TV Reviews : Spirited Nostalgia Sparks ‘Beginning of the Firm’

Anybody who’s read “Stover at Yale” or other classic boys books by Owen Johnson about prep and college life in turn-of-the-century America will helplessly fall prey to the exuberant nostalgia evident on American Playhouse’s “The Beginning of the Firm” (at 9 tonight on Channels 28 and 15).

An insufferable freshman snob arrives at the prestigious Lawrenceville School in New Jersey for the fall term in 1906. Flashing a wad and ripe for the picking, the odious dandy (affably played by David Orth) tries to buy his popularity, only to be exploited by his mocking classmates, who dub him “The Uncooked Beefsteak.”

This coming-of-age tale may be tame by Charles Dickens’ darker standards, but that misses the point of the story’s ineffable vitality. The production, in its mannerisms and vernacular, robustly captures the entrepreneurial Bullmoose individuality of the time.

The program concludes a trilogy. Several of the characters, including Edward Herrmann as the laissez-faire-minded Headmaster and Zach Galligan as the school’s ringleader Hickey, reprise their roles from two previously aired episodes (“The Prodigious Hickey” and “The Return of Hickey”).

The stories were directed with affection by Allan A. Goldstein and adapted by Jan Jaffe Kahn from Johnson’s l908 Saturday Evening Post serial, “The Lawrenceville Stories” (recently collected in paperback by Simon and Shuster).

The show is a loving page from another PBS series. For literary Americana trivia buffs, PBS’ American Short Story anthology broadcast in 1977 (on April 5!), in strikingly similar tone and style, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” with Joan Micklin Silver directing Shelley Duvall and Bud Cort.

These are endearing, evocative dramatizations without sentimentality and, naturally, so comparatively gentle they must seem otherworldly to teens today. Let’s hear it for a revival of “Stover at Yale.”