YOU JUST CAN'T STOP LOOKING ... BARNUM FREAK SHOWS LIVE ON TV OF TODAY.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

Freaky stuff: P.T. Barnum made and lost a couple of fortunes - 19th-century dollars that'd still impress as we enter the 21st - peddling the hiccups in mankind's genetic flowchart. His first ventures into the oddities trade were Joice Heth, George Washington's purported 161-year-old nanny (her autopsy revealed she was, to the surprise of few, an 80-year-old fraud) and the Feejee Mermaid, a monkey's head and torso sewn to a fishtail. Later, more sensational attractions like Tom Thumb, the Elastic Man and ladies bearded and fat and tall (sometimes all three) underscored his primal insight: People just plain like to gawk at the abnormal.

``People are fooled today in the same way and by the same things that fooled them 400 or 500 years ago,'' magician and oddities buff Ricky Jay writes in his book ``Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women.'' ``Our capacity to marvel at the strange, wonderful and peculiar accomplishments of our fellow human beings is undiminished.''

The carnival freak show, a onetime staple of county fairs, has been chased out of business over the past 25 years by politically correct scolds demanding an end to such shameful exploitation of human misery. So TV, particularly cable, has thoughtfully stepped up and become the new circus sideshow, providing viewers with the most bizarre people and objects each programmer can get his or her hands upon. The person who gaped at the Feejee Mermaid 158 years ago would today be sitting slouched before brawling, wronged lovers on ``Jerry Springer.''

In a 200-channel cable universe, wallowing in freaks and geeks (not NBC's new high-school show) can be a matter of mere survival - there are a heck of a lot of outlets out there vying for our attentions, and a guy who hammers nails up his nostrils pretty much commands notice no matter what.

``P.T. Barnum,'' a miniseries celebrating the life of Phineas Taylor Barnum being shown Sunday and Monday on A&E, gives us a fair overview of the mind-set that inspired today's TV landscape. Beau Bridges, bedecked in a fright wig and playing a character who initially is some 20 years younger than he is, essays Barnum as he pronounces words of wisdom that remain on the lips of every entertainment executive working today: ``The public wants to be amused. ... They get what they paid for.''

The first two-hour segment, tracing his sundry schemes and culminating with his grandest successes, is easily more successful than the second, which is a narrative muddle, a mere grocery list checking off each of the events of the rest of his life with no pace or drive. Bridges' performance lacks the zing and verve you'd imagine in a guy known as the ``Prince of Humbugs.'' He's an earnest, plodding P.T. - Bridges' son, Jordan, who plays the young Barnum, brings more of the energy and sense of fun you'd expect, and gifted character actor Henry Czerny, who portrays Barnum's assistant Greenwood with aplomb, would've easily aced the role.

Ultimately, the result is bland hagiography, with cursory glimpses at his failure as a family man (forgiven, conveniently and without explanation, by film's end) and goofy extrications on how he conjured up innovations like press conferences, grandstanding and the three-ring circus. The scene in which Barnum names his elephant Jumbo is borderline idiotic, in which Barnum brainstorms on the spot: ``I need a new word ... you're gigantic, you're magnificent, you bellow; hmmm ...''

Ironically, viewers can get a better impression of Barnum from the mere hourlong ``Biography'' Tuesday on A&E after the miniseries. ``P.T. Barnum: The Greatest Showman on Earth'' is a brisk portrait, including an intriguing factoid nowhere to be found in any of the miniseries' four hours: In an effort to make live theater ``respectable,'' the man who gave us the Two-Headed Girl and JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy would excise potentially prurient passages from Shakespeare.

Despite the miniseries' efforts to accentuate Barnum's other accomplishments (he brought opera to the masses and enjoyed a brief tenure as a successful abolitionist politician), he's still best remembered for bringing freak shows, exotic animals and stupid human tricks to the masses.

And who's to say that's not visionary enough? In ``P.T. Barnum,'' one journalist proclaims him ``the very shaper of America,'' and while that may be hyperbole on a level that Barnum himself would appreciate, he certainly has had an incalculable influence on TV, a medium which didn't even exist at the time of his death. To wit:

David Letterman, on his old NBC series, was a dime-store Barnum, his entertainments puny where Barnum reached for the grand gesture. Letterman dropped junk from 20 stories up just to watch it explode on impact, crushed stuff in an industrial vice to revel in its implosion, and introduced to the world Calvert DeForest, a pudgy, talent-free performer who many initially feared was cranially challenged thanks to his barking out his lines like a poorly trained seal. DeForest still occasionally appears on Letterman's show, his line readings still sluggish and awkward nearly 20 years later.

Tom Green has emerged as the Letterman for the extreme-sports generation. On his MTV series, he has undertaken such challenges as slurping milk from a cow's teat, eating a concoction made of Vaseline and human hair and tossing a severed cow's head in his parents' bed - not so bad, you might think, until it's pointed out that his parents were sleeping in it at the time.

``Jerry Springer,'' the white-trash Tom Green, has never been the most circumspect show in the best of times, but it recently announced that the show will ease up on bare-fisted battles between incest survivors and instead focus on such human oddities as Siamese twins who warble country tunes and a lottery winner who gained 600 pounds after his windfall.

Springer no doubt would approach the swinish female character on BBC America's ``The League of Gentlemen'' who suckled a baby pig and engaged in a bizarre religious rite involving nudity, dancing and trussed-up construction workers, but would be disappointed to discover the show was fictional.

Comedy Central's ``South Park'' includes, among its myriad perversity, a school nurse with a conjoined fetal twin fastened to her head.

Characters rounded up for ``Penn and Teller's Sin City Spectacular'' on fX are frequently as bizarre, but they're real. There, you can find a guy hammering tenpenny nails into his nostrils, Teller's head co-existing peacefully in a box full of live rats, a ``talking'' Boston bull terrier and the Enigma, a human oddity covered head-to-toe with jigsaw puzzle tattoos, hanging out with Alec Baldwin.

The folks on Comedy Central's ``The Man Show'' aren't as willfully freakish, but they take their good-ol'-boy attitude to ``Heart of Darkness'' extremes. Each episode concludes with breathtakingly gratuitous footage of women bouncing on trampolines, but to get there, viewers sit through segments such as ``Great Moments in Stupidity,'' household hints from porn stars rather than Heloise and a guy going out on a date with his mother.

A mere baby-step down on the evolutionary ladder is TBS' ``The Chimp Channel,'' in which trained monkeys, decked out in costume finery and human hairpieces, parody ostensibly classic moments from movies and TV shows.

On the Nashville Network, one finds ``Rollerjam,'' a '90s incarnation of roller derby. In this updated version, women flaunt body piercings no doubt alien to traditional TNN viewers, and when a poor fellow is caught with his legs on either side of a pole, the zeal with which his opponents grab his feet and yank his fragile nether regions toward said pole merits repeated slow-motion replays.

Maybe they should have gotten the karate master NBC trotted out over the summer on ``You Asked For It'' - he withstands a fierce kick to the groin. The show also ran off some network summer air time by presenting a magnetic family with steam irons clanked upon their chests, a guy who built a suit in which he could be hit by trucks, another who put poisonous snakes up his nose and removed them through his mouth, and a woman who weeps glass shards for tears.

On Howard Stern's Saturday night series, he proudly presents the talents of an extraordinarily flatulent fellow who, face-down and bottom held high (to a microphone), manages to fire off a clip of some 300 outbursts. Stern also paraded, with alarming regularity, a string of women shockingly willing to display their anatomical gifts - be they ample, lacking or just plain frightening - for the benefit of Howard, his studio stooges and, of course, his digitally fuzzed-out TV cameras.

And, of course, there's the sweaty, fist- and steroid-pumping men and women of professional wrestling (no amateurs here), slamming their colleagues violently to the canvas and barking nonsensical bravado at the camera. Wrestling is easily found up and down the cable dial and now, even at UPN, where ``WWF Smackdown'' threatens to resurrect the ailing network. It will turn up, even more curiously, on ostensibly highbrow Bravo, which will explore down-market cultures on ``Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends,'' debuting next month.

What could top all this? How about Fox's reported plans to, in cahoots with the Federal Aviation Administration, crash a jumbo jet live on TV?

The point, the goal - increasingly difficult in today's blase, seen-it-done-it society - is to show viewers something they truly have never seen before. Strong storytelling and characterizations - themselves enough of an oddity - will continue to engage us, but we'll always turn our heads to see a novelty. As Barnum declares in the miniseries, ``Americans revere the old, but only enjoy the new.''

Most of the aforementioned programs indulge in their grotesqueries with a wink to the audience, a knowing nod that this behavior is a little beneath us. And audiences happily go along with the charade - as Barnum's ``Biography'' notes, ``They were part of the joke.'' We are all willing accomplices in our own debasement, and those who decry the current coarsening of our culture would be well advised to remember: Thus it has ever been.

``The crowd is standing up and beating the tables. The laughter is fierce and the band is loud, but barely loud enough, as I lift my arms and waggle my huge hands and bob to the light, and my knees begin to shift in what my body calls dance, waving my hump at the crowd. ... How proud I am, dancing in the air full of eyes rubbing at me, unable to look away because of what I am. I've conquered them. They thought to use and shame me, but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.''

- ``Geek Love''

THE FACTS

The show: ``P.T. Barnum.''

What: Miniseries examining the life of the famous showman.

The stars: Beau Bridges, Jordan Bridges, Cynthia Dale, Natalie Radford and Henry Czerny.

Where: A&E.

When: 5 and 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday.

Our rating: Two and one half stars.

The show: ``Biography: P.T. Barnum: The Greatest Showman on Earth.''

What: Documentary on Barnum.

Where: A&E.

When: 5 and 9 p.m. Tuesday.

Rating: Three stars.

CAPTION(S):

7 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) `WWF Smackdown'

(2--Cover--Color) `Penn & Teller's Sin City Spectacular'

(3--Cover--Color) `Jerry Springer'

(4) Josh Ryan Evans plays the diminutive Gen. Tom Thumb on ``P.T. Barnum,'' a four-hour dramatization of the showman's life running in two parts Sunday and Monday on A&E.

(5) ``The Man Show'' makes abundant use of bikini-clad young women.

(6) Exhibitionism and displays of flatulence are part of Howard Stern's TV and radio shows.

(7) A trained chimp does its best Barbara Eden impression for an ``I Dream of Jeannie'' segment on TBS' ``The Chimp Channel.''