Television: One Hit, Two Misses

Big stars in small shows

The Collection (Oct. 25, PBS, 9 p.m. E.D.T.). Not terribly much happens during this hour-long play by Harold Pinter. Phones ring at odd times of night. A London boutique owner unexpectedly drops in on a dress designer who lives in a baroque town house down the road. Two men almost stage a duel with delicate cheese knives. A husband fears that his wife may have had an affair in a hotel room in Leeds. Not much happens during The Collection, but by the time the play is over at least three lives have been shattered. That's the wonder of Pinter: when tragedy strikes his characters, there are no fireworks, only an unnerving hush.

The Collection, written in 1960, is one of Pinter's best plays—a small masterpiece. Skillfully constructed and mordantly funny, it is as scathing as a Waugh novel, as suspenseful as a Hitchcock film. (Pinter, like Hitchcock, even used a "McGufinn" —in this case, the alleged Leeds affair —to get his narrative rolling.) PBS's version of the play, imported from England's Granada International Television for the Great Performances series, may well be the definitive production. Director Michael Apted has obtained a riveting ensemble performance from a dream cast: Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates, Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren. Though it is difficult to capture the physical tension of Pinter characters on a small television screen, Apted grips the audience with a judicious use of tight closeups, clever editing and proper attention to Pinter's pauses.

Apted's actors love the English language as much as the playwright does. The spare, precise dialogue practically detonates from their lips. Bates, playing the paranoid husband, is the quintessential Pinter menace: if looks could kill, the rest of the cast would be dead. He is well countered by McDowell in the role of a serpentine climber who may or may not be sleeping with both a male housemate and Bates' wife. As McDowell's keeper, a prissy old couturier, Olivier has The Collection's only openly emotional scene. It is a shocker. When he falls apart under the strains of loneliness and jealousy, he forces the audience to confront the heartbreak that lies beneath the play's cool surface. Yet Olivier—who also produced this show —understands that Pinter's small moments are no less crucial than the big ones. What other actor could turn the simple act of answering a telephone into a poignant intimation of mortality?

The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank (Oct. 25, CBS, 9 p.m. E.D.T.).

One of the most depressing spectacles on television is Erma Bombeck's regular weekday stint on ABC's Good Morning America. From her humble beginnings as a syndicated newspaper humor columnist, Bombeck has evolved into a TV personality of the most plastic sort. She delivers her one-liners in a strident vibrato; she luxuriates in canned laughter as though it were the praise of a Nobel Prize jury. Bombeck used to satirize the vulgarity of American suburbia; now she epitomizes it.

With The Grass Is Always Greener, an adaptation of her bestselling book, Bombeck invades prime time. This made-for-TV movie is intended as a trial run for a future sitcom. Let's hope that some one at CBS has the good sense to mow Grass down at this early stage.