Washing Mouths Out With Soap

Some things would be hilarious, if they weren’t true. Take the whole ‘80s escapades surrounding the establishment of the Parents Music Resource Center by Tipper Gore, Susan Baker and several other “Washington wives” concerned about the content of pop music being sold to children.

It was surreal: Gore on TV discussing the masturbation imagery of Prince’s “Darling Nikki”; Bob Dole castigating Cannibal Corpse as if the little-known horror-metal band was a threat to national security; various other prim and proper types combing through W.A.S.P., Twisted Sister and Judas Priest albums in search of Satanism and sadomasochism; the unlikely triumvirate of Dee Snider, Frank Zappa and John Denver lecturing a Senate committee about free speech and family values while music executives hid behind the 1st Amendment at any suggestion that perhaps some material just isn’t suitable for kids.

So why, in turning the events into a TV docudrama (er, docu-farce), thread the conflict around fictional characters and a lightweight back story closer to Ozzie Nelson than Ozzy Osbourne? That’s exactly what the people behind the VH1 movie “Warning: Parental Advisory” have done, with Jason Priestley as a young, naive music-industry lobbyist caught between his ambitions and his ideals.

The tone is “The West Wing” meets “That ‘80s Show,” though with none of the intellectual aim or sizzling banter of the former or the what-we-know-now humor of the latter. Save for a few Echo & the Bunnymen references and the fact that the music is played from vinyl LPs, there’s little sense of cultural context. Everything seems watered-down and predictable, right down to the excessive lingering on uptight conservatives having to speak naughty words and the pale romantic tension between Priestley’s Charlie Burner and a pragmatic, conservative colleague (Deborah Yates).

Burner is a well-meaning innocent where the events call for a whip-smart crusader a la Rob Lowe’s Sam on “The West Wing.” Gore (Mariel Hemingway) is portrayed as a similarly well-meaning though misguided innocent. Most of the rest of the characters (the other PMRC women, the senators, a couple of sub-”High Fidelity” record store clerks) are basic caricatures.

The only real dynamic comes from the Terrible Trio of rock stars, and not much there. Griffin Dunne plays the late Zappa too benign and lacking the sarcastic snarl for which he was known. Tim Guinee is all distracted golly-gee as space-program-obsessed Denver. Dee Snider, as himself, brings amped-up energy, but the script (by Jay Martel), direction (Steven Haft, who did HBO’s “Pirates of Silicon Valley”) and acting all work too hard to illustrate how the 1985 establishment was frightened by the cartoonish Snider and Twisted Sister. (Perhaps the best telling of this story, though, would have been through Snider’s eyes, rather than the fictional lobbyist’s.)

But even the drama of the Senate hearings is played light, with the rock stars’ knockout punch coming too cleanly to have any dramatic weight, which makes the eventual compromise agreement to put warning labels on potentially offensive recordings even more anti-climactic than it was in real life. The label for this? Warning: Dumbed-down television.

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“Warning: Parental Advisory” can be seen Sunday at 9 p.m. on VH1. The network has rated it TV-14-L (may be inappropriate for children under the age of 14, with an advisory for coarse language).