It's impossible to avoid comparing TNT's two-part TV movie "Moses" with Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 classic "The Ten Commandments."
And not just because Part 1 of "Moses" (Sunday at 6, 8 and 10 p.m. on TNT) airs up against the umpteenth rebroadcast of "The Ten Commandments" (Sunday, 6 p.m., Ch. 4).The two cover the same biblical ground, retelling the tale of the Old Testament prophet raised by Egyptians who was called of God and led his Hebrew people out of bondage.
The quick comparison is this - "Moses" doesn't come close to re-creating the enormous spectacle of "The Ten Commandments," but the performances in "Moses" are far better than what DeMille came up with.
(That's no surprise - Ben Kingsley, who stars in "Moses," is a much better actor than Charlton Heston.)
And "Moses" has a far more credible script, although it does tend to plod at times. (There are times during Part 2, which airs Monday at 6, 8 and 10 p.m., that viewers may feel like they're plodding through the wilderness for 40 years.) As pure entertainment, it can't match "The Ten Com-mand-ments."
But while "The Ten Commandments" took a thoroughly Hollywood look at the story of Moses - making Moses a "prince of Egypt," adding elements like a rivalry between Moses and Ramses and a love triangle involving those two and a beautiful woman - "Moses" sticks closer to the scriptures, albeit with its own interpretation of events.
"We started off with a platform, which was that Moses was not a prince of Egypt," said Roger Young, who directed "Moses." "He was, in a way, kind of an out-cast."
Logically, it's not a bad premise. Exodus does not refer to Moses as a prince of Egypt - "The Ten Commandments" does.
"If the daughter of the pharaoh shows up one day with a 3-month-old child who's kind of dark-skinned, and it's three months after (the pharaoh) made the edict that all those children should be killed who were part of the Hebrews, it wouldn't take a genius in the court to figure out where that kid came from."
In "Moses," Moses seems barely tolerated by Pharaoh (Christopher Lee) and is openly mocked by Pharaoh's son, Mernefta (Frank Langella), who succeeds his father as ruler of Egypt.
Young also questions why, if Moses were a prince of Egypt, he would have had to run away after killing a low-level Egyptian. Or why, if he were raised as a prince of Egypt, he had no belief in Egyptian gods.
"Once you start with that thesis (that Moses was not a prince), the rest of it falls into place. . . . And that was what made it a human story," he said.
Of course, much of the credit for humanizing Moses goes to Kingsley. He told TV critics he sees Moses as "a man who must have been suffering from some kind of post-holocaust guilt, and I have met many survivors of the Holocaust who were traumatized by the guilt of their survival. And Moses survived a terrible holocaust - limited, but terrible, in the killing of the children. He therefore carried that guilt with him for the whole of his life."
(The first two chapters of Exodus tell of how the pharaoh ordered all the male Hebrew babies killed, how Moses' mother put him in an "ark of bullrushes" and floated him in the Nile, and how he was found and adopted by Pharaoh's daughter - thus escaping the fate of his fellow He-brews.)
Kingsley's interpretation speaks of Moses' "traumatized childhood, being in a sense adopted by the enemy - adopted by the perpetrators of the genocide." He is compared to "a survivor of the Holocaust being adopted by a high-ranking Nazi."
"I think because of this traumatized childhood, he had a stammer," Kingsley said. (In the fourth chapter of Exodus, Moses tells God, "I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.")
It's a point that's largely forgotten in "The Ten Commandments." In "Moses," Kingsley's character is told more than once to "speak up!" Nobody ever has to tell Heston to "speak up!"
Kingsley goes on to speak of Moses "individual destiny" as "traumatized child - parentless and voiceless" who "adopts as his parent, God. And becomes a faithful interpreter of that word. And, having been tribeless, in a sense, at the beginning of his life becomes the center of his tribe at the end of his life."
It's a plausible and highly effective interpretation. And with his considerable skills as an actor, Kingsley - who won an Oscar for "Gandhi" - creates a portrait of Moses as a man. A portrait that's missing from "The Ten Commandments."
ABC YANKS AGAIN: In yet another last-minute decision, ABC yanked "Buddies" off the air earlier this week - little more than a day before the series was supposed to air an episode on Wednesday night.
(You may recall that the previous week ABC suddenly yanked "Aliens in the Family" off its schedule.)
"Buddies" has been suffering from anemic ratings (and anemic writing and anemic acting).
As a result, "The Drew Carey Show" returns to the schedule on Wednesday, April 17, at 7:30 p.m. and, on that same date, "The Faculty" moves from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Actually, "Drew Carey" will return on Tuesday, April 16, at 8:30 p.m., when it will pre-empt an episode of "Dana Carvey."
Unfortunately, this will be a one-time-only pre-emption, and the awful "Carvey" will return the following week.