The Rat Pack (9 p.m., Aug. 22, HBO) The View (check local times, weekdays, ABC) A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Buffy and Angel in the sack; Miss Teen USA Mrs. Peel, we're needed Reviewed by Charles Taylor Remembering the real "Avengers" Y E S T E R D A Y Snake Eyes Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek Cage and Sinise come up cold in De Palma's aloof thriller (08/07/98) Acting weird By Elgy Gillespie Nicholas Cage talks about selling imperfection (08/07/98) R E C E N T_. T E L E V I S I O N Queertoons By Joyce Millman Gay-positive messages and campy humor find a TV home in "South Park" and other animated upstarts (08/03/98) American Squirm By Sarah Vowell Fishers of men: Two offbeat TV talk shows reinvent the celebrity interview (06/29/98) Buffy By Joyce Millman Love bites: Buffy learns about life (06/08/98) When Garry met Larry By Joyce Millman "The Larry Sanders Show" signs off after six seasons, but creator Shandling and his alter ego remain inseparable (05/29/98) You go, girls By Joyce Millman Time's up for "Murphy Brown" and "Ellen," but they were once TV's women of the hour (05/18/98) BROWSE THE TV ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES

[ J O Y C E_.M I L L M A N__O N_.T E L E V I S I O N ]__ ________ABC'S GIRL-TALK SHOW "The View" AND ________HBO'S "Rat Pack" MOVIE HAVE ________MORE IN COMMON THAN YOU THINK. In 1960, when Camelot was in bloom and it was a man's world, Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack were the men every man wanted to be, the ideals of American male swagger. With honorary Packers John and Robert Kennedy in tow, they smoke, drank, told racist and sexist jokes, pawed women and swung, baby, swung. Given all that, the new HBO movie "The Rat Pack" is appropriately ironic and admiring. It offers impersonations of Pack members that range from astonishingly faithful (Joe Mantegna's Dean Martin, Don Cheadle's Sammy Davis Jr.) to not even close (Ray Liotta is no Frank Sinatra). But the movie doesn't have much to tell us that we haven't already heard. These guys were the kings of the world, then the world changed. End of story. Or not. Every major character in this chapter of pop history is dead -- Frank, Sammy, Dean, Peter Lawford, JFK, RFK, Ava, Marilyn. Yet TV movies and documentaries are still being made about them, books are still being written. America has not yet tired of this horny, tragicomic epic. These are our gods of Mount Olympus (or Palm Springs). Written by Kario Salem (HBO's "Don King: Only in America") and directed by Rob Cohen ("Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story"), "The Rat Pack" has some delectable moments for sure, the chief one being the sequence where the actors recreate a typical Rat Pack show at Las Vegas' Sands Hotel. They goof and strut, they tell awful jokes about blacks, Jews, "wops" and "fairies." There's copious booze consumption (except for the all-business Dino, who, unbeknownst to the audience, sips apple juice onstage) and jolly juvenile banter about broads and sexual prowess. There's one magnificently kinky scene that pretty much sums up the Pack (and the movie). On the soundtrack, Dean sings "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" while the camera peers into the windows of the Pack's Sands hotel rooms. Sammy is making love to his Swedish girlfriend, May Britt. JFK (William Petersen) is underneath a writhing hooker. Sinatra is tucked between two writhing hookers. Lawford (Angus MacFadyen), who's married to JFK's sister, is banging somebody who's not his wife up against the full-length mirror in the bathroom, pausing to admire his reflection. And Dean Martin, the family man, is alone in a single bed in his pajamas, watching TV and drinking a glass of milk. "The Rat Pack" is such naughty fun, you feel cheated when it turns morose toward the end, with real-world politics breaking up the old gang: JFK, who's now president, can't be Sinatra's friend anymore, because of Sinatra's pals in the Mob. But, the truth is, the Rat Packers were lame ducks anyway; they never would have survived '60s rock 'n' roll culture (which they detested), or "women's lib," which they mocked. But, irony of ironies, the Rat Pack's exuberant buddy act, with its playful pokes at "stuffed shirts," has had a lasting influence on female pop culture. Just look at the Spice Girls, sashaying through their campy "Spice World" movie like the Pack in "Ocean's 11." And, more to the point, look at ABC's hit daytime talk show, "The View," the defiantly retro coffee klatch in which Barbara Walters and four mix-and-match female colleagues (A working mom! A black lawyer! A middle-aged divorcee! A Gen Xer!) gossip and giggle like schoolgirls. In the year it's been on the air (it starts a new season on Aug. 17), the women of "The View" have become icons to female fans and (not undeserving) targets of savage ribbing by "Saturday Night Live." They're loose and flip and they say things women aren't supposed to say out loud, let alone on TV. They swoon over cute guys, complain about ex-husbands, react emotionally to events and people in the news and say unkind things about other women (on "The View," Linda Tripp has been described as looking like "Mrs. Ronald McDonald"). Substitute coffee mugs for martini glasses and a cozy living room set for a glitzy Vegas showroom and you've got -- the Chat Pack. For those who haven't had the (very guilty) pleasure, "The View" is the brainchild of Walters, who materializes in fluffy soft focus in the opening credits to gush her manifesto: "I've always wanted to do a show with women of different generations, backgrounds and views." Glam photos of the other staffers begin whooshing softly by as Walters continues: "A working mother (former "60 Minutes" correspondent Meredith Vieira); a professional in her 30s (former prosecutor Star Jones); a young woman just starting out (the unfathomable Debbie Matenopoulos); and then somebody who's done almost everything and will say almost anything (stand-up comic Joy Behar). And in a perfect world, I'd get to join the group whenever I wanted ..." (Hmmm -- does Baba have a small issue with relinquishing control?) Broadcast live, "The View" is calculatedly casual -- the hosts wander out onstage from behind a phony door, already deep in conversation with one another, and seem pleasantly surprised to find themselves in front of an audience. Their shtick is remarkably close to the Rat Pack's -- make the viewers feel like they're in on the coolest clique around. "The View" starts the same way every day: The women position themselves for coffee around a country-kitchen table and discuss the morning's headlines (Vieira gets to lead, because she's the Serious Journalist). But, no matter what the topic, the discussion inevitably turns into a perilous journey down the stream of consciousness, and ends up being about sex, or body image, or why men do what they do. The women reconfigure into larger or smaller groups for the show's other segments -- usually, there's a big celebrity interview, a light segment about fashion or food, a service segment and what has become the signature "View" feature, "Question of the Day," a pre-selected viewer query along the lines of "What's the most embarrassing thing you've ever been caught doing?" Reposing on their comfy-chic living room set, the women take turns answering the question "honestly," with the exhibitionistic flair of sorority sisters playing Truth or Dare. Vieira's most embarrassing moment? She was caught peeing outside on the grounds of her country house. Jones? Recognized at the McDonald's drive-through without her wig. You get the picture. "The View" is addictive for many reasons, not the least of which is the morbid opportunity it gives you to watch so-called newswomen like Vieira and, to a lesser extent, Walters, risking their credibility by doing and saying the kinds of damning things that women have learned to hold in check over the years. The tightly wound, perfectionistic Vieira sometimes erupts with an alarming faux pas, like the time she implied that dog was a secret ingredient of Chinese food. Walters, who's deferred to like the Chairwoman of the Board whenever she's on, seems chiefly interested in pimping her protégée Debbie to every unmarried male guest who comes along; one day, Walters actually fidgeted with Matenopoulos' sweater, advising her to show a little more skin. When Diane Sawyer was a guest, she and Walters had quite a titter over the male Cosmo models who were also on the show (Walters pronounced them "divine"). Later, Sawyer revealed that she and Walters and other women at ABC News recently had a dinner together where they tried to imagine whom among their male colleagues they'd like to marry. "We went through every man at ABC!" enthused Sawyer. "Who hasn't gone through every man at ABC," responded Vieira. Such alarming, self-sabotaging silliness is the foundation of the "SNL" parody (it's a recurring feature that's on whenever there's a young female host around to play an air-headed Debbie). Here's the "SNL" version of Walters' intro (Walters is impersonated by Cheri Oteri): "I've always wanted to do a show with women of different generations, backgrounds and views. A regular working mom; a sassy black woman, like I've seen on TV; and a total idiot (Debbie). And in a perfect world, I'd get to sing the theme song!" And then she does. But the parody isn't half as funny as the show itself. For example, you can't script better Matenopoulosisms than the ones she blurts out herself. On the death of Michael Kennedy: "It's like they're cursed!" On the media's fixation with celebrities: "I sort of feel like the power of the media is very manipulating. Like, Frank Sinatra, when he died? I was watching the funeral -- the funeral wasn't on TV, but all the coverage? I found myself crying and I'm like, why am I crying? I felt totally manipulated!" As for Walters, no impersonator can trump the sight of the doyenne of TV newsmagazines in her tony Bill Blass outfits trying to get down and dirty with the gals. The one "View" cast member you absolutely can't satirize, though, is Joy Behar, whose tell-it-like-it-is one-liners are genuinely zingy (noting that Woody Allen began dating Soon-Yi when she was a teenager, Behar cracked, "What did they do after sex? Color?"). The earthy Behar is the show's designated smart mouth, and she plays the role as masterfully as Dean played the drunk. Watching "The View," you realize that the "SNL" parody is too simplistic. Yes, it's often startling to see five obviously intelligent women (well, make that four) letting themselves get so out of control. But there's a method to their madness. Without being aggressively, smugly un-PC -- like, say, "Politically Incorrect" -- "The View" challenges rigid societal notions. It defies the idea that women must be either/or. For instance, the women on "The View" have come down hard on Paula Jones and Tripp and Monica Lewinsky, saying in public what many women have said to each other in private, yet, on the show, they continue to define themselves as feminists. "The View" has caught on with viewers because it gives expression to feelings more complicated, and real, than its detractors realize. Like the Rat Pack, it's all about freedom in an uptight world. Vieira, Walters, et al., have confessed to a lot of things on the show that women are supposed to feel guilty about: forgetting to vote, being too lazy to exercise, hating skinny models, letting the kids watch too much TV, admiring Hollywood's latest hunk. And, apparently, they don't care what people think. Look, I'm not holding them up as role models. And I'm not saying they're representative of the death of feminism, or the rebirth of feminism, or anything like that. I just like the way they don't give a damn. If the Rat Pack was Everyman's id, "The View" is Everywoman's. These chicks do it their way, and it's a kick in the head. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - R E L A T E D_.S A L O N_.S T O R I E S The Wizards of Id Forget the martinis and smoking jackets. The Rat Pack ruled because they sang like angels and swung like hell. By David Rakoff June 13, 1997

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ABC AND HBO | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED