The network sits alone in its attic room at night, dreaming feverishly of confession and redemption, torn between the dual natures of its soul.
The better part of the network trusts that its audience will seek out and be able to handle challenging material. And so it makes not only the deepest concentration of smart series on television, but it also keeps plucking volumes of classic literature off the shelves and turning them into entirely respectable TV movies: “Gulliver’s Travels,” “The Odyssey,” “Merlin” (adapted from several books of Arthuriana) and now “Crime and Punishment.”
The other side of the network is dark and twisted. With cold, intellectual calculation, it has concocted a theory that the very elite — itself included — are justified in foisting mediocrity and worse on viewers. More troublesome, it has acted on that theory, ruthlessly slaying good taste with series such as “Jesse,” “Conrad Bloom,” “Veronica’s Closet” and “Suddenly Susan,” not to mention a plague of newsmagazines.
If the network’s name were translated into Russian, it would be long and difficult to pronounce. But in plain English it comes out to NBC.
To understand how two such conflicting aspects can exist in the same body it helps perhaps to look at “Crime and Punishment” (8 p.m. Sunday, WMAQ-Ch. 5), a movie that, coincidentally enough, is also about a soul split between good and bad.
The NBC version has taken many liberties with Dostoevsky’s text, and calling the movie “Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment” really does beg the question: Did Jacqueline Susann write one too?
But the 19th Century Russian novelist wrote a book that exists mostly in the mind of his hero, whose name is Raskolnikov, and in the attic room where the impoverished young intellectual lives. Watching Patrick Dempsey fight it out with his conscience up there for two hours would grow rather thin; indeed, the internal struggles do make the film play more like bad music video than a representation of a tortured conscience.
So some liberties seem necessary. And the producers of this deserve credit for, along with their elegant production, trying to remain faithful to the essence of the novel. Producer Robert Halmi Sr. does keep “Crime and Punishment” in 1850s Russia, rather than, say, moving it to St. Petersburg, Fla. (It was filmed in his native Hungary, in Budapest.)
Writer David Stevens (he also wrote the enchanting “Merlin” and the sublime “Breaker Morant”) gives it the old college try, crafting many scenes of emotional power while trying to bring out the story’s sprawling-Russian-novel aspects, including forced marriage, suicide, deep family loyalties and the gloomy kind of love between Raskolnikov and the reluctant prostitute Sonia (Julie Delpy).
Especially strong are the cat-and-mouse sequences between Dempsey and Ben Kingsley, as the investigator Porfiry who suspects Raskolnikov of the heinous act that he did, in fact, commit, the ax murder of a shrewish pawnbroker and her benign sister.
But as they can tell you at most any old college, great novels are novels for a reason: What succeeds as words on a page can suffer in the translation to the screen. This one, in trying to become a story of deeds rather than thoughts, loses much of its philosophical resonance.
This is especially true in its failure, in the early going, to make viewers understand that Raskolnikov had an intellectual justification for the killings, however horrific. He believed, or thought he did, that it is OK for extraordinary men to commit crimes.
So instead of pondering the evil that can exist in good men, and vice versa, or ruminating over the way youthful radical theorizing can seem like poppycock from a mature perspective, we mostly get a choppy crime story rendered with Boris Badenov accents in an exotic setting.
And NBC gets an interesting but ultimately disappointing television movie, one that does, at least, give us hope that in the network’s internal battle, as in Raskolnikov’s, the angel on one shoulder may knock the devil off the other.
– Horse Opera: Syndication has proven there is still an audience for old-fashioned action series, so maybe the troubled UPN network is onto something with “Legacy,” its new nighttime soap opera premiering Friday (7 p.m., WPWR-Ch. 50).
This kind of fare — featuring love, lust, cleavage, vengeance and, usually, large and troubled families living in houses overflowing with trysting places — used to flourish on TV in the 1980s, when “Dallas” and “Dynasty” dressed the soap-opera genre for evening.
“Legacy” applies the formula to a post-Civil War Kentucky clan, the Logans, headed by a liberal bachelor father (Brett Cullen) and featuring the usual assortment of fetching offspring (nobody you’ve heard of). Into their home, thanks to the dad’s kindly impulses, comes a teenage orphan lad, and sparks, literally, start to fly.
This will likely satisfy people with a hankering for this kind of thing, and it is beautifully shot in Kentucky’s horse country, a location as attractive as any of the actors.
