California News Without a Car Chase in Sight

Any news program that bans “team coverage” earns a booming Hi-yo! here.

That’s just one reason why “California Connected” may be the brightest idea to splash this state since sunshine. All right, it has some early ruts. No harm in gee-whiz hyperbole, though, when the topic is a weekly hour with this much promise, one following a serpentine trail of news through the most dazzling, complex, diverse and fascinating state in the U.S.

This concept has been tried in California before, but with much less flare and visibility.

Collaborators on this 7-week-old newsmagazine are public television stations--KCET in Los Angeles, KQED in San Francisco, KVIE in Sacramento and KPBS in San Diego. Stations in Eureka, Fresno, Redding and San Bernardino air it too.

It’s designed to find threads symbiotically linking California’s archipelago of interests and ethnicities. That makes it a hard-news sibling of the folksy cultural pieces that California traveler Huell Howser has provided KCET viewers for years.

And the antithesis of L.A.’s local newscasts.

Commercial stations will cover the state Assembly and Senate, for example, only when Democrats and Republicans start chasing each other in cars on freeways. Equating Sacramento with Jupiter and Uranus, they’re waiting for a spaceship to get them there.

These stations burn their budgets sending reporters off to cover showy stories abroad while telling you to take Yuba City and shove it. You can have Siskiyou too. And why pay attention to Stockton? Isn’t it the capital of Sweden?

So now comes much smarter “California Connected” with its ambitious hybrid of statewide news and quirky features, a rare strong anchor-interviewer in David Brancaccio, talking heads that infrequently invite slumber, and early stories embracing worthy subjects from drinking-water pollution to Mexican field laborers living squalidly in wine-rich Napa and Sonoma. For them, 2002 is no vintage year.

Among the program’s liveliest components is its regular “Dish” panel--humorist Will Durst and journalists from the Sacramento Bee, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Univision, so far. These schmoozers are guided by Brancaccio, who is just the kind of bright, articulate moderator, with a sense of fun, who could bring a pulse beat to KCET’s own nightly discussion program, “Life & Times,” as it stiffens on the slab. But he’s keeping his day job as host of public radio’s “Marketplace.”

Another contributor is Jeff Stilson, most recently executive producer of MTV’s surprise big sizzle, “The Osbournes.” Stilson’s background is comedy, and in his role here as the program’s snarling sendup, “Enemy of the State,” he goes on location to launch kick-California rants that are wittily pretty much on point. A region where even a tiny drizzle is called “Storm Watch 2002”? Yup, he’s nailed it.

“California Connected” will rise or fall, though, on its hard-news magazine pieces reported on camera by such California veterans as Alison Tom, Hena Cuevas, Saul Gonzalez and former L.A. newsman David Garcia.

It’s here where executive producer Marley Klaus’ series marches to PBS rhythms. Think “The News-

Hour With Jim Lehrer” and those lengthy, thoughtful (all right, sometimes too lengthy, tediously thoughtful) pieces with worldviews, capped by talking heads for context.

A recent meaty “California Connected” piece on severe problems at Mount Vernon Middle School in Los Angeles ran 17 interesting minutes, for instance, and was updated a week later. Expect fewer one-night stands than on typical newsmagazines, for this one does not practice “drive-by journalism,” noted Brancaccio.

No less perceptive was the program’s take on the likely June 30 closings of five privately operated low-security prisons--in a move Gov. Gray Davis says he is instigating to cut costs--and the predicted impact of this on local communities that rely on these inmates as cheap labor for essential services.

The program visited Baker Community Facility east of Los Angeles. There, inmates work in school maintenance and staff the emergency fire department, servicing an accident-prone stretch of Interstate 15 heavily used by Southern California motorists. Although the story was balanced, viewers were told that once the inmates leave, emergency response will be an hour away.

Davis’ approval of a hefty raise for the state’s prison guards, whose union backs his reelection, had “California Connected” revisiting charges that his plan to close privately run facilities is less a function of good policy than politics.

“California Connected” personalized this story just as it attached human faces and voices to undocumented farm workers in wine country. There, the homeless underclass lives appallingly in “hidden camps” not far from upscale homes. One of them emptied his knapsack to display his possessions. “I have scissors for cutting. Here is my flashlight....”

Defining itself as populist, the program solicits ideas and video-cam contributions from viewers while encouraging them to find more information at its Web site (www.californiaconnected.org), which is swanky looking and, as a bonus, user-friendly.

But about those ruts.

There are times you’re parched just from watching “California Connected.” Hats off to it for tackling the complicated yet critical story of the gasoline additive MTBE showing up in the state’s drinking water. Although admirably detailed, the presentation turned a liquid issue into an arid desert, affirming how hard it is to tell some stories on TV.

One California issue the series inexplicably hasn’t touched--and says it won’t cover soon even though it will be on the November ballot--is an epic one of potential disconnection. That would be the San Fernando Valley’s crescendoing drive to leave Los Angeles, a secession campaign joined this week by Hollywood.

Meanwhile, lighter segments here can get a bit cutesy, and the “Enemy of the State” recently became his own enemy. That happened when Stilson embraced a stale cliche in his monologue by ridiculing Angelenos for being non-walkers--as he stood on a sidewalk surrounded by pedestrians.

The state strikes back.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.