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Assignment Southeast Asia: NBC spent three months and $125,000 shooting a color documentary on the seven-nation region that arcs from Laos to Indonesia, then let the film gather dust for a year. Last week viewers could see the results—and understand why nobody bothered to rush the go-minute show to the screen. Southeast Asia offered some striking individual shots, such as a closeup of an opium smoker, and picturesque views of Thai boxers, golden Burmese temples and the stone splendor of Cambodia's Angkor Wat. But in trying to do too much—a travelogue plus a report of things social, economic, political, religious, anthropological—it did almost nothing well. Instead, it frequently suggested a melange of scrambled lantern slides. James (Tales of the South Pacific) Michener's commentary, delivered in a tired drawl, was repetitive, primer-simple, and studded with long gaps in which the viewer was left without pertinent information about the picture, or even a clue as to its locale. The film was more than half over before Michener got around to mentioning the issue that makes Southeast Asia's present crucial to the U.S. future—i.e., the Communists and the West are both struggling to win the region to their side. In all, NBC cameramen shot 16 hours of film for the show; the torpor of the editing and narration created the unhappy illusion that all of it got on the air.