11:29 AM CST on Thursday, January 12, 2006

By ED BARK / The Dallas Morning News

PASADENA, Calif. – A "mile-wide laceration" scars downtown Dallas after a killer twister "plows into the city."

Look, up in the sky, it's the Weather Channel's new It Could Happen Tomorrow series, which will decimate "the epitome of Texas pride" on Jan. 22 after nailing Manhattan with a hurricane in Sunday's premiere episode.

The half-hour "science fact" series ostensibly is a collection of cautionary tales aimed at spurring preparedness and safety precautions before the onset of killer storms or other natural disasters. But the show's worst-case, high-anxiety rhetoric and ramped-up music seem out of character for the usually decorous Weather Channel.

"On the sprawling plains of the Southwest U.S. lies a city that could be destroyed in seconds," narrator Howard Parker begins. And later: "The catastrophe would be monumental. ... Up next – how horror in Dallas would unfold."

Weather Channel senior vice president and general manager Terry Connelly says subtlety won't cut it when lives are at stake.

"To break through the clutter in television, you really do have to be very compelling and you have to engage the viewer," he explained Wednesday. "So there is a kind of pounding-the-pulpit style."

Emergency-management experts and city officials are frustrated that most people "don't pay attention to them," Mr. Connelly said. "So we don't think it's over the top. But we'll continue to do research, so we'll find out from viewers if it's off-putting. And if that's the case, we'll change the tone."

The pilot episode of It Could Happen Tomorrow proved to be amazingly prescient. Produced in April, it dramatized the after-effects of a major hurricane on New Orleans. Then Hurricane Katrina hit, prompting Weather Channel officials to shelve the New Orleans episode rather than kick off the series with it.

"Quite frankly, we think it might look opportunistic," Mr. Connelly said.

Dallas, for its part, has seen worse on prime-time television. The fictional 1997 NBC miniseries Asteroid put the city on the receiving end of an aerial bombardment from a lethal title character named Eros. Reunion Tower was toppled and Texas Commerce Bank's "keyhole" building took a big hit to its midsection.

"Night has come to Dallas," a fictional network news anchor intoned. "And with it, memories of the nightmare that struck less than 24 hours ago, leaving tens of thousands dead and injuring over a hundred thousand more."

In the Weather Channel's treatment, Texas Severe Storms Association spokesman Martin Lisius says that the effects of a killer F-5 tornado on Dallas would be unimaginable. "It goes beyond anything Hollywood has done," he says.

As proof that it could happen here, the show rewinds back to the lethal 1999 tornado that hit Oklahoma City. It took 36 lives and injured 675. Dallas, "lying on the southern end of Tornado Alley," could be in for far worse devastation and destruction, we're told.

Weather Channel uses less than state-of-the-art special effects to envision what might happen. Mr. Lisius paints a vivid word picture, though, in describing the fate of downtown Dallas' see-through skyscrapers.

"The fatalities and injuries are going to be very graphic with all that glass falling," he says.

Narrator Parker closes the deal by asserting, "The threat is real, the threat is now."

Weather Channel hopes you'll be suitably blown away.

Robert Duvall will be back in the saddle in AMC's upcoming Broken Trail, the network's first original movie. Playing a trail driver named Print Ritter, the Oscar-winning actor will be teamed with El Paso native Thomas Haden Church, whose career was rekindled by an Oscar-nominated performance in Sideways.

Mr. Church said he first met Mr. Duvall in 1987 while working as a concierge at Dallas' Adolphus Hotel. Mr. Duvall spent a month at the hotel prepping and fund-raising for The Apostle, which didn't get made until 1997.

"He inspired me to choose acting as a profession for the dignity of it," Mr. Church said. "He brings such a complete A game from stem to stern."

Mr. Duvall said he's never been more on his game than in 1989's much-lauded Lonesome Dove, in which he played jovial Texas Ranger Augustus McRae.

"It's my favorite part," he said. "I don't care if it's television, off-Broadway, Broadway or film. It's my favorite."

E-mail ebark@dallasnews.com

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