The Awful Truth: Press: The New York Times, April 4, 1999

"...sets the bar for the most daring show on television." - VARIETY

Giving a Guerrilla Journalist the Freedom of Cable

by Warren Berger

published by The New York Times , April 4, 1999

In the debut episode of "The Awful Truth, " the new series created by the guerrilla-style documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, viewers meet Christopher Donahue, a Florida man with a life-threatening pancreas illness. Mr. Donahue desperately needs a transplant, but his health care provider, Humana, refuses to pay for the operation.

On a conventional newsmagazine program, Mr. Donahue's plight may have inspired grave tones and earnest pleas from a well-coiffed correspondence. For Mr. Moore, it is not just a call to action but an opportunity to create mischief. With cameras rolling, he accompanies the ailing Mr. Donahue on a stroll through the corporate offices of Humana, where Mr. Moor e asks a sweating, stonewalling public relations official to help him choose in advance a nice coffin for Mr. Donahue. Subsequently, Mr. Moore stages a mock funeral for Mr. Donahue on the lawn of Humana's headquarters in Louisville, Ky. Mr. Moore himself delivers a eulogy for the man standing beside him: "I remember Chris always used to say?' Mr. Donahue replies, "I just want a pancreas." Before long, Mr. Moore has so thoroughly embarrassed Humana that the company responds by reconsidering in Mr. Donahue favor.

Those familiar with Mr. Moore's work, particularly his breakthrough documentary film in 1989, "Roger and Me," and his Emmy-winning series "TV Nation," will recognize that the same ingredients remain the same in "The Awful Truth," which has its premiere next Sunday at 9 P.M. on bravo. As in the past, Mr. Moore can be counted on to defend the downtrodden "ordinary people " like Mr. Donahue while taking aim at rigid (and some might say easy) targets like bureaucratic corporations and double talking politicians. As ever, his chief weapons are his unblinking movie camera and his wicked, offbeat sense of humor, which usually manages to keep him from seeming sanctimonious as he plays a kind of shlumpy Robin Hood.

Mr. Moore's arrival on Bravo could be viewed as a step down for someone who once occupied a prime-time slot on NBC, then one on Fox, with "TV Nation," which ran sporadically during the 1994 and 1995 television seasons. But Mr. Moore insists that he is pleased to be returning to television on cable, where, he said, he is granted more freedom to take on subjects that might be taboo on broadcast networks.

"This show is going to be everything 'TV Nation,' would have been if we didn't have the heavy hand of network standards and practices on us," Mr. Moore declared on a recent evening at a Manhattan editing suite, where he was putting the finishing touches on a scene from "The Awful Truth." The segment shows Mr. Moore bringing a group of Christmas carolers to the headquarters of a tobacco company, where he leads them in song in the lobby. The catch: the carolers, all lung cancer victims, sing with croaky artificial voice boxes, as mortified tobacco executives stand by helplessly and watch. "That's something you've never seen on TV before," Mr. Moore said.

Certainly not on bravo, whose viewers are accustomed to the mellifluous singing of, say, Luciano Pavarotti. Some viewers of the arts network are likely to be surprised by "The Awful Truth," whose rambunctious segments include one in which Mr. Moore travels with a group of homosexual men in a recreational vehicle he calls "the sodomobile" into states where sodomy is outlawed and interviews shocked local residents.

"If the show creates a little controversy, we're comfortable with that," said Ed Carroll, the general Manager at Bravo, which is producing the series with the British network Channel 4. Mr. Carroll said he believed that "The Awful Truth" might help Bravo connect with "viewers who haven't sampled the network before." Although "TV Nation" was never highly rated (Mr. Moore blamed poor time slots for the ratings and show's ultimate demise), it did attract a following of young viewers, who responded to Mr. Moore's outrageous pranks and his willingness to challenge authority.

In "The Awful Truth," Mr. Moore's fans are with him not only in spirit but in person. Mr. Moore closes and opens the show and introduces each segment standing before an interacting with a live studio audience filled with mostly young devotees. During the taped segments, the crowed can be heard tittering and cheering whenever Mr. Moore, camera in tow, begins to advance on the bastions where he is most unwelcome (corporate America, Capitol Hill, the Deep South).

But Mr. Moore is not just a prankster playing to the youth audience, a la Tom Green on MTV, whose idea of humor is to cover himself with food. Most of Mr. Moore's segments touch on a serious issue like race, class, free trade, enviromnentalism or health care. Mr. Carroll of Bravo believes that the channels sophisticated viewers will respond to that aspect of the show as well as to Mr. Moore's arch humor and cinema verite style. Meanwhile, as he is wont to do, Mr. Moore sees his presence on Bravo in terms of class struggle: an arts channel "should not be the purview of only people from the upper class," he said. He promises to bring not just college students but also working- class viewers into the Bravo fold.

"They're part of my core audience, too," he said.

Mr. Moore, who invariably wears jeans and a baseball cap, and whose slumped posture and bowed knees make it seem as if he is supporting the weight of the world, remains proud of his modest background, and often bringing it up with no prompting. "I didn't go to film school, and I didn't start at Sundance," he said during a break in his editing session. Sitting like a child -- slumped, sideways, with one leg draped over the arm of a plush chair -- Mr. Moore veered between animated political discourse (true, the murder rate in New York is down , he acknowledged, but only because "they don't count people killed by the police") and personal data.

When he began filming "Roger and Me, " Mr. Moore recalled, he was collecting unemployment in Flint, Mich., where he "shopped at K Mart and lived in a $27,000 house." He made the film -- in which he doggedly pursues Roger Smith, the chairman of General Motors, to confront him about the closing of G.M. plants in Flint -- "because I was angry at what General Motors had done to my town, and I was going to do something about it," he said.

"Roger and Me," one of the most successful documentaries ever made, turned Mr. Moore into an unlikely celebrity. But he resisted changing his regular- guy image or his guerrilla-film ways. On "TV Nation," he continued to stage pranks and conduct ambush interviews , often intended to make a political or social point to make his targets look foolish. He often succeeded, with help from willing victims. (On one "TV Nation" segments, Mr. Moore showed that with a bit of lobbying, he could coax Congressmen to propose legislation designating a national holiday in honor of his series.)

Mr. Moore has drawn criticism for his ambush tactics. The television critic Tom Shales once derided him for "dragging people in front of the cameras lens and humiliating them." However, Mr. Moore contends that he doesn't trick his subjects and always allow them to speak freely. "I try to present myself in as non-threatening a way as possible," he said. "Some people end up saying things they shouldn't because they look at me and think, 'Well, this isn't going to end up anywhere; look at him, he hasn't even shaved in a week.' "

Mr. Moore doesn't hide his political agenda, which leans heavily towards labor and unusual favors liberal positions over conservative ones (though he considers himself politically independent). In the opening episode, he ridicules Kenneth Starr by staging his own more cost-efficient Capitol Hill witch hunt, complete with overwrought, finger-pointing actors on Puritan garb. But Mr. Moore makes no apologies for making a politically biased show. Citing Comedy Central's "Daily Show," which he considers derivative of "TV Nation" but "without the politics," Mr. Moore said that because the show lacked an underlying serious message or point of view "it ends up just making fun of stupid people."

Ten years after "Roger and Me," the real issue for Mr. Moore may not be one of politics or occasional harsh treatment of subjects but of staying power. Though he has added a few new wrinkles, he remains the same basic character who burst on the scene in his debut film: the labor -loving Everyman, shambling into corporate lobbies and asking rude questions. His schtick, if it's fair to call it that, given his obvious passion, does not seem to evolve much. Mr. Moore is aware of this and understands that he need to reinvent oneself in the fickle media landscape. He insisted that he planned to limit the number of "scenes of Mike going into the lobby and jousting with the public relations people," and that he would try some new creative approaches on his show. But n one should expect a kinder, gentler or apolitical Mr. Moore anytime soon. And industry moguls who see someone with a baseball cap and a movie camera coming through the revolving doors would be well advised to hide.