Review of ESPN's The Bronx is Burning

My TV diet usually consists of two things: baseball games in the summer and, in the winter, the channel called Off.

Over the All-Star break, I found something to like that's not a baseball game. It's still about baseball: the ESPN eight part mini-series "The Bronx Is Burning."

Based on a book by Jonathan Mahler, the screenplay starts in spring training 1977. The New York Yankees are defending American League champions. They returned to the big October dance in 1976 after a twelve year absence, and after shrinking from baseball's most powerful dynasty (pennants each year between 1960 and 1964) to baseball's most helpless team (dead last in 1966).

George Steinbrenner became the Yankees' principal owner in 1973. He has a pennant but wants a ring. To that end, he acquires mercurial superstar Reggie Jackson and his Everest-sized ego from the Baltimore Orioles, and signs as manager Alfred Manuel Martin; known around the ball park as Billy, teammate of Ford and Mantle on the early 50s Yankee pennant winners, and about as old school as they get.

Imagine Hunter S. Thompson, by chance or design, seated at a dinner party next to Tipper Gore.

Reggie declares himself "the straw that stirs the drink." He was misquoted. No, he wasn't. He refuses to acknowledge teammates' congratulations after homering. Yankee captain Thurman Munson brushes past his offered hand. He and his manager get along like two cats in a sack. Everything ends up on the front pages of the New YorkDaily News, and the real NYC paper of record, the Post.

There's no way a baseball fan won't love "The Bronx Is Burning."

Younger fans who weren't aware of baseball, or weren't born yet, will feel like it's really 1977; when people used pay phones and dared to wear leisure suits before six in the evening, and a new band called the Ramones had taken rock music back to its roots.

The fan who was watching the Saturday Game Of The Week that June 18 and saw Billy yank Reggie in mid-game for loafing on a ball hit his way, will be pleased to learn that the decade when new cars came with 8-track players, when Elvis was still eating cheeseburgers by the plateful, has already acquired a nostalgic glow.

Daniel Sunjata is shorter and less muscular than the Reggie Jackson I remember. Oliver Platt is okay as King George but more resembles MLB Players Association boss Donald Fehr. However, when casting decided on Joe Gritasi as Yogi Berra, Erik Jensen as walrus-mustachioed Yankee captain Thurman Munson, and John Turturro as Billy Martin, they nailed it.

Of additional interest to the fan who followed baseball in 1977 is the use of archival TV footage. He'll see Monday Night Baseball complete with graphics that look stone-age in 2007, Keith Jackson in his mustard-yellow ABC blazer, and hear Howard Cosell's pre-game pontifications. (No ads on the outfield walls back then, either.)

At the end of some installments is a backstory feature in which the principals in that night's show comment on the events. At the end of show number three, the fan learns that re-created scenes in which Reggie is removed in mid-game and then confronts Billy in the dugout are virtually identical to the real thing seen on the NBC-TV tapes.

I look for accuracy and did notice that, when the Yankees play in Detroit and Billy gets an ovation from his former hometown fans, the distinctive Tiger Stadium upper deck stands appear behind him, and Ernie Harwell describes the scene.

A subplot, also told via news footage, is the developing Son of Sam story. Young women with long, dark hair had become targets of a serial killer who prowled the streets of Queens after dark. The killer, identity still unknown, reveals himself in a series of letters to Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin. BRESLIN TO 44 CAL KILLER: GIVE UP! screams the paper's headline; the same one I remember seeing in the only bookstore in Flint, Michigan that sold New York City newspapers.

Even though the viewer knows how the story ends -- as Martin's manager Casey Stengel would say, you can look it up -- "The Bronx Is Burning" is still a compelling, must-watch series.

"The Bronx Is Burning" airs each Tuesday night at ten Eastern time, through August 28, on ESPN.

The official site:

www.bronxisburning.com