Two Rare Chances to Think Outside the Box

Prime-time television has never been much of a think tank. And never less than during a ratings sweeps month when brainless and blockbuster are close companions.

Yet Saturday brings HBO’s “A Lesson Before Dying,” a smart, thoughtful, sensitive, if flawed drama about a young black farm worker who is devastated when his intellect is demeaned by whites in rural Louisiana where he waits to die in 1948 for a murder he didn’t commit. Will a local educator succeed in teaching him self-respect before his date with the electric chair?

And ending its run tonight is an NBC series known for challenging viewers as it entertained them since 1993 with piercing stories about Baltimore police detectives and crime, one whose cerebral aura has had some viewers worshiping at its altar but may have limited its popularity with the masses.

That series is “Homicide: Life on the Street,” whose cancellation because of ratings has broken many hearts, but not nearly enough by major network audience standards to make NBC reconsider ending it.

In “A Lesson Before Dying,” a life is about to end. The story is drawn from an Ernest J. Gaines novel set in a lazy Cajun hamlet where a public defender urges an all-white jury to acquit his innocent black client, Jefferson (Mekhi Phifer), because he’s “just a poor dumb hog.”

That seems to stun Jefferson and his extended family more than his murder conviction and death sentence, his steel-willed Godmother, Miss Emma (Irma P. Hall), proclaiming: “I don’t want them killing no hog.”

College graduate Grant Wiggins (Don Cheadle), after returning here to teach in the same one-room parish school he attended as a child, is assigned by the matriarchal Miss Emma to persuade Jefferson before he dies “that he’s not a hog, he’s a man. . . .”

This is hardly your typical death row crusade.

No appeals. No dwelling on the condemned man’s innocence. No tingly wait for a reprieve seconds before the switch is thrown. Resigned to the Southern racism that chafed his own life, Wiggins notes ruefully: “A white man’s been killed, and a colored boy has to die for it.”

The intent is not to save Jefferson from dying, but to save him from dying without dignity.

Wiggins intersects in spots with the Louisiana nun who races against a clock to redeem a doomed murderer in “Dead Man Walking,” the major difference being that Jefferson is innocent and his imminent execution almost an abstraction.

Commanded by Miss Emma and her equally forceful friend, Tante Lou (Cicely Tyson), to set Jefferson straight about self-worth, Wiggins initially balks, thinking him a lost cause. And Jefferson resists, too, setting the stage for the two men to bond and each learn a lesson from the other.

The ending, with a bigoted white sheriff inexplicably curious about Jefferson’s inner thoughts, feels artificial. In addition, Joseph Sargent departs from his otherwise strong direction and goes too far in milking emotion during the story’s waning feel-good minutes. And Ann Peacock’s script has Wiggins’ young students being encouraged to revere Jefferson as a hero even though they can’t possibly know what we know, that he’s not a murderer.

Yet the performances overcome these faults and the predictability of the plot, with Cheadle doing well in a breakthrough lead role, Brent Jennings fuming masterfully as a minister angered by Wiggins’ ungodly concerns, and those scene-stealers Hall and Tyson matchless at projecting a seething intensity that draws you to their every word.

What’s more, “A Lesson Before Dying” conveys deep wisdom throughout. Never more so than when Wiggins visits Jefferson for the first time and hears the cell door slam shut behind him. His instinctive response--a subtle tensing up--communicates alarm, as if he were just another black man helplessly trapped in just another white sheriff’s dungeon. Although small and passing quickly, it’s a gesture that in one fleeting instant evokes 300 years of history.

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Created by Paul Attanasio, “Homicide” has imparted its own distinctive African American flavor, largely by featuring more recurring pivotal black characters than any other drama series.

Coming to mind first is a 1993 episode that was one of the most powerful hours ever aired in prime time, one whose script earned an Emmy for Tom Fontana (who executive produced the series with Barry Levinson). It took place almost entirely in an interrogation room known as the “box,” with Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) and his rookie partner, Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor), facing a 12-hour deadline for wringing a confession from Risley Tucker (Moses Gunn), a vegetable peddler they believe murdered 11-year-old Adena Watson.

Although Bayliss became the emotional casualty here in a case that would haunt him for years, the duel between the two black men, Pembleton and the suspect, was most memorable, with Tucker ultimately taking the offensive and spilling out an array of emotions about race and class among African Americans. Ending without resolution, the episode represented breathtaking work, especially by Gunn, who died nine months after the filming.

Infinite other “Homicide” episodes are worthy of freeze-framing, too, one being a 1997 story, written by James Yoshimura, which found Pembleton spending an hour in a subway with a dying man (played with harrowing realism by Vincent D’Onofrio) trapped between the train and the platform, while other officers searched unsuccessfully for his girlfriend. The kicker came just before the final credits when she jogged by the train station, unaware that inside her boyfriend’s life was draining away.

“Homicide” itself has been some high wire act, on several occasions nearly getting the sack from NBC despite critical raves. And the glass-half-full crowd will note that surviving nearly seven years with such marginal ratings has been a major achievement in an era when high TV financial stakes preclude gambling or benevolence by networks.

Yet that’s not the show’s biggest achievement. More than just an extraordinary cop series, “Homicide” has been one of the most original dramas ever to appear on television, joining with NBC’s “Law & Order” and ABC’s “NYPD Blue” to make this decade prime time’s golden age of crime drama.

In many respects, Braugher was the electricity that drove “Homicide” on the screen, and the series, which went through numerous cast changes, was not quite the same after his departure. Yet tonight’s Fontana-written finale will intensify fans’ sense of loss, for “Forgive Us Our Trespasses” is one of “Homicide’s” better hours, dark, brooding, untidy and full of disquietude as always, a quasi-farewell that typically mingles irony and enigma.

It features a mysterious murder, a body and characters in transition, with John Munch (Richard Belzer) headed for matrimony, Lt. Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto) getting a promotion that he doesn’t want and his son (Giancarlo Esposito) facing life after the FBI. Then there’s Bayliss (Secor at his best), still ticking like a time bomb after all of these years, roughing up a prosecutor and facing a future almost scary to contemplate.

“Homicide” signs off tonight true to its inky self, loose ends still flapping, in a place that couldn’t be more fitting.

A dark alley.

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* “Homicide: Life on the Street” series finale airs at 10 tonight on NBC. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14). “A Lesson Before Dying” airs at 9:30 p.m. Saturday on HBO. The network has rated it TV-14LVD (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14 with special advisories for coarse language, violence and suggestive dialogue).