Professor Longhair, the late Louisiana music man, once advised in song:
”If you go to New Orleans, you better go to the Mardi Gras.” Heeding this call, David Lynch and Mark Frost, the bad boys of television, took their cameras to New Orleans and now offer that city and its Mardi Gras in a way that assaults us like a come-on from a Bourbon Street barker.
The first edition of the new series ”American Chronicles” (8:30 p.m. Saturday, WFLD-Ch. 32) is as peculiar, disturbing, intriguing and captivating as that better known Lynch/Frost collaboration, ”Twin Peaks.”
This visit to New Orleans is hardly the sort of exploration that will thrill local boosters: ”(New Orleans) is an isolated banana republic,” says narrator Richard Dreyfuss. ”Too north to be part of the South and too south to be part of the North, it is the party capital of the world . . . (a place of) earthy, sensual delights.”
It`s a highly stylized half-hour. Images of the floats, parties, private balls, public raucousness and modern mysticism that define Mardi Gras are given a nightmarish quality.
In a way, Mardi Gras in New Orleans is easy pickings: pagan rites in a peculiar place. It will be interesting to see how ”American Chronicles”
handles the more prosaic. Already planned are visits to Manhattan and with pro basketball star Magic Johnson.
They are worth anticipating, for this debut gives us a piece that, speaking from personal experience, captures, as best TV can, the colorful qualities and disturbing images of memory.
`CRIMINAL JUSTICE`
8 p.m. Saturday, HBO
One of the best made-for-cable movies I`ve seen, this excursion into the American judicial system concerns a case that represents the sort of mayhem-made-mundane created by our crack-laced violent times: Forrest Whittaker is accused of slashing a prostitute during a robbery.
Picked from a mug book and in a lineup, Whittaker claims innocence with a shaky alibi. Without money to post bond, he is forced to sit in jail while his public defender (Anthony LaPaglia) does judicial sparring with an assistant district attorney (Jennifer Grey) none too sure of her witness` credibility.
The minutiae of the system-the dealing and bargaining-is handled deftly. Characters talk with realistic crackle and profanity.
Though Grey is not up to the tasks asked of her, Whittaker and LaPaglia give two of the best performances you`ll see.
Ambiguities and questions pepper the proceedings as writer-director Andy Wolk infuses the tired system-doesn`t-work theme with an amazing energy and attention to character. It`s a powerful film, a searing indictment of a system of justice that often moves as if on flat tires.
`THE FANELLI BOYS`
8:30 p.m. Saturday, NBC
What is it about that face?
Yes, that`s it: the woman playing Theresa Fanelli, widowed matriarch on this fairly standard and frequently insipid new series, is indeed Ann Morgan Guilbert, the actress who played Millie Helper, next-door neighbor to Rob and Laura Petrie on the sparkling ”Dick Van Dyke Show.”
She must feel like a diamond broker sent to work in the mines. In this series she is bound to toil as her four adult sons move back into the family`s Brooklyn home. Tony (Ned Eisenberg) is penniless trying to run the family funeral parlor. Skirt-chasing Frankie (Christopher Meloni) has had his engagement break up. Dominic (Joe Pantolino) is broke between hustles. And Ronnie (Andy Hirsch) returns from college with bad news.
”I dropped out of college,” he says.
”Jeez. Thank God,” Frankie says. ”I thought you was queer.”
That`s just the sort of low-brow humor that could make this a hit, but that also sadly symbolizes the indigent nature of contemporary sitcom comedy. `SOMEBODY HAS TO SHOOT THE PICTURE`
8 p.m. Sunday, HBO
This companion piece, of sorts, to ”Criminal Justice” details a fatal failing of the system but comes cloaked in conventional whodunit clothes.
Roy Scheider plays a disillusioned-by-war photographer sent to rural Florida to photograph the execution of cop-killer Raymond Eames (Arliss Howard). Once there, he is presented a series of events that plant the seeds of Eames` innocence in his head.
Teaming with Bonnie Bedilia, widow of the dead officer, Scheider pieces together the particulars that should lead to Eames` release . . . if there`s time.
The plot is vigorously massaged for tension and for its fatal conclusion, but the cast behaves well, and the story satisfies.
`DEA`
8 p.m. Friday, Fox
If you`re looking to experience the feeling of car sickness while sitting on your living room couch, this is the show for you.
Its style, called ”kaleidoscopic” and ”cinema verite” by the producers, resembles nothing if not the colorful chaos of fingerpainting. It mixes docu and drama but offers no glue to bind them.
The premiere concerns the efforts of a group of Drug Enforcement Administration agents to crack a Colombian cocaine ring. They do it in fractured fashion, interrupting their surveillance to give us glimpses into their personal lives, their reasons for joining the DEA and other law-enforcement info.
I`m reluctant to criticize the producers for their ambition. I`m all for innovation. But high technology may not be the best way to humanize characters. In fact, the show`s video vociferousness drowns out all personality. It`s a look, but it`s not life.
Channel hopping . . .
– A little uneasily but with surprising charm, radioman Buzz Kilman and artist-writer Tony Fitzpatrick bring some of their popular WLUP radio movie banter to TV on ”Drive-In Reviews” following ”Saturday Night Live” on WMAQ-Ch. 5. Talking before, during and after clips from such films as
”RoboCop,” ”The Blob” and ”The Hidden,” Kilman and Fitzpatrick seem to be having a ball. They cavort through clips, gleeful at the gruesomeness.
– The half-man half-plant title character in ”Swamp Thing” (9:30 p.m. Fridays, USA cable) is unlikely to set female hearts as athrob as did Vincent of ”Beauty and the Beast,” but he`s a campy cutup in this palatably cartoonish new series.
– Those of you unfamiliar with the comedic art of Steve Wright will get a dazzling portrait in his new HBO special. It is amazing that a comic as deadpan as Wright can create such intellectual excitement, such observational fireworks. There are those who find Wright`s manner too mild, but there`s a fiery and hilarious intellect at work in ”Steven Wright: Wicker Chairs and Gravity” (9:30 p.m. Saturday, HBO).
