a time. So when the Littleton, Colo., slaughter erupted last week, the ongoing “Crisis in Kosovo”--as so many newscasts title it--shrank to nearly a blip on TV’s radar, with faces of suffering refugees supplanted by those of anguished students and parents.

With news holes of only 22 minutes after commercials, for example, network nightly newscasts last week temporarily relegated the Balkans conflict to sidebar status, although its importance had not diminished. As always when this process happens, local newscasts followed suit, to the extent that TV shone almost monolithically on Littleton.

This singular focus had a curious distorting effect, inflating a very big story--which Littleton certainly is--even bigger, into a colossus that appears truly cataclysmic. Which Littleton may not be.

Columbine High didn’t come under siege from an army of dysfunctional teens, after all. Perhaps just two deeply troubled kids went on a killing rampage there after hatching plans possibly to level the entire school and wipe out the student body and faculty. So the reason for this tragedy’s deafening resonance is not the number of perpetrators--even if it turns out as many as four or five were involved--but primarily the horrific toll they exacted and the even greater evil they had planned.

The net benefit of Littleton--at too great a human cost--is that Americans are now taking hard looks at potential security and communications problems at schools everywhere. TV has played a highly positive role in that.

From the hysterical tone of some of the coverage, however, you might get an impression that Littleton represents a national epidemic, that heavily armed homicidal kids are marching on classrooms everywhere like killer ants. That does not appear to be the case even when other schoolhouse shootings are taken into account.

Meanwhile, the media are in an impossible conundrum, knowing that by dwelling so extensively on this story they may be generating interest among potential copycats.

“Home Movies”: That’s the title of UPN’s newest animated series, a relentlessly goofy, delightfully silly half-hour of free-form comedy from the producers of the Peabody Award-winning “Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist.”

There are similarities. Even more than that animated series, though, this new one features chaotic, rapid-fire dialogues that sound improvisational, a process of overlapping voices that the producers call “retroscripting.”

Whatever. The important thing, it works in a premiere that introduces Brendon Small, a nerdy 8-year-old who is several notches below functional, but has a passion for making home movies with his friends.

The stammering voice of Brendon Small is co-creator Brendon Small, and Paula Poundstone wisecracks for his neurotic, renegade of a single mother, Paula, who tonight, much to her son’s horror, goes on a date with his loud-mouthed brick of a soccer coach, Mr. McGuirk. H. Jon Benjamin doubles as the voice for McGuirk and Brendon’s neighborhood pal, Jason.

Meanwhile, the look is . . . memorable. Frantic Brendon’s pointy red hair is swept backward behind his head as if it were caught in a gale wind, and his mother has crooked paste-on lips, a wild black mane and an instinct for the unfashionable. In advance of her disastrous date with McGuirk, Paula tells a friend on the phone: “I’m wearing a big baggy shirt that makes a man want me . . . to buy another shirt.”

“Home Movies” airs on UPN after the relatively new “Dilbert,” the pair of them joining other animations on the cutting edge of prime-time comedy.

Memory Lapse: Oh, the hand-wringing that went on at local TV stations last August after beaming live pictures of a fugitive motorist killing himself with a shotgun blast to the head in full view of chopper cameras. Some of them asked for forgiveness and vowed: Never again!

Yet shortly before 5 p.m. Wednesday, when a sheriff’s marksman killed a suspected bank robber in a stolen taxicab after a five-hour standoff on the Pomona Freeway, KTTV-TV got it wrong again by getting it live. Although not graphic, its live picture showed the killing bullet hitting the taxi’s windshield just as the KTTV chopper was moving in for a closer shot.

With two choppers above the scene, KTTV was alone among Los Angeles stations in following this story continuously for some four hours all the way to the finish, inexplicably keeping the stationary taxi center screen like a freeze frame. For much of this period, all that moved were the tongues of KTTV personnel commenting on the static picture.

Then came the kill shot, patience paying off.

Mislabeled and Marvelous: Anointing “Frenchman’s Creek” a masterpiece is like giving Quasimodo an award for good posture. Yet talk about irresistible corn. Sunday’s “Masterpiece Theatre” on PBS not only flaunted that winning combination--costumes and romance--but was so utterly bad that it was wonderful.

Daphne du Maurier’s novel was the basis for this late 17th century swashbuckler about love between a lusty lady of privilege (Tara Fitzgerald) and a daring French pirate (Anthony Delon) set against violent conflict between England’s Protestants and Roman Catholics.

There were lots of fireworks, the loudest of which were the cannons that exploded when Lady Dona and Jean Aubrey ogled each other in Cornwall.

He’s Bad. Who Cares? It’s about time someone appreciated the labors of former Los Angeles Laker Dennis Rodman, who told Diane Sawyer Friday: “It’s so much work to do what I do and be what I am.” The obvious question: Why bother?

But instead of asking it Sawyer played it straight with Rodman, who wore canary yellow while singing his usual tune on “Good Morning America,” and when getting a second shot on “20/20” later that night. Talk about recycled goods. The biggest question was why the network was bothering with this “veritable kaleidoscope of a man,” as Sawyer euphemistically christened Rodman.

Sawyer attributed to Rodman this revisionist account of why he was cut loose by the Lakers recently: “They were looking for an excuse to fire him because he wasn’t afraid to take them on about money and respect.” Whatever that meant.

During a morning interview of mostly make-believe, Rodman did suffer one fleeting lapse of fantasy when describing his brief but tumultuous stay with the Lakers: “They knew what they was getting into.” As did ABC.

* “Home Movies” airs at 8:30 tonight on UPN. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).