They Were All Heroes

By Richard Zoglin

SHOW: I'LL FLY AWAY

TIME: OCT. 11, 8 P.M. (MOST STATIONS), PBS

THE BOTTOM LINE: NBC's fine series about race relations in the South gets a stilted and sentimental send-off on PBS.

I'll Fly Away, NBC's fine, thoughtful series about a small Southern town in the late 1950s, always seemed like an anachronism in the 1990s. A network drama with no guns, drug pushers or colorful small-town eccentrics -- just a lot of ordinary people on the cusp of the civil rights movement. The surprise isn't that the show was canceled last spring after two seasons, but that it | developed a big enough following to encourage creators John Falsey and Joshua Brand to produce a two-hour movie finale for PBS. The public network airs it next week, launching a 38-week reprise of the original series.

The movie, sadly, is a disappointment. Stilted and sanctimonious, it labors under a pair of common PBS problems: too little production money (a lot of static dialogue scenes) and too much preaching. The film opens in the present day, with Lilly (Regina Taylor), the Bedford family's former maid, now a successful 60-year-old author. Baby-sitting her grandson, she lectures him about the civil rights movement and gets out her old scrapbook. Fine way for a kid to spend a Saturday night -- but by the end of the show he is properly reverential. "You were all heroes," he says.

And they are, in a sentimental way that the series usually avoided. In the flashback that makes up the bulk of the movie, Lilly recalls the incident that forced her and her family to leave town: a friend's nephew from Detroit pays a visit, and his defiance of segregationist protocol leads to tragedy. The movie makes old points with new heavy-handedness. A black man courageously identifies the suspects in a race crime while a boorish white cop munches pickles and mayonnaise in the squad car. Lilly's daughter stands sweating in her clothes while John Morgan, the Bedfords' youngest, frolics in a whites- only pool, as the camera crosscuts incessantly.

Still, the movie works up some nostalgic emotion at the end, when Lilly says goodbye to John Morgan and, 30 years later, pays a visit to his father (Sam Waterston). Doddering convincingly in old-man makeup, Waterston wrings tears by almost literally reading the phone book -- reciting to Lilly what his kids have done since she left. Then he pays her a belated tribute: "Thirty years ago, you helped to open my eyes." And, in a small way, ours too.