October 5, 2007

What to Watch: Coming Up on Cable

Great docs on cable, including ESPN's tale of the Jonestown Massacre ... Ted Koppel's prison spell for Discovery ... Talula's Mom, about (and by) a breast cancer survivor, and more.

Tube Stake: Programming Reviews by Seth Arenstein

HOOP DREAMS: ESPN's surprising Jonestown doc.

• SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7

Outside The Lines: Jonestown, The Game of Their Lives, 9:30am ET, ESPN.

You can only wonder why.

In Iran, a hit television series revolves around an Iranian diplomat in Paris who helps Jews escape occupied France and the Holocaust. The diplomat gets Iranian passports for the Jews so they can travel to what is known today as Israel. 

That the miniseries, Zero Degree Turn, is a hit is amazing. There’s nothing wrong with the acting, the plot or the production values. But remember where the show is grabbing viewers. It’s a country where the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeatedly has denounced Israel and questioned whether the Holocaust occurred. One more miracle, the series is produced by a state-run company and airs on state-controlled television.

Another head-scratcher is at the center of a strong segment in this installment of ESPN’s routinely excellent Outside The Lines series. This segment tells the story of Jim Jones Jr., one of the sons of the infamous Reverend Jim Jones. It was the Reverend Jones whose cult of personality led to the death of some 900 of his followers at a compound in Jonestown, Guyana, and the murder of California congressman Leo Ryan in 1978.

The head-scratcher is that the Reverend, who denounced basketball as part of the bourgeois culture that his movement abhorred, allowed his sons to erect a basketball court. “It was right in the middle” of the Jonestown compound, Jim Jones Jr. told us the other day during a call arranged by ESPN. “I don’t know why he let us do it.”

In the ESPN piece, Stephan Jones, another son of Jones, recalls that, “It was a borderline rebellious act for us to play organized ball, we always felt guilty” playing ball against the wishes of his father. 

More important, Jones allowed his sons to form a team, which he eventually permitted to travel to the capitol of the country, Georgetown, to play a game against the Guyanese National team.

While the team was in Georgetown the order came down from Reverend Jones that all his followers would have to drink the potion that would lead to their deaths. Basketball literally saved Jones Jr.’s life. His wife and an unborn child were not so lucky.

Forward almost 30 years and we find an articulate Jones Jr. residing in the San Francisco area and making peace with the game that he couldn’t bare to play or watch since Jonestown. Helping him do so is his son, 18-year-old Rob, a hulking young man who was a high school basketball and football star.

One of the Bay Area’s best athletes, the younger Jones today is a freshman basketball player at the University of San Diego. One of his goals: Building a new legacy for the Jones name. An irony: Jones Jr., like Rob, was 18 when the Jonestown massacre occurred.  

While ESPN tells a terrific story, and unearths plenty of unseen footage, the segment’s 20-minute length is too short to explore deeply many of the issues raised by the Jonestown episode.

ESPN producer Jon Fish, who visited Guyana to report the story and finds evidence of the basketball court at the jungle-based compound, says the network has plenty of material to expand the segment into a longer work. It would make a chilling but interesting piece to commemorate next year’s 30th anniversary of the infamous mass murder suicide. 

STUY GUYS: CSTV trails NYC HS football team.

The Peglegs of Stuyvesant High, 6:30pm ET, CSTV.

It’s a problem when one of your star football players, Romeo Alexander (pictured, above left), sums up the coming season thus: “This year we hope to win, uh, games.”

The 2005 season highlighted in this documentary was a winless one for NYC's Stuyvesant High School team. It’s understandable, though; Stuyvesant, or Stuy, as the place is called by its students, is one of the most academically competitive public schools in New York. Students must pass an exam to enter.

And since lower Manhattan school values SAT scores more than yards per carry, the odds of fielding a good football team, or any football team for that matter, are pretty long (the math team could probably devise a formula to come up with the number that was 99.9% accurate).

More hurdles: many of the team members come from homes where English is a second language. Indeed, the documentary’s best filmmaking shows a long line of players telling us their names and their family’s mother tongue. “You’d never find a team like this anywhere else,” one player’s mother says, correctly. And, in many cases, prior to arriving at Stuy, the players thought pigskin could be found only on the back of a farm animal. “I have to teach the basics; it’s like they’re seventh graders,” new coach Brian Sacks says.

Despite his rather unscholarly language, Sacks apparently teaches them well. The documentary’s major failing, besides being about 20 minutes too long, is that it doesn’t identify why the team’s fortunes improve in 2006. While it would be a stretch to call the team’s 2006 season “the revenge of the nerds,” the squad manages several victories, including one where the team’s charter bus fails to appear and the boys, in football gear, ride the subway to the game. As they say, only in New York.

BEHIND BARS: Ted Koppel's latest Discovery doc.

Koppel On Discovery: Breaking Point, 9pm, Discovery.

There have been several good documentaries on prisons in recent years, including a few from Discovery rival National Geographic Channel. This one, on a par with those earlier docs, is an extraordinarily intimate look at California’s Solano prison.

Koppel weaves through the overcrowded quarters at Solano, where correctional officers are badly outnumbered, to reveal a bloated prison population, with inmates stacked three high on bunk beds. California’s tough-on-crime laws are fingered as the bad guy, creating a prison population of some 173,000. The facilities were designed to hold 100,000. But, as Koppel says rhetorically, “the conditions shouldn’t be too good — this is prison, after all.”

But Solano's overcrowding has disrupted a system that is supposed to be rehabilitating men. Koppel interviews numerous prisoners who’ve been paroled only to return to jail shortly thereafter. One inmate tells Koppel of returning 18 days after leaving. Instead, the only things the inmates are learning behind bars, Koppel says, are better ways to commit crimes. “They’re learning from the masters,” says Sol Irving, a 20-year prison official. 

And this education isn’t cheap. It’s costing California’s taxpayers $43,000 each year to keep one man behind bars. With a prison population of nearly 200,000, Koppel says, “you do the math.” In five years California’s spending on all its public colleges and universities will be topped by its prison spending.   

The picture doesn’t seem much better in other states. There are four times as many people in prison today in this country as there were 25 years ago, Koppel says. Another sobering thought: the U.S. has more people in prison than any country in the world.

Baisden After Dark, series premiere, 10pm ET, TV One.

This is easily the slickest-looking show we’ve seen on TV One, and its hip music and attitude will, at times, make some viewers think they’re watching BET or an updated version of Arsenio Hall’s talker.

The host is radio’s Michael Baisden, the author and urban radio talent  known for discussing sexual topics on his drive-time show Love, Lust & Lies. Accordingly, sex is a large part of this TV series, with the first half of the 60-minute show consisting of a discussion, such that it is, about adult issues, including why men and women cheat, interracial dating, and tonight’s topic: Are men doing their job in the bedroom?

You can get a handle on how serious the talk will be by knowing that among the guests debating this topic is Baisden’s comedic sidekick Geroge Wellborn and a so-called delivery man, a good-looking male who’s paid to sleep with women.

OK, so does America need yet another talk show? Admittedly this one, which plays late at night, will have more latitude than morning and daytime talkers, and its after-dark party atmosphere hasn’t been seen on television since Hugh Hefner’s Playboy After Dark days.

Do TV One’s viewers need a late-night talk show? Yes. The African-American perspective doesn’t get enough play on television (plenty of other perspectives are missing, too) and Baisden’s show, however light in tone, partially addresses that problem. It’ll be interesting to see how this show develops. 

BENSON'S HEART: Talula and Mom, on Cinemax.

• TUESDAY, OCT. 9

Dear Talula, 7:30pm, Cinemax.

Cable has offered a slew of excellent pieces about breast cancer, including the Lifetime original Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy, the Emmy-nominated film version of the book by Lifetime executive Geralyn Lucas.

Another excellent film about cancer, although not breast cancer, Crazy Sexy Cancer, a documentary that ran on TLC last month, will be repeated there on, of all days, Halloween, at 8pm and 11pm. Also coming up this month, Lifetime will premiere another original movie about breast cancer, this one titled Matters of Life & Dating and starring Ricki Lake, October 22 at 9pm. 

National Breast Cancer Awareness Month also brings us this Cinemax project — one of the shortest pieces, but one of the best, on cable this month.

At 38, Lori Benson became a mother for the first time, giving birth to a daughter, Talula. About 12 months later she had another life-changing experience, when a routine checkup revealed breast cancer.

The resulting documentary could have been a self-absorbed soliloquy of woe. Fortunately Benson, like Crazy Sexy Cancer’s Kris Carr, is upbeat, a fighter, with a good sense of humor. Unlike Carr, Benson is an aspiring filmmaker. If this 34-minute piece, done under the worst of circumstances, is any indication of Benson's talent, and it is, she has a great career ahead of her.

One of her biggest assets as a director is how she allows images to tell her story. An appointment with her oncologist allows the viewer to become just as confused as Benson, as the doctor describes myriad options for chemotherapy, all with confusing acronyms.

Another scene, which uses no words but simply natural sounds, is simple, but devastating.

Benson, just home from a radical mastectomy, is attempting to calm Talula. The child reaches for her mother’s breast, but Benson must keep Talula from her breast. Benson cradles Talula, but the child again reaches for her mother’s chest. Talula becomes inconsolable and is taken out of the room by her father. A moment later, Benson weeps.
 

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