On the one hand, the NBC movie "Witness to the Execution" has been attacked by a member of the U.S. Senate as the ultimate example of violence on television.
On the other hand, NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield has hailed it as "a bold warning to the broadcast world."Both hands have been greatly overplayed.
First, despite the fact that this movie deals with a cablecast of an execution, it's really not violent.
And second, while "Witness to the Execution" (Sunday, 8 p.m., Ch. 2) has some grand designs and raises some intriguing questions, it all-too-quickly degenerates into a mundane movie-of-the-week in which a silly plot line overshadows any aspirations the movie had.
In other words, this is an awful lot of hype about very little. The controversy is far more interesting than the movie itself.
The brouhaha was set off several months ago when the magazine Advertising Age inaccurately reported that "Witness" would be the "first snuff TV movie."
A snuff movie is one that features film of an actual killing. And, obviously, that's not the case here.
"Witness to the Execution," set in the year 1999, is about how a pay-per-view executive (Sean Young) who's in search of a sure-fire audience grabber comes up with the idea of televising an execution. After securing the approval of her bosses and the state, she auditions death-row inmates and settles on a young, handsome killer (Tim Daly) as her "star."
The execution scene itself is not tastelessly handled. As a matter of fact, due to judicious editing it's far from sensational.
There's more violence in background shots of muggings going on as Young's character drives home from work than in the execution.
The fact that Advertising Age's report was far from accurate didn't prevent Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) from assailing it as an example of how terrible the violence on television is. Conrad, of course, had not seen the telefilm.
(Unfortunately, that's but one example of how poorly prepared members of Congress have proved to be when discussing the issue of violence on television.)
"I would assume that after (Conrad) does see the film, he would see that it doesn't contain any violence and makes a statement about media reponsibility, and it's actually an anti-violent film," said the film's executive producer, Frederick S. Pierce.
Pierce, who used to be the chief of programming at ABC, is also somewhat off the mark in his evaluation of "Witness." There is some violence, albeit not much.
And his anti-violence message gets lost along the way.
The movie begins promisingly, despite the fact that Young is completely out of her league as Janet Traynor, a clone of the character Faye Dunaway played in the movie "Network." There is some intriguing discussion of how far TV will go in the pursuit of viewers.
When some of Traynor's colleagues express revulsion at her scheme, she quickly replies "If we don't do it, the networks will."
It's not hard to believe that TV might reach that stage by 1999.
But all this highfalutin theorizing is crushed under the weight of what turns out to be the main plot of the movie. Traynor's choice as the star of her show, Dennis Casterline (Daly), is extremely attractive to women despite the fact that he was convicted of murdering a father and son and raping the mother so violently that she remains in a coma.
And the movie really begins to unravel when Traynor begins to suspect Dennis is innocent. "Witness" abandons its pretenses and becomes a third-rate mystery - to complement third-rate performances from Young and Dee Wallace, who plays a character so completely unbelievable she's almost laughable.
What is laughable is watching Young in the movie's final sequence. It almost makes you wish she was the one being executed.
Pierce himself said the movie "is about ambition, greed, competition and media exploitation to the furthest extreme." And all of those terms could be used to describe NBC's marketing of it.
One on-air promo that began running weeks ago intones, "In the future, how far will television go to get an audience? Some people say you shouldn't watch this film. Some say you must see it. Decide for yourself. Where does justice end and ratings begin?"
There's no justice there.
A national print ad for "Witness" proclaims it "The most controversial TV event of the year."
NBC wants you to believe that. Controversy breeds ratings.
But this movie isn't worth all the fuss. It isn't even worth watching.