A&E GETS A FACE-LIFT : Stark reality slicked up.

TV programming needs a face. I don't mean merely the face of the host or star of a particular series, but the way one person can come to represent an entire channel or network, as Alistair Cook came to be the face of PBS, though he hosted only two shows, "Masterpiece Theater" and "America." For nearly thirty years, CBS News was certified by the presence of Walter Cronkite, while Garrison Keillor's mellow baritone, for many, is the aural "face" of public radio.

During its early years, the cable channel, Arts and Entertainment, had no face, and the channel itself had no character. Though it was a good idea to have a commercial alternative to the art programming of PBS, A&E's endless recycling of what seemed to be the same nine or ten ballets and operas soon let viewers know that the wide and deep world of the arts wasn't going to be surveyed or plumbed. Worse, those endless repeats of "Murder, She Wrote," "Columbo," and "MacMillan and Wife," originally meant as mere filler between the artistic events, soon threatened to become the main bill of fare. A&E was fast turning into a rival sibling of Nick at Night!

But sometime in the late 1980s, a shift in A&E's scheduling signaled that something was happening behind the scenes. Suddenly, A&E was featuring countless documentaries about tanks, guns, aircraft, missiles, bombs. These were invariably hosted by George C. Scott (A&E executive to underlings: "We gotta get Patton!"), who negotiated his pot belly and grizzling beard around innumerable planes and tanks while reciting statistics in a gravelly voice soaked in boredom. Was the Arts and Entertainment channel now becoming the Art of War channel? In any event, it was clear that A&E was having the media equivalent of a nervous breakdown. But sometimes a nervous breakdown precedes genuine transformation.

And what a strange transformation it turned out to be, and what an unexpected face that transformation came to wear. The face belonged to Bill Kurtis, once featured in CBS's weekday morning programming. He has helped create at least six shows for the A&E channel: "American Justice," which deals with famous American criminal cases; "City Confidential," recounting juicy crimes in deceptively placid cities; "Closed Case Files," which demonstrates how detectives finally crack long unsolved crimes; and "Investigative Reports," which is in the process of spawning two "strands," "Investigative Report: Criminal Justice" and "Investigative Report: Special Edition." All of them deal with a cornucopia of social and legal problems: the death penalty, obesity in kids, you name it. Does Kurtis ever sleep?

Though Kurtis possesses a handsome, graying, glowering countenance that might have been ordered up by central casting for the part of the heavy father who tells his bohemian son to forget about that loft in Greenwich Village, he himself must have more than a touch of the artist in him, since only a would-be actor could host a show so hammily. As he marshals the facts of the case, we get a quick run-through of the whole D.A. repertory: the hawk-like glare, the arched eyebrow, the sardonic smile, the self-righteous set of the jaw, the stabbing index finger, the dismissive back of the hand, all of which coax the audience into thinking of itself as a jury, Kurtis as the D.A., and the documentary that follows as a sort of trial.

And, like a trial, each show follows a strict format: After the introduction, some newsreel montage sketches in the background of a crime or social problem, then zeros in on the protagonists. Various witnesses are at hand: politicians, reporters, detectives, judges, lawyers. All interviews are done in the style that was perhaps inspired by Warren Beatty's Reds, brought to perfection by Ken Burns on his PBS epics, and has by now become standard on every TV documentary. The speakers are all shot in close-up against a neutral background, their names and professions announced by captions a few seconds after they've begun speaking. The interlocutors are never heard and don't have to be since the interviewees are caught only when they are in full flow and don't need any prompting. So everyone questioned comes across as an accomplished storyteller.

And this is exactly as it should be, for despite Kurtis's prosecutorial air and the journalistic titles of his shows, what we have here are examples of slick storytelling, and not at all the sort of investigative documentary once done decades ago by Edward R. Murrow on CBS and now seen on PBS's "Frontline," which digs up overlooked facts and tries to bring about political and social reform. "CBS Reports" and "Frontline" are the television descendants of Lincoln Steffens, but "Investigative Reports" and its ilk are the TV equivalents of the true-crime books so popular in recent decades. They don't demand justice because justice has already been done, or is about to be done. The host's pretentious huffiness assures you that the blindfolded lady holding the scales is not only implacable and inescapable but--by gad, sir!--puts on a damn fine show. This is documentary as pure entertainment, almost completely liberated from its muckraking, reformative origins.

"City Confidential" is by far my favorite because it wears its sensationalism on its sleeve. Instead of Kurtis, the actor Paul Winfield narrates, and it is Winfield's vocal persona, an unholy amalgamation of Bayou pirate, inner-city tough, and weary police detective, that gives "Confidential" much of its tangy cynicism. Each installment begins with a potted history of the city in question and, as written, this segment is rather neutral. But, hearing Winfield, you'd swear you were listening to a chamber-of-commerce pamphlet rewritten by H.L. Mencken and the Marquis de Sade. The lazily sneering drawl of the offscreen narrator keeps nudging the viewer, "Oh, you think your neighbors are just law-abiding citizens going about their business, do you? Well chump, let's you and me peep through a few windows on Main Street together." And, while Kurtis's other programs feature interviews with earnest attorneys and politicians, "City Confidential" brings bartenders, schoolteachers, realtors, and housewives into the witness box, all of them happy to tell the camera that, yes, they knew all along it was the young minister who did in the pregnant showgirl, and, oh yes indeed, everyone always thought it was the mayor who'd bumped off that irritating councilwoman. That's what I love about "City Confidential." It's like being in a barbershop buzzing with gossip about the murder case being tried in the courthouse across the street.

A&E seems to be flourishing now and, because it is, there's more money to pour into big film projects (often in collaboration with British television). The results have been decidedly mixed: a superb dramatization of the bestseller Longitude; solid middlebrow entertainment with the Horatio Hornblower series and the adaptations of the Hercule Poirot, Spencer and Nero Wolf detective stories; a coy and entirely misfired series about Hollywood in the 1940s; pale, boring adaptations of Jane Austen, Dickens, and all the usual Victorian suspects, although the recent show about Victoria herself and her acquisition of throne and husband was a thoroughly absorbing little valentine. The one review of the arts, "Breakfast with the Arts," every Sunday morning, often has nice chamber music and a couple of OK interviews with musicians, actors, and museum curators plugging their latest projects. But there's no "Lunch" or "Dinner with the Arts."

The real A&E flagship shows are the Kurtis productions and, of course, the "Biography" series, a project so good and so bad and so exfoliating that it needs and will get an article unto itself. But what the investigative shows and "Biography" have in common is that they have all tapped into the public's fascination with real life packaged as slick drama, even as soap opera. That fascination has always existed but was exacerbated by the Watergate affair, specifically by its amazingly complete and satisfying dramatic arc--its obscure, sinister beginning (a nocturnal burglary), its amazing development and outrageous cast of characters, and its thumpingly dramatic finish with Nixon boarding that plane and waving goodbye. How could fiction compete with such lurid and satisfyingly shaped reality?

But artists insist on making their own reality, and bend mere facts to serve the artistic vision. So, how odd it is that a channel created for arts programming has finally established itself by feeding off the headlines of yesterday and today? A&E's slogan is "Escape the Ordinary." With due respect to the undeniable entertainment that both the channel and Kurtis provide, I think a better slogan would be, "Escape the Imaginary."