Pranks and Populism

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Michael Moore, the director of the film documentary Roger & Me, is a hybrid of two Ralphs -- Kramden and Nader. The son of an autoworker, he has the persona of a bumbling working guy; he is blessed with brilliant comic timing, and his waistline is Gleasonesque. At the same time, Moore was once the editor of a left-wing magazine, and he considers himself an activist sniffing out the hypocrisies of corporate America. The comedian and the reformer lurk within Moore, and just as he did with Roger & Me, he winningly manages to express both these sides of himself on TV Nation, his satirical newsmagazine that debuts on NBC this week.

Roger & Me dealt with the effects of General Motors layoffs in Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan, and was structured around his efforts to meet with Roger Smith, who was then CEO of GM. Shambling, wearing sagging jeans and badly in need of a haircut, Moore sought out the elusive chairman in posh offices and clubs. He pursued his subject doggedly, and his innocent, straight-faced directness with the public relations executives and others keeping him away from Smith gave the film a subdued hilarity.

Moore uses a similar mixture of prankishness, populism and deadpan naivete on TV Nation. The show, which features four correspondents in addition to Moore, covers topics ranging from AIDS profiteering to pets on Prozac. In one of the series' typical segments, Moore stands outside the offices of various corporate chiefs and uses a megaphone to ask them to come down and perform simple tasks their employees carry out every day. Louis Gerstner of IBM is challenged to format a computer disk; he doesn't respond. But Ford's Alex Trotman does agree to change the oil in a jeep. After he completes the chore, Moore, referring to a Ford slogan, asks him, "If quality is job one, what is job two?" Trotman responds earnestly, "We don't have ... we don't think of what's second really."

There is probably more incisive humor in one hour of TV Nation than in a season of Murphy Brown, but Moore is not venturing into network territory only for the laughs. "I want people to be angry; I want them to get up and do something," he says. This goal sometimes causes TV Nation to veer from satire toward simpleminded didacticism. At the end of a NAFTA segment in which Moore visits American plants that have shifted operations to Mexico, the camera pans over a shantytown. In his narration Moore bemoans the fact that U.S. leaders said NAFTA "would build a better life for all Mexicans." Did anyone ever say that decades of poverty would be eradicated within eight months of the passage of a trade agreement?

No, but as Moore will remind you, this is television with a point of view.