What Could a Mafia Don and a Nemo Share? Try Misfortune

Enough of these charges that television is thin on family values. Sunday, for example, is a mother of a day for miniseries, as the fiction of Mario Puzo and the fantasy of Jules Verne duel in a sort of 20,000 Dons Under the Sea.

Don’t expect titans. On CBS, not only does “The Last Don” sleep with the fishes, it sleeps, period. And on ABC, “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” a submarine classic written in 1870, resurfaces as Das Babes.

There was a time when big-budget miniseries were extensive enough to span the sweeping expanse of prime time--vast, spidery webs that were nearly impossible to elude during May and other ratings sweeps months. The TV landscape has broadened in recent years, however, offering infinitely more viewing options that make the traditional networks especially reluctant to gamble Nielsens on behemoth slabs of costly programs that require long commitments by viewers.

Thus, the standard miniseries of the ‘90s is a relatively slim two-parter that goes four hours, along the lines of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”--making the six hours across three nights that CBS is flushing away on “The Last Don” nearly as decadent as Puzo’s aging Don Domenico Clericuzio himself.

Although from different universes, the two dramas share certain distinctive traits.

* Both are excruciatingly bad and boring, symbolizing contemporary TV’s clumsiness with epic tales--two exceptions being NBC’s superior “Gulliver’s Travels” in 1996 and the same network’s generally rewarding version of “The Odyssey,” arriving May 18.

* Both come from novels, with Puzo’s pulpy bestseller “The Last Don” returning him to the lucrative Mafia gore of “The Godfather,” and Frenchman Verne’s thickly written but prophetic and seductively adventurous “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” aging famously as a work that inspired an earlier movie version in 1954 and a CBS movie just seven weeks ago.

* Both pivot around a despot who is the ruthless master of a domain from which there appears no escape. In the don’s case, it’s a cloistered mob family that dictates absolute obedience and loyalty; in Nemo’s, it’s his futuristic, gadgety Nautilus sub that patrols the depths like a sea monster.

* Both Nemo (Michael Caine) and the don (Danny Aiello) have this sage complex that drives them to speak, not in the language of ordinary humans, but incessantly in proverbs ponderous enough to be inscribed in marble on tombs where they bury moribund writing. This is especially true of the don, whose irritating bromides as the story’s narrator (“One man’s tragedy can be another man’s opportunity”) are more than enough to earn him cement overshoes.

In fact, most of the Mafia guys in “The Last Don” appear to have studied Corleone 101 at Godfather School, catching viewers in a cross fire of now-familiar cliches, to say nothing of the lead slinging that piles up corpse after corpse. You could afford a 30-second spot here if you were given a buck every time some guy says, “You will break my heart.”

Just watching this can break your heart, as the don immediately tends to business in the early 1960s by instigating a wedding night massacre, led by his flamboyant nephew, Pippi De Lena (Joe Mantegna), that drives his daughter, Rose Marie (Kirstie Alley), insane and sets in motion a period of Clericuzio unrest, ultimately making rivals of Pippi’s son, Cross (Jason Gedrick), and Rose Marie’s son, Dante (Rory Cochrane).

As the don says, “God created a perilous world and mankind has made it even more dangerous.”

Directed by Graeme Clifford, the story crawls somberly back and forth between the fortified Clericuzio compound and Pippi and Cross in Las Vegas, with the inevitable side trip to Sicily. Meanwhile, even though the don cautions that “love is an emotion that is not to be trusted,” Cross falls for movie star Athena Aquitane (Daryl Hannah), and Joyce Eliason’s script has lots of transient characters passing through on their way to the sea bottom, where the family’s victims are deposited.

To add more here would be fruitless, for as the don says, “Happiness can only come from knowing less.”

This is a morality tale, but a bent one, anointing prolific hit man Pippi relatively honorable, for example, because he murders dispassionately, in contrast with Dante, who loves killing. And Cross, who murders only once, is close to being heroic.

As the don says, “Oh, what a wicked world it is that drives a man to sin.” You know that Pippi has been spending too much time around the don when he starts in himself: “Money is like whipped cream. . . .”

Easily as sociopathic as Dante, meanwhile, is the giant octopus dominating the windup of ABC’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” which also finds Nemo blithely pondering the under waters through his giant portal (“Here . . . I am free”) and his prisoner, scientist Pierre Arronax (Patrick Dempsey), wondering, “What drove him into the depths of the world that no one else has mastered?”

Isn’t it obvious? As Nemo says, “Water is the great nurturer of life, and the great destroyer.”

And don’t let that Nazi S.S.-style get-up fool you. Besides mad genius, Nemo has values: “For a man to give up his life to help save another, there is no greater love.”

Despite the Godzilla-sized octopus and decent special effects, neither the spectacle nor beauty of the waterworks cuts it on the small screen, making “20,000 Leagues” flat-out tedious. It never recovers from director Rod Hardy’s long, laborious opening that precedes Arronax, Cabe Attucks (Adewale) and that lox, whaler Ned Land (Bryan Brown), being plucked from the sea by Nemo and installed aboard the Nautilus after their American frigate is disabled.

This sub is no tub. The visitors are stunned by its palatial interior and astonishing technology.

“Respect what you don’t understand,” Nemo advises. You do find yourself wondering, though, not about Nemo and his sub’s mysterious destination, but about the monastic life of the captain and his large male crew, a bunch of guys packed together blissfully with no female in sight. Are they, you know, funny boys?

Not to worry, though, for Brian Nelson’s script ultimately locates some women to make things interesting, at least for Attucks and Arronax, the latter soon finding himself immersed in sappy romance.

Verne set his story in 1867, writing the black Attucks character as Arronax’s servant. Here, apparently to serve a ‘90s sensibility, he’s promoted to Arronax’s companion and made more assertive. In addition, a ludicrous back story is introduced to justify the TV movie’s absurd ending.

Although there’s nothing about Verne’s tale that’s inviolate, it would be nice if, in the remaking, it were made more credible, not less so. Of course, script-writing is a thankless but necessary task. As the don says, “God’s world is a prison in which a man has to earn his daily bread.”

* “The Last Don” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday on CBS (Channel 2). The network has rated it TV-14 (may not be suitable for children under the age of 14). “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on ABC (Channel 7). The network has rated it TV-PG (may not be suitable for young children).