If you`ve been wondering what has happened to Robby Benson, you can find him sitting in a prison cell at the outset of ”Invasion of Privacy” (8 p.m. Wednesday, USA cable). He`s doing pushups and fantasizing about Hillary Wayne (Jennifer O`Neill), a famous celebrity/magazine journalist who, not coincidentally, is coming to jail to interview Alex Pruitt (Benson) in connection with a story about the failure of the parole system.
Pruitt`s in prison for armed robbery, but that`s not nearly indicative of his potential for evil.
Able to turn on some boyish charm, he impresses Wayne so much that by the time he gets out on parole he is able to get a job as her assistant on the magazine.
Painfully conventional, this film tries to pin Pruitt`s violent urges to an incident from his childhood: As a young boy he witnessed his mother having a tryst with her lover and his father killing them with a shotgun.
He tries to subdue his demons not by any reasonable means, but rather by brutally mutilating himself with a crudely fashioned prison knife every time he starts to feel anger. And that`s often, as he is ignored by Wayne and abused by Wayne`s lascivious magazine editor boss.
Pruitt tries courting Wayne`s daughter by having her strip for his video camera, but he will not be satisfied by anyone but Mom.
Benson, looking fit but acting terribly, seems to think that rage is best captured by contorting his face until he looks ape-like. It doesn`t work, like almost everything else in this film, in which the only believable element is Jennifer O`Neill`s continuing ability-beginning with 1971`s ”Summer of `42”- to attract younger men.
– Georges Simenon`s Jules Maigret, detective hero of 84 novels and 18 short stories, is the latest sleuth to join the ”Mystery!” series, which begins its 13th season with six Maigret capers.
Maigret (Michael Gambon) is a Paris police inspector who tries to solve crimes by trying to think like the criminals. If that tells you that the stories are heavier on character than plot, you`ve discovered the essence of Simenon`s stories, a method that may demand more viewer patience than the exploits of Sherlock Holmes.
Gambon plays the detective with self-assurance but without much spark. There is a determinedly pinched British feel to the proceedings, rather than the more raffish French tone I recall from the novels.
Still, the first two episodes are not unappealing (in their creepy ways), dealing with the kinky and sordid corridors of love and romance.
”Maigret Sets a Trap” (8 p.m. Thursday, PBS-Ch. 11) gives us a series of stabbing deaths in a sleazy section of Paris, and next week`s ”Maigret and the Mad Woman” has an elderly widow murdered the day after telling Maigret that her apartment has been repeatedly visited by a person who disturbs nothing.
– ”Total Exposure: Privacy and the Press,” a special edition of ”First Person With Maria Shriver” (9 p.m. Thursday, NBC-Ch. 5) is not likely to raise the public`s low impression of journalists. This hourlong show examines some of the lengths to which the press will go to get its stories and what that costs the objects of the coverage.
It is close to an indictment of some journalistic practices, especially those of the supermarket tabloids, which go after their prey with reckless enthusiasm.
The argument-put forth by such people as former New York Post Managing Editor Jerry Nachman-that celebrities crave coverage while complaining when they can`t control its tone, doesn`t hold much weight against the sad tale of Shaun Walters.
Walters was the son of the governor of Oklahoma who, having been charged with a misdemeanor possession of drug paraphernalia, was so hounded by the media that, his parents contend, he was driven to suicide.
The show introduces us to a tabloid photographer who made $50,000 for one picture of Madonna`s wedding, and a 10-year-old girl who, after her name was printed in a local paper in connection with a sexual abuse case, became the focus of a controversial lawsuit over the naming of minors in sex crime stories.
We get the details of-and hear from some of those involved in-Arthur Ashe`s being forced to come forward with the news that he had AIDS.
Shriver, whose life as a Kennedy and the wife of a movie star has made her more aware than most of the press` appetites, is unfortunately not as opinionated as I would have liked. But her show is a well-balanced and not very pretty look at the press.
