21 FRIDAY DRIVING MISS DAISY (CBS, 8-8:30 p.m.) A TV sitcom couldn't possibly spring forth from the end of the 1989 tearjerker Driving Miss Daisy (Hmmm the comic adventures of a 97-year-old shut-in and her ancient chauffeur?), so the producers of this misbegotten pilot have opted to take Miss Daisy and Hoke (now played by Joan Plowright and Robert Guillaume) back to the beginning of their relationship. In this failed pilot, Hoke has just been hired and Miss Daisy doesn't want to be driven around, and slowly, they begin to forge trust and wait a minute, you dopes! We saw the movie! We know all this already!
But repeating the obvious is just one of Driving Miss Daisy's countless bad ideas. Another is the dreadful laugh track, which shuts up only for the show's one obligatory and clumsily overstated lesson in prejudice. Another is the way Idella, the tough, stoic maid who died in the movie, is now back to life as a sass-spouting stereotype. Another is the cameo appearance by, of all people, Eleanor Roosevelt (Toni Gillman). And the biggest sin of all is the way this Daisy turns the movie's subtler attentions to race and class into nonsensical cliches; since Daisy's playwright and screenwriter Alfred Uhry also wrote this pilot, he has nobody to blame but himself. Driving Miss Daisy the series was reportedly first offered to Angela Lansbury, who turned it down; after eight years on Murder, She Wrote, she obviously knows a stiff when she sees one. So does CBS; having decided this Daisy was not the picture of race relations TV needed in 1992, the network declined to make this a series. For which we owe them thanks. D
22 SATURDAY
MOVIE: CITIZEN COHN (HBO, 8-10 p.m.) If you believe that public figures get the TV- movie biographies that they deserve, then right now Roy Cohn is cringing somewhere in hell, the resting place to which this lurid, exhilaratingly strange film consigns him. In an early scene, Cohn, who died of AIDS in 1986, lurches upright in his hospital bed, damp and gaunt, fending off ghosts with a defiant ''F -- - you!'' The rest of Citizen Cohn gleefully says it right back to him. This Roy Cohn, as played with floor-the-accelerator ferocity by James Woods, is the one we know from history books as the crude, swooping vulture of the McCarthy hearings. But he's also depicted as a man whose personal pathologies (self-hating Jew, self-hating homosexual) fed directly into his professional ones (corrupt lawyer, vicious dirt-digger, ranting paranoiac). ; Beyond its catalog of transgressions, though, Citizen Cohn takes a far more unconventional approach than ''the man, the myth, the maniac.'' This is biography as sweet revenge, in which the ghosts of Robert Kennedy, Ethel Rosenberg, and even Cohn's smothering mama (played by blacklist survivor Lee Grant) come back to haunt Cohn on his deathbed. (''I killed you for the headlines!'' he barks at Ethel, in one of many scenes that slops over from creepiness into comedy.) As Cohn lies delirious, the film flashes back through the lowlights of his professional life, with each of his victims arriving to reprimand him before the curtain falls. There are drawbacks aplenty to this storytelling style, among them a buffet-table approach to history and an incredible inconsistency of tone; at times Citizen Cohn (based on Nicholas von Hoffman's 1988 best-seller of the same title) plays as if A Current Affair, Reversal of Fortune, and A Christmas Carol had been thrown into a blender. A more serious problem is that the film takes Cohn's villainy so much for granted that it becomes more interested in meting out punishment than in documenting the crimes. By the fourth or fifth time we see Cohn, ravaged by disease, hacking up phlegm, the film begins to edge dangerously close to relishing his physical suffering. But going too far isn't usually a problem with TV movies, and that's what makes Citizen Cohn so compelling-it couldn't care less about being evenhanded. And it should come as no surprise that Woods, fearless when it comes to playing loathsome souls, is riveting. His voice dripping with arrogance, his eyes hooded with sunken malice, Woods makes Cohn charismatic and repellent to his last moment. When he finally dies, the film even offers an awesomely venomous epitaph: ''At last he did something human.'' That's about as gentle as Citizen Cohn gets. B
