Ken Finkleman, Canada's best satirist, takes on the wasteland of infotainment

By GINA MALLET

en Finkleman zoomed into the TV heavens last year, at home and abroad, with his deliciously acidulous series, Newsroom, the broadcasting satire that he wrote, directed, produced and starred in. Newsroom picked up a raft of Canadian awards and went on to further acclaim on PBS stations in the U.S. (TIME named the show one of the year's 10 Best in North America.) So, after puncturing the pretensions and neuroses of a thinly disguised CBC, what next? The answer is now out: in his latest mini-series, More Tears, Finkleman has gone after bigger game: the entire business of TV news and the corruption of reality in the name of infotainment.

The four-episode show (three half-hour segments and a 90-minute closer), which begins airing on CBC on March 30 and continues through April 19, is a wickedly funny, wittily cynical meditation on the ways in which the manipulation of imagery has leached the values out of our ethical soil. Infotainment has turned everyone--from glamourized news correspondent to the most hapless loser in a human-interest weeper--into a hardened spinmeister. Finkleman, who may be proving himself to be Canada's most accomplished satirist, wants us to witness every detail of the staging.

And who better to take us through these paces than George Findlay, the ethically pliable news director of Newsroom. In Tears he has morphed into a field producer who never lets a qualm get in the way of a carefully manicured story or an eternal series of adulterous relationships. Finkleman plays him with the sly appeal of an ageless tomcat. Findlay is a news pro who can spin every unexpected eruption of reality into a made-for-TV moment. (In an early episode he silkily talks a mother whose child has just been murdered into a retake for the cameras of her red-eyed complaint about the public's indifference to victims' rights.) He maintains his cynical equilibrium even when reality spins right back at him. Findlay is abetted by his blondly beautiful star reporter Diane (Leah Pinsent), whose ability to squeeze the bathetic juices out of every situation, regardless of its actual human import, matches his own.

Tears begins exactly on the borderline of artificial reality, as camera-wielding hordes descend on a rural site where a child is reported to have fallen down a well. Findlay and Diane are in the middle of the pack, with unwanted baggage in tow--his fever-stricken mistress Nikki (Lou Thornton), who comes on the trip for R. and R. and to ask if he loves her, and his estranged wife Andrea (Arsinee Khanjian), who suggests, to no avail, a divorce and a division of their community property. Faced with emotional reality, Findlay can only bob, weave and hide.

In fact, honest emotion is anathema in Tears, where the preferred substitute might be called EmTV. A Los Angeles producer (Teryl Rothery) is drawn to the well site because, she confides in an on-camera interview--everyone in Tears is both an image and a reality--she has just finished making a movie of the week of her stuntman husband's murder, which occurred while he was making a movie of the week based on an incident like this one, only more trivial. Obviously moved, Diane cuts to the chase. What is it like, she asks, for a powerful woman to be married to someone so, well, beneath her?

TV trivializes reality, as Finkleman likes to say again and again and again. A black mother complaining that the police killed her son doesn't make the news, but an old German man who denies, not at all convincingly, that he killed 11,000 Holocaust victims is worth a feature story in which Diane lets the man and his wife know that everyone on their block really likes them. In Finkleman's homage to the concerns of the profoundly unconcerned, the hipster parents of a savagely murdered girl put on a fashion show in the child's memory, with hollow-eyed models walking, gagged and bound, in clothes the couple designed.

This is heavy freight for a TV show to carry. Finkleman's slicing wit makes it very bearable. Here he owes a debt to past masters. Finkleman's elegant direction, the detached still lifes of intense emotion, the juxtaposition of the tender and the callous, the carnal and the spiritual, the snatches of nostalgic fairground music, all hark back to Federico Fellini. Finkleman admits to an obsession with La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2--"I believe it's all there in those two movies"--that echoes throughout Tears.

If anything, this series should prove more exportable than Newsroom. Whether Finkleman, who spent 20 years writing in Hollywood, cares is another question. What really matters is the hilarious, piercing truth of what he has to say. In his extraordinarily gifted hands, TV is no longer a vast wasteland. It is a fierce moralist's comic battleground, and it knows no boundaries.