The short and curious life of MSNBC Films

"Dear Zachary"
on MSNBC

Say this for MSNBC: Love it or hate it -- or in my case both, depending on the day and time -- not many TV channels out there inspire such strong feelings.

But this is not a story about Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or their nemeses Billo, the Manatee or Rick Warren. This is a story about the stuff that MSNBC puts on its air when its celebrity hosts are taking time off. This is when MSNBC acts differently than its rivals, when it acts differently than even its own commercials that tout MSNBC as "The Place for Politics" (and, unofficially, as the official cable-news alternative to Fox).

Say what you like about Fox News, but it pretty much fills its schedule 24/7 with news and talk. MSNBC, however, adds a third component, broadly known as its "documentary block," an umbrella term that covers everything from docs to schlock, from prison videos to award-winning nonfiction films.

Because MSNBC is not as flush with cash as CNN and Fox -- well, 12 years of ratings futility will do that -- management has opted to use docs to fill up much of the time when viewing levels are down. Specifically, weekends and holidays. Even more specifically, holiday weekends.

This cost-saving decision has already produced one major embarrassment for MSNBC. The Mumbai hostage crisis started the day before Thanksgiving. That day, David Shuster (filling in for "Hardball" host Chris Matthews), Olbermann and Maddow were all providing updates as they unfolded.

Then they went home, and MSNBC forgot Mumbai even existed. For the rest of the weekend, with the exception of short news breaks at the top and bottom of the hour, MSNBC showed "Lockup: Raw" -- an ongoing series of inmate video from some of the country's most notorious prisons -- and "Caught on Camera: Video Vigilantes," which is about what you think it is.

On Thursday, as the Mumbai crisis showed no sign on ending, Air America radio personality Lionel tuned in to see a "Lockup" marathon. "Look, I want MSNBC to succeed," he said later. But "what could have possibly been the reason not to blow off the Folsom Prison Hour for live coverage of a terrorist attack?"

As the Mumbai crisis lurched into its third bloody, terrible day, I switched on the TV for the latest. On CNN, correspondent Sara Sidner was telling Wolf Blitzer, who did not have the weekend off, that fresh explosions were going off in the hotel a few hundred yards from her position.

On Fox, a fresh news report was telling viewers about the American couple, a rabbi and his wife, killed in the attack.

And on MSNBC, a "video vigilante" was confronting a New York City inspectors who had committed the heinous crime of parking her car in front of a fire hydrant during a "Caught on Camera" marathon.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" the vigilante told the inspector. And I thought, "Indeed."

Here's the video I made of that inglorious moment:

Yet even as MSNBC peddles this crap to its viewership it is also trying to build a quality documentary division in-house.

This weekend, you'll have two opportunities to see what MSNBC can do when it doesn't take the low road.

At 7 p.m. CT Wednesday, "Witness to Jonestown," a two-hour documentary compiled from NBC news archival footage, and featuring interviews with survivors of the Jim Jones-People's Temple massacre, is not the first film made about that tragedy. But it is the first product out of the new MSNBC Films division, which was started earlier this year "to present and produce provocative, compelling and award-winning films on television."

And then, at 10 p.m. CT on Sunday, you must see "Dear Zachary." This documentary, which has been wowing festival audiences, is a personal tribute by filmmaker Kurt Kuenne to his beloved friend Andrew Bagby, who was murdered by his girlfriend in 2001 -- but not before he got her pregnant.

When the suspect-with-child fled to Newfoundland, Kuenne decided to take a cross-country trek to talk to Bagby's many, many friends and make a movie that young Zachary would be able to watch someday about his murdered father ... and that's when the story went from jaw-dropping to teeth-gnashing to (if I had any) hair-pullingly insane.

Whereas "Jonestown" was produced in-house, "Dear Zachary" was acquired from the filmmaker. What surprised me was that the same person -- MSNBC vice president for longform programming Michael Rubin -- not only put those two programs on MSNBC, but "Lockup" and "Caught on Camera," too.

And when I expressed my surprise to Rubin in an interview recently, he acted surprised as well.

"Let me tell you something," Rubin said. "'Lockup' is not done any differently than any other piece of journalism. I daresay that 'Lockup' is a jewel. It is probably the greatest collection of video shot inside an American prison ever done.

"I work in a new world," said Rubin, a veteran of network news going back to the "West 57" show on CBS. "I look for everything my viewers are interested in. They're as interested in the inside of a prison as much as they are interested in 'Dear Zachary,' or 'Supersize Me' (the Morgan Spurlock film also acquired by MSNBC).

"They're interested in going somewhere they can't get to on their own, whether it's inside a prison or the story of Dr. Bagby. No matter what film we do, the viewer is guaranteed to be an eyewitness. Our tastes span the full spectrum -- and so does human interest."

I'm not entirely convinced by that argument. Rubin knows as well as I do that hardly anyone watches MSNBC on holidays and weekends -- what's the point of kowtowing to the tastes of 100,000 viewers?

On the other hand, "Lockup" isn't that much different from some of the lurid true-life stuff you see on HBO ("That's not a bad model," said Rubin when I brought it up). And I also know that if it weren't for MSNBC, I might have waited a long time to see "Dear Zachary." (If you miss it, Rubin said it will repeat for months, like everything else he oversees.)

Rubin and his small staff are looked at hundreds of documentaries this year, and plan to keep up that diet and keep acquiring more little gems like Kuenne's. Next up: "Witch Hunt," a followup to a case of eight parents falsely accused of child molestation in 1984. Narrated by Sean Penn, it will air on MSNBC in spring 2009. And Rubin just got his hands on "Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead," about a capital punishment advocate who becomes friends with a killer on death row.

Now all he has to do is get MSNBC to feature the good stuff and downplay the not-so-good stuff. Tune in New Year's Day for a "Lockup" marathon, followed by "Caught on Camera" on Friday. Why, I asked Rubin, do I always see promos for those shows and never for "Dear Zachary"?

"You have opened a can of worms here," said Rubin, carefully.