HEROIN CHIC? NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST

There are close-ups of needles and open sores on the junkies who populate a
drug-saturated neighborhood in HBO's tough mini-series "The Corner." More
important, there are vivid individuals within each of those damaged bodies.

Set and filmed in Baltimore, the series is a dramatized version of the
nonfiction book "The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City
Neighborhood," by David Simon and Edward Burns, and it uses the real names
and characters from that clear-eyed work. As reality television becomes
increasingly staged, this series crosses the line in a different direction,
turning the roughest of facts into the most truthful of fictions.

Gary McCullough (T. K. Carter) once made plenty of money playing the stock
market. He is now addicted to heroin, reduced to stealing metal to sell at
junkyards and buying cigarettes one at a time for a quarter at the local
market.

His former wife, Fran Boyd (Khandi Alexander), a drug-addled mother of two
with dark circles under her eyes, spends her days sitting on the front
steps smoking cigarettes with her addicted sister.

Their handsome 15-year-old son, DeAndre (Sean Nelson), is nearly drug-free.
He deals but doesn't do hard drugs, yet there isn't much hope he can escape
the heritage of his family and neighborhood.

As the series' director, Charles S. Dutton (better known as an actor and
the star of the sitcom "Roc"), says in an on-camera introduction, "This
film is the true story of men, women and children living in the midst of
the drug trade. Their voices are too rarely heard."

Ms. Alexander, whose unglamorous performance as Fran gives the series much
of its power, says something just as cogent in an HBO promo. She just hopes
people will be "entertained." That may not be the best choice of words for
such a distressing subject, but it's easy to see what she means. At times
this drama comes dangerously close to becoming an antidrug public-service
announcement.

Assuming the perspectives of its characters, the series avoids cliches and
condescension; the performances are remarkably free of the cheap mannerisms
actors often resort to when playing addicts. But this insiders' view is
still undermined by the tone of a cautionary tale. The fact that the series
makes a plea to understand the characters' humanity, rather than a judgment
about them, doesn't make it less didactic.

Sunday's opening installment, "Gary's Blues," introduces a character whose
soft, puppy-dog look makes viewers wonder how he survives his treacherous
world, where daily events range from minor scams to gunplay. Living in the
basement of his mother's house, in the neighborhood where he grew up, Gary
has flashbacks to the prosperous life he led before drugs overtook him.
Seeing the story from his point of view is so effective that when he has to
drop a packet of heroin on the street because police turn up, viewers are
likely to feel bad for him. He was getting sick, and desperate for it.

Each of the early episodes focuses on a single character, and the second,
"DeAndre's Blues," owes everything to Sean Nelson's engaging performance as
an adolescent with a hip-hop look, an irresistible smile and at times more
sense than either of his parents.

The strongest episode is the third, "Fran's Blues." With a ravaged look,
Ms. Alexander (Peter Benton's sister on "E.R.") gets inside the mind of a
woman who admits she is a junkie, but defiantly says she is also a good
mother who never missed a school meeting or a juvenile hearing. She accepts
with chilling matter-of-factness that her son's life will be plagued by
drugs and tussles with the law. Her attempt to get herself into a detox
program fast is heartbreaking.

The minor characters are acted with just as much attention to truth and
detail. Tasha Smith's walk is a first-rate performance in itself, capturing
the flat-footed, hip-swinging gait of an emaciated addict named Ronnie.

Like many actors turned directors, though, Mr. Dutton is better at
eliciting deep performances than at involving viewers in his story. And
using pseudo-documentary scenes to begin and end each episode, with Mr
Dutton's off-camera voice interviewing the characters, is trite.

"There's a corner everywhere," Gary says of his attempt to start over in a
different place. The series is not always well-written line-for-line but
its overall impact is more forceful. So is the coda at the end of Episode
6, in which Mr. Dutton briefly interviews the real-life people on whom "The
Corner" was based, at least those who have survived.

PRODUCTION NOTES

"THE CORNER"

Sunday night at 10

First part of a six-hour mini-series written by David Mills and David
Simon; Charles S. Dutton, director; Robert Colesberrycq, Mr. Mills and Mr.
Simon, executive producers; Nina Kostroff Noble, producer; Antonia Ellis,
co-producer.

WITH: T.K. Carter (Gary McCullough), Khandi Alexander (Fran Boyd), Sean
Nelson (DeAndre McCullough), Tasha Smith (Ronnie Boice), Toy Connor
(Tyreeka Freamon), Tyra Ferrell (Ella Thompson), Clarke Peters (Fat Curt)
and Glenn Plummer (Blue).