IN the America of zero tolerance, a bald prime time star never stood a chance. No surprise then that Stephen Bochco sacked Ted Hoffman (Daniel Benzali), the main man of the first series of Murder One. Bald Ted has been replaced by James Wyler (Anthony LaPaglia), a legal dude, who looks like a facelifted Al Pacino brooding under a coiffed mop of the sort of blueblack hair worn by Superman impersonators.
With the opening credits of the new series retaining the portentous theme tune and blood on broken marble imagery of the original, it was strange not to see Ted. Instead, we met Wyler and soon he was angry. He fillets a bent copper in court for a racist assault and then quits his job as assistant district attorney when his boss, Roger Garfield, blocks his promotion. Garfield is running for governor and is financed by LA's wealthiest sleazeball.
So, Wyler flees to private practice and replaces Ted as head buck cat of the Century City law firm. His first job as a defence lawyer is representing an anorexic looking spice girl who is accused of murdering the Governor of California and one of his legion of mistresses. The spice girl, Sharon Rooney (Missy Crider), has, of course, been a mistress of the murdered governor too. It looks grim for Wyler when she tells him that she's guilty.
That, essentially, is the set up. There are layers of added complication when Wyler starts to fund the defence by getting, through his girlfriend, a dodgy loan from a bank owned by the sleazeball. It's a nice touch though, that Mr Sleaze is played by Ralph Waite, who used to be the dungareed Pa of The Waltons. America ain't what it used to be.
The first series was deeply objectionable because of the portrayal of the milieu. Hollywood types, "celebrity" lawyers, rich bitches trying to be soulful, jerks in suits extolling ruthlessness as the only virtue in a pragmatic world ... it was ill judged because, in spite of the plot, it left too much of the glamour and glitz with a shimmering attractiveness. It was, ultimately, much too self referential and self absorbed and it took itself criminally seriously. It was patronising.
This time it's different. Though most of the original elements - the star not withstanding - have been left in place, they have been tweaked. The power suits and stylised seductions; the lack of laughter, which indicates a lack of self awareness; the sense of ego smelodrama, rather than as comedy, the messianic meditations - all these survive. But crucially, they're a few shades darker. This time, the corruption, moral illiteracy and even the absurdity of LA high life is better defined.
Still, the cast remains too conventionally good looking. Indeed, with the axing of Benzali for LaPaglia, this aspect of the series is worse. The only bald guy this time is Century City lawyer, Moseley. As he's young and black, his appearance is, perhaps, a virility statement. And there is still too much putative profundity - people don't converse in Murder One they stare, glare and, between ominous pauses, engage in verbal guerilla warfare.
But Wyler's dad was a union man, who, after he took the shilling from the sleazeball, hated himself. Now Wyler must win this case to save the law firm. Beating Mr Sleaze is motivated by social, as well as personal vengeance. Wyler, though he has that look and that hair and is unacceptably suave, also has a history which gives his character some meaning. He's conniving, of course, but his out conniving the connivers (within and without) will be less pontifical than his predecessor's. That will help.
The pace too is faster this time. Murder One is still magnificently filmed and framed - if anything, it remains too luscious. But, in casting a hero for a big budget series which seeks to reflect the moral decline of the times, it has chosen better this time. Benzali's style was too Shakespearean for the milieu of navel gazing airheads and sleazeballs. He aggrandised not only himself, but them, too much. The new kid on the block has, at least, toned down the melodrama. Good.
IN contrast to the glossiness of American TV drama, the British variety remains characterised by naturalism. This is a function of money, of course, and of national self image and sensibility. It runs through soaps and sitcoms, just as it does with major drama series. ITV's new Sunday night series, Where The Heart Is, is as vehemently naturalistic as Murder One is glossy.
Indeed, in mixing the cloying homeliness of the Yorkshire Dales of Heartbeat with the cutesy, humane do goodery of doc opera, Where The Heart Is, is a kind of All Creatures Great And Small with human patients. The rustic types in this one certainly seem more real than the model agency brigade of LA law lifes. Pam Ferris and Sarah Lancashire (not long left Curly of Coronation Street) play a pair of district nurses in the fictional town of Skelthwaite.
The series has one of the most awful signature tunes outside of Australian soap: it's not just cosy, it's sick bag stuff. But the action, even though its dilemmas are suspiciously easily resolved, is competently drawn. Given the desire of series such as this to reflect both the glory and pain of nature, it was no surprise that such fundamentals of nature as birth, death and copulation formed the main plotlines.
Ms Lancashire gave birth Ms Ferris's laddish teenage son copulated with his female drama teacher and, in the most convincing plotline, a mother died just before her estranged son reached home. In fact, the mother didn't just die: being in agony, she was helped on her way a little by the district nurses. Considering the vileness of the signature tune, the inclusion of such an ethically contentious scene gave the opening episode more bite than we might reasonably have expected.
Still, it was, of course, essentially soft centred. Storylines aimed at parents of teenagers - the wild, hormonally charged son dreams of escape to glossy, exciting America - will increase its appeal with soap addicts. And yet, in its own way, Skelthwaite's unpretentiousness is as mythic as LA's opposite. Depends, I suppose, on how you like your drama - one poses as a mirror; the other as a flare. But... lawyers and doctors... it seems neither can be killed by over exposure.
BACK on the home channels - where home produced drama will never be in danger of death from overexposure - Debut featured three intriguing short films. Jack's Bicycle and He Shoots, He Scores were by John Moore. The third, The Chameleon, was an animation comedy by Rory Bresnihan and it was hilarious.
A pub bore, with a hacksaw midLouth/Monaghan accent starts to rattle on about reincarnation. He is incessant. Yid havta hearrh hum on abow "Budda and kaaarrma" to get the joke. But, he persists to the point where his victim shoots himself in the head to end the torment. Twelve seconds later, released from the manic meditation, the dead one wakes up to find he has become a lizard in The Congo. "Bollix, I'm a lizard but I don't know any lizard stuff," he says.
Still, at least it's escape . . . until our lizard meets a frog. "I wuz mowed down be a Number 13, d'other nigh'," says the pub bore, reincarnated as a frog .. . and so it goes. Still, the lizard, being a chameleon, puts on a great show in primary colours, does a bit of rock star stuff, including copulating, before being eaten by a snake. One of the pair ends up as cow dung. "Oh, boll ix." For sheer insanity, this was splendid nonsense, even if it was actually too kind to barflies.
John Moore's films were equally appealing, if not quite as funny. Set during The Emergency, Jack's Bicycle featured Darragh McHugh as a poverty stricken boy, who manages to get a new bike, when he catches the bike shop owner "visiting" his (the boy's) mother. As a morality tale, it taught a questionable lesson. But, the period feel, evoked in black and white and by a big band and Louis Armstrong soundtrack, reminded you, that even in de Valera's austere Ireland, "bike" had more than one meaning.
At first, He Shoots, He Scores looked like it had got the order of its title wrong. In a bizarre, Beckettian landscape - with the shadow of Godot all about - it seemed that, as with junkies, "he scores, he shoots" might have been more appropriate. This was a more cerebral, knowing effort and though it was an award winner at the 1995 Berlin Film Festival, it was my least favourite of the three. Oh, it was clever, hut it was a little long and laboured.
THE most truly sickening sight of the week was on Network First's The Boy Business, which documented how paedophiles prey on homeless and other vulnerable children. I did not see it all, but one scene, near the end, was as monstrous and gruesome as anything I've ever seen on TV. An abused boy, his body covered by blue sheeting, was shown being stretchered away, as an informant insisted that the things done to the child were unspeakable.
The informant went on to claim that he knew of five cases, at least, where a paedophile ring operating between London and Amsterdam had grotesquely tortured and killed young boys to make snuff movies. In America, fictions like Murder One are able to increase tension by reference to the fact that the death penalty remains an option. Britain is more civilised in this regard and yet, jail - even jail until death - seems an inadequate punishment for the sort of crimes recounted (even with gory details omitted) in this thoroughly chilling documentary.
FINALLY, a thoroughly chilling party political broadcast by the sinking Tories. It raises issues about freedom of speech and whether or not such a vital freedom ought to permit the freedom to abuse such a right. Set in the future, with Blair's Labour having won the general election, a succession of testimonies from such archetypal Tory voters as a black man, an Indian mother, a leather jacketed thirtysomething lad, an unreconstructed hippy - tell, declaratively, how awful things are now.
But this is scandalous. Even if they believe that Labour will wreck Britain, they cannot prove it. There is a tense in the English language for talking about things to come - the future tense. To propagandise about the future in the present tense is, clearly, unethical. Perhaps, in relation to political discourse, it ought to be illegal too. Certainly, it is scare mongering, which seeks to obliterate the fact that it is - and can only be - speculation. Voters should have zero tolerance for such gratuitous fraud.