What Label to Give ‘American Daughter’?

Count yourself lucky.

You’re reading the Column of the, er, Cocker Spaniels. No, the Column of the Cadavers. No, the Column of the Concord Grapes. No, the Column of the Cursed. The Comatose. The Cantaloupes? No, no, no. Wait. I’ve got it. Here it is. I like this very much. Very posh, very elegant, very catchy and indelible. Welcome to . . .

THE COLUMN OF THE COLOSSUSSSSSS!!!

Well, whatever.

After watching television for a number of years, I’ve learned that everyone needs a slogan. Success demands it. Consumers expect it.

A slogan is a brand. A good one can demarcate, categorize, define a public image. KABC was on the air this week, for example, modestly proclaiming itself “The Most Trusted Place in L.A.”

Not long ago, KCBS was joining its parent network, CBS, in welcoming viewers “home” as if from exile. Using up slogans like soiled tissues, KCBS pulled one out of the air this season when it began anointing itself the “The Station of the People.”

“The Station of the Plutonians” would be as close to reality.

Whether any of this actually works is uncertain (Can you imagine someone being drawn to a station because it labels itself Populistic?), but the practice persists.

At various times in recent years, CBS also told viewers, “We’ve Got the Touch.” NBC urged them to “Come Home” and later to “Come Home to the Best!” NBC also told viewers that it was “Must See TV.” ABC reminded them, “We’re Still the One,” then “Still the One,” and later that “TV Is Good,” that “We Love TV” and that ABC was “America’s Broadcasting Company.”

The WB crowned itself “Dubba Dubba WB.” HBO has said, “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO.” TNT has called itself “The Best Movie Studio on Television.”

Positioning itself as an oasis of balance in a desert of media bias, the Fox News Channel promises viewers: “We Report, You Decide.”

At times this year, it would have been more justified in titling itself the Network of Elian. As would CNN, which following Thursday’s federal appeals court decision on Elian Gonzalez carried live the long, rambling, accusatory response of his ever-quotable cousin, Marisleysis, in Miami as if it were a major policy address.

CNN: the Network of Excessive Elian.

At various times, CNN and MSNBC each could have legitimately called itself the Network of JonBenet. And a few years ago, the Network of O.J.

As for other slogans that do exist, cable’s Lifetime network has said its “Television for Women” since 1994.

Based on its scattershot new movie, “An American Daughter,” it might want to amend that to “television for women with a yen for stories that diminish them as easily swayed simpletons.” In other words, women who are not just different than men (which, of course, is the case), but those who are easily diverted, easily manipulated dupes.

“An American Daughter” evokes the rhythms of a stage play, which it was--one by Wendy Wasserstein--prior to being transferred to the screen by her with Christine Lahti as Lyssa Dent Hughes, a distinguished, caring, widely admired physician and hospital administrator whose nomination as surgeon general takes a steep dive after her inadvertent disclosure that she once ignored a jury summons.

A blip of an infraction which U.S. women, when viewing Hughes as a total package, regard as a capital crime.

The media descend, and just like that, her popularity vanishes and the polls are overwhelmingly against her. When she’s baffled by what has happened, her husband (Tom Skerritt) gives her the skinny: “It’s the women of America who are angry at you. You’re pretty, you’ve got two great kids, you’re successful, you’re thin and you have a great soul.”

In other words, she’s too perfect for women to support.

Perhaps it played better on stage. But this meandering story is more flawed than Hughes could ever be as a nominee if she ignored a stack of jury notices and burned them on her front lawn.

A feminist author (Blake Lindsley)--with whom Hughes’ husband once had a fling--is too sharply drawn. Credibility buckles when he risks a hot smooch with her in his own home with his wife just outside, and when her friend (Mark Feuerstein) later seems anxious to expose her mildly soiled linen to a notorious TV interviewer (Jay Thomas). Meanwhile, Hughes’ closest friend (Lynne Thigpen) wanders in and out with an agenda that diverts attention from the main story.

More fundamentally, nothing in this collapsing bubble approximates the “nanny” adventures of Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, President Clinton’s scuttled attorney general nominees whose cases Wasserstein has said she had in mind when writing her play. It’s implausible that female opinion would turn so sharply negative on an issue as trivial as that depicted in “An American Daughter.” Or that it would be reversed just as dramatically by a subsequent winning TV appearance by Hughes.

Can it be that the vast majority of U.S. women are this fickle? You don’t buy it, even from the network airing “Television for Women.”

So says the Column of the Colossus.

* “An American Daughter” can be seen tonight at 9 on Lifetime. The network has rated it TV-14-LD (may be unsuitable for children under 14 with special advisories for coarse language and suggestive dialogue).

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached by e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.