SEPARATE BUT EQUAL ABC, April 7-8, 9 p.m. EDT
Remember the network mini-series? It used to roam the TV plains: a big, lumbering beast that would show up two or three times a year, sprawl across nights and nights of prime time and attract (at least sometimes) hordes of viewers. Mounting costs and sagging ratings have pretty much forced the networks to abandon these extravaganzas. Instead, we get tidy two-parters, most of them either tacky soap operas (Danielle Steel's Kaleidoscope and Fine Things) or sensationalistic true-life crime stories (Love, Lies and Murder).
Occasionally, however, one comes along that recalls the heroic scope and seriousness, if not the air time, of a vanishing breed. Separate but Equal, a two-part ABC movie, portrays the events leading up to the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision outlawing segregation in public schools. Sidney Poitier, in his first TV appearance since 1955, stars as future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who headed the N.A.A.C.P.'s legal effort. Burt Lancaster, another rare bird in television land, plays Marshall's courtroom adversary, John W. Davis. George Stevens Jr., whose father created some of Hollywood's great epics, was writer and director.
Separate but Equal has some inspiring moments and relatively few cheap, melodramatic ones. The defenders of segregation are not, for the most part, snarling bigots but honorable folks concerned about states' rights and constitutional precedents. The script humanizes the problem but does not shy away from the tough legal issues involved. Still, it is the sort of dutiful effort that demonstrates why the "quality" mini-series has hit hard times.
The problem is too much reverence for the subject, not enough respect for the audience. The higher one climbs on the power-and-influence ladder, the more ponderously didactic the drama becomes. The opening scenes, set in a poor black school district in South Carolina's Clarendon County, are affecting because they are grounded in hardscrabble reality. The injustice here is that black children must walk miles to their one-room schoolhouse because county officials claim there's no money for a school bus. The white school district, meanwhile, has 30 of them.
When the N.A.A.C.P. takes up the case, however, the dialogue is gradually replaced by oratory. "Mr. Marshall, a lot of us who support the N.A.A.C.P. hope you don't reach too far too fast," says a reporter who encounters Marshall and his wife in a restaurant, causing indigestion all around. Once the action reaches the Supreme Court (as it does for most of the second half), the scenes get even more stilted. "I agree with Reed," says one Justice, discussing the case with his colleagues. "We were not appointed to this court to make the law. We're here to interpret it." Yet the decisive moment for Chief Justice Earl Warren (Richard Kiley) is rendered in simplistic human terms: an inspirational trip to Gettysburg and the sight of his black chauffeur sleeping in the car because he can't get a motel room. What was all that legal mumbo jumbo anyway?