A Potpourri of Special Fare

By Gerald Clarke, RICHARD CORLISS, John S. DeMott, Anastasia Toufexis

Programs of intelligence: political and scientific

Snail tracks have been observed in Hollywood: the actors' strike is inching toward a settlement. But Happy Days are not here yet. It could take a month or more for the old shows to return with new episodes. In the interim, viewers can choose among "specials" and series from the commercial networks and PBS that will instruct, provoke and entertain in intelligent new ways. For the next few weeks, TV will mute its role as electronic babysitter and engage the viewer in adult conversation. En garde, sitcommers and real people! The spirit could be catching:

A Mole in a Maze of Mirrors Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, PBS (Mondays, beginning Sept. 29, 8 p.m. E.D.T.). Except for The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, John Le Carre's convoluted plots have resisted translation into two-dimensional film and television. Now, in what should be the TV event of the season, the BBC proves that Britannia still rules the air waves. PBS's six-part showing of the BBC-co-produced Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is probably the most intellectually demanding--and rewarding--TV series ever seen in the U.S.

Mole is a code word for the double agent who has burrowed his way into the heart of the British secret service. As Tinker, Tailor opens, the head of intelligence, known only as Control (Alexander Knox), determines that one of his subordinates has an open line to Moscow. But which one? Enter the redoubtable George Smiley, brought out of retirement. The counterspy is an unlikely hero. He is middle-aged and stout, and his adulterous wife has bedded down with just about every man he knows, including Bill Haydon (Ian Richardson), one of the four candidates for Mole. Yet as Alec Guinness plays him, Smiley seems wholly real, a man who has walked through a maze of distorting mirrors for so long that he sees life as a series of untrustworthy reflections.

At times the chase through this maze is needlessly confusing; it is often hard to tell past from present. A pity, because everything else in the program demonstrates lapidary craftsmanship. Producer Jonathan Powell, Adapter Arthur Hopcraft and Director John Irvin are like glypticians bent on chiseling one perfect series for TV. Hopcraft has retained Le Carre's spare style, which is as tightly drawn as a violin string. It can convey almost as many tones, and it is wonderful to hear what talented performers can do with those laconic, loaded sentences.

The acting surpasses even the BBC's high standards. At this point in his career, Guinness, solid and elegantly thoughtful, is beyond praise. His lesser-known colleagues are, without exception, worthy of him and of the drama's subtle subject. Even the smallest scene is memorable-- like Beryl Reid's appearance as a dipsy researcher who fell from favor with Smiley and Control. "Poor loves," she says to Smiley, her whiskied voice falling slowly and softly, like autumn leaves. "Trained to empire. Englishmen could be proud then. Oh, God. Taken away. Good bye, world." One reason Le Carre's sad story rings with such resonance is that it is largely true. There really was a "mole," a treasonous golden boy of the British Establishment. His name was Kim Philby, and he defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. Now 68, he lives in Moscow, a hero of the Soviet state, honored for that trove of secrets he stole from London and Washington. No one knows whether he would look upon this show as tragedy or comedy.

--By Gerald Clarke

Soloist in a Choir of Martyrs Playing for Time (CBS, Sept. 30). Film and TV movies about the Holocaust have be come so numerous they now constitute a genre: horror-show effects, mannered performances and madhouse melodrama. In Playing for Time, the true story of Chanteuse Fania Fenelon's survival in Auschwitz as the vocalist of its female orchestra. Dramatist Arthur Miller and Director Daniel Mann have set these Holocaust cliches against each other. Though Fenelor (Vanessa Redgrave) and her fellow prisoners must fight for their lives and their dignity against the SS oppressors, they find their sternest, most domineering antagonist in Alma Rose (Jane Alexander) niece of Gustav Mahler and conductor of the Auschwitz orchestra. Playing for Time is as much the tale of two strong women, in conflict or in concert, as it is of inhuman degradation and heroic grit. Because Redgrave and Alexander are two of the great modern actresses, the film is also a record of their competition and triumph over the limitations of the genre and the viewer's expectations.

The casting of Redgrave, La Pasionaria of the P.L.O., as a half-Jewish inmate of a Nazi camp has provoked much controversy. The Anti-Defamation League has attacked the casting as "both an insult and an injury to the millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust." CBS has found advertisers reluctant to peddle their hair sprays and frozen foods between segments of a downbeat film with an unpopular performer and has sold its commercial time at a fraction of the standard rate. Meanwhile, most of the Playing for Time starring cast have signed an open letter urging that Redgrave's "personal political views" not obscure "a dynamic and honest piece of work."

On paper, Redgrave may indeed seem ill-suited to play a Jew in Nazi Germany. The Fania Fenelon of Playing for Time is more than a survivor: she is a tough, generous woman with an aura of eccentric sanctity. The part demands an actress of profound force and intelligence. Redgrave is that actress. Surrendering herself to the part, she has created a giving, living exemplar of human strength under pressure. Fania Fenelon should be proud.

--By Richard Corliss

An Astronomer in the Galaxy Cosmos by Carl Sagan, A Personal Voyage (PBS, Sundays, beginning Sept. 28, 8 p.m. E.D.T.). With this 13-part, $8.25 million series, television truly gets down to the stuff of cells and the substance of stars. Each segment has flair, excellent special effects and a dash of good ethical showmanship, thanks to Carl Sagan, 45, the Cornell University astronomer and Pulitzer prizewinner (for The Dragons of Eden).

What if, in Episode 1, viewers travel with Sagan on a hokey Star Wars-style "ship of the imagination" to distant galaxies? The vastness of the universe is brilliantly presented--the trillions of suns, the distances in billions of lightyears. The limited speck called earth is put in its place: the third planet around a middle-aged dwarf star, on one arm of the Milky Way, in a sea of other galaxies.

Episode 1 is light on theme and heavy on overture. But Cosmos soon settles down to its subject. Evolution is explored in detail, along with natural and artificial selection. Viewers take a trip inside a cell to see how DNA reproduces itself. With life's building blocks--simple organic molecules--common throughout the universe, Sagan feels that life must exist somewhere other than earth. But what would it look like? On Jupiter, he shows, it could consist of giant gas-filled living balloons called "floaters," with "hunters" that eat the floaters for survival.

Sagan has been on Johnny Carson's Tonight show so many times that his students have been known to greet him with "Heeere's Carl!" None of that tinsel, though, should take away from Sagan the scientist, one of the first astronomers to estimate correctly the surface temperature of Venus and to recognize that the changing patterns on Mars were caused by wind-blown sands. Nor should it detract from Sagan the teacher. He is a man clearly in love with his subject, and in love with teaching it, who speaks of "exquisite interrelationships" and the "awesome machinery of nature." Sagan is unabashedly awestruck, and he assumes that what interests him will interest his audience. His assumption should prove to be correct, provided that the audience can forget the banality of That's Incredible!, Those Amazing Animals and the rest of what is mislabeled "reality programming."

--By John S. DeMott

A Doctor in the Blood Stream The Body in Question (PBS, Tuesdays, beginning Sept. 30, 9 p.m. E.D.T.). The BBC had an inspired notion when it chose Jonathan Miller to write and host this 13-part medical series. Miller is a physician and, more important, a veteran of that '60s satire Beyond the Fringe. Miller brings some of the engaging wit and lunacy of that review to the series. In the opening episode, Naming of Parts, he takes to the streets Oxford to ask passers-by about the location and size of internal organs. In Blood Relations, red automobiles career over roadways to show how red blood cells travel the circulatory system. Best of all is the staged encounter between doctors and a man hospitalized for abdominal pains in Try a Little Tenderness. The daffy sequence illustrates the complexities making a diagnosis while capturing the ignominy of being a patient.

In more serious fashion, Miller discusses the involuntary actions of the gastrointestinal tract, re-creates classic medical experiments, such as William Harvey's showing that blood flows in only one direction in a vein, and assists at an autopsy (we see far more of a postmortem than is ever shown on Quincy). The series can be alternately informative (Roman society frowned on scientific dissections of the human body while applauding human massacres for entertainment) and provocative (proposing that falling ill is not something that happens to us but something we choose to do). But the best moments are noncontroversial explanations of how scientists arrived at concepts of bodily mechanics. The idea of the heart as a pump, for example, occurred only in the 17th century after such mechanical devices became widespread.

Ironically, the series' greatest flaw is a result of its principal asset: Miller's agile mind. The host's penchant for explaining everything in terms of something else--gunpowder to show how nerves fire muscles into contraction; cartography to demonstrate the differences between organs and tissues--can be instructive. But analogies are used so lavishly that audiences may be subject to acute metaphoritis. The going occasionally gets so dense that the viewer is tempted to cry: "Give it to me straight, Doc. I can take it."

--By Anastasia Toufexis

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