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"The Beast"		 >
Frank Langella plays the boss man at a reckless TV network

ABC's new drama is about a TV network that feeds on sensations

 

By KINNEY LITTLEFIELD
of TheColumnists.com

It’s a bad day in the belly of “The Beast.”

Meaning the traumatized journalist-characters in ABC’s murky, disjointed new summer series “The Beast” (premiering 10 p.m. Wednesday, June 13) are moping and moaning about how much the world hates us media-types--and how we may just deserve it, too.

(Oh the shame of it! I think I’ll just smack myself!)

As the premiere episode opens a mad bomber has killed lots of folks in St. Louis, apparently because he blames the media--that raging monolithic beast--for all the evil in our lives.

Well, Mad Bomber may have a point. I certainly see it. In the world of “The Beast,” cynicism, voyeurism, meaningless, cliched pseudo-intellectualizing and crude, half-cocked behavior abound at scruffy World News Service, a low-rent, Los Angeles-based, 24-hour broadcast news organization dubbed “the beast” by its weirdo staff.

Yes, it’s worse than Fox News Channel.

Yes, “The Beast” airs on a traditional Big Three network--the Disney-owned Mouse House, ABC. But it smells like UPN, bastion of so many shows that shoot for edginess but end up all emptily inscrutable, not quite laughable enough to be camp.

Thankfully “The Beast’s” resident media mogul Jackson Burns (Frank “Dracula” Langella) manages to transcend caricature a bit.

Langella long has known how to seduce and menace simultaneously. He’s always worth a look.

And Burns does have his crazy quirks. He trains banks of sneaky cameras on everyone at WNS including himself, on air or behind the scenes, 24/7. The cameras even feed a live in-house Webcast that goes out over the air unedited on a slow news day.

Presiding over the peepfest is a guy named Harry (Gary Werntz) who we don’t see very much of except an eye and cheek.

Burns has given Harry complete autonomy over the camera capers. Harry sits above and isolated from the fray, switching to different shots like the wily wizard behind Oz.

In fact Harry is the best part of “The Beast.” He is enjoyably mysterious and inscrutable. Powerful as he may be, you sense his fragile ego is wounded easily. He seems lonely. He probably yearns to be one of the gang in the news pit below him. He needs stroking. He is the put-upon Phantom of WSN.

Still WNS is Burns’ baby, his personal bid for redemption. Burns financed WNS by peddling violent video games to hapless kiddies in his earlier, less responsible days. Now he vows to expose every particle of the newsmaking process on air so viewers won’t feel conned or manipulated.

> This TV cameraman who works for "The Beast" looks like a dropout from a heavy metal band >> 

But lens me 24/7? No way. It’s not hard to imagine that the in-house surveillance is driving some folks mad. Take on-camera personality--I cringe at calling him a reporter--Reese McFadden (Jason Gedrick of “Murder One,” “EZ Streets”). He launches into uncontrolled on-air outbursts about “the black hole of Western culture, the festival of flatulence.” He flips the bird. He taunts an on-air guest, a fugitive friend of the bomber, by belittling the size of his male organ.

Then again we’re led to believe Reese is the real deal who does his viewers right. That this is all in the name of real news--of delivering the sordid truth.

“Here we rip the wrapper off…and we just feed it out there raw, just like it is,” Burns says.

He is trying to impress his newest recruit, naive-looking magazine writer Alice Allenby (Elizabeth Mitchell of “The Linda McCartney Story”).

Mitchell plays Alice all stunned and slipped helplessly into the darkness beyond the looking-glass, at least in the two episodes I’ve seen. Her timing’s strange. She pauses like she’s trying to snarf flies before she speaks.

I’d like to smack her, too.

Apparently Alice is meant to be our innocent eye, a supposedly sane standard by which viewers can measure the surrounding lunacy in the mean ole news biz.

Alice’s heroes say a lot. They are Woodward and Bernstein--the Washington Post reporters who exposed Watergate in the ’70s and toppled Nixon. They belong to the righteous era that old newsies recall fondly, before all-news CNN helped turn journalism into a 24-hour feeding frenzy.

Why is WNS called “the beast”? Alice asks.

“Because it’s always hungry,” a WNS veteran says.

OK, “The Beast” makes some worthy points about media rapaciousness, callousness, subjectivity and superficiality. But it never quite figures out whether it’s pro or con the news industry.

And its own dialogue is stereotypical and superficial.

Eventually Alice fits right in at WNS. She instigates a televised execution in the premiere episode while barely breaking a sweat. She simply asks the condemned man she is interviewing--oh, this is so hard for her tender sensibilities!--if he will let WNS lens his death.

Yes, “The Beast’s” production honchos know a hot concept when they see it. Televised fryings are on the public mind these days--and on the agenda of idea-starved TV producers, too.

“The Beast”ly production team includes, by the way, creators Kario Salem (telefilms “Don King: Only in America,” “The Rat Pack”), Ian Sander (recent NBC series “Profiler”) and Kim Moses (“Profiler”). Salem, Mimi Leder (“ER”) and Imagination Television co-chairmen Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Tony Krantz are executive producers.

Looks like all these guys shuffled around a table one day, had a sugar high and came up with the proverbial high concept. Hey, let’s take the all-seeing cameras from so-called reality show “Big Brother” and stir ’em with “Network”--that ultimate movie of TV news lunacy.

Let’s mix the dark, despairing edge of crime show “Profiler” with the out-of-control existentialism of “The Prisoner.” Let’s have Reese do Peter Finch-styled rants ala “Network” and let’s throw in a whiff of convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh, too.

Let’s be sure to severely slice-’n’-dice the media because polls tell us average folks hate journalists. We’ll aim at their fear and mistrust.

And we definitely gotta play it all hot and fast like “ER.” That way no one will notice we’re not saying anything that means much.

From what I’ve seen so far, not even “Beast’s” largely capable and seasoned cast--also including fine actors Peter Riegert (“Local Hero”), Naveen Andrews (“The English Patient”) and Harriet Sansom Harris (“Nurse Betty,” “Frasier”)--can save itself from this belly-aching show.

But that’s what you get with television by committee.

Of course. I could be wrong in future. I dig Harry and Langella does have smooth moves.

But for right now anyway--and who knows how long “The Beast” will live?--10 p.m. Wednesday on ABC looks like sinkhole TV--of the whiny, pandering and most unoriginal sort.

© 2001 by Kinney Littlefield. Photos © 2001 by ABC.

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