TV Nation, which first aired in the summer of 1994, in its own small way, made history. Michael Moore, director of the shambling working-class documentaries Roger & Me and The Big One and the subsequent Bravo! cable program The Awful Truth, persuaded NBC to give him a run of hour-long shows that would enlist the talents of pop-culture correspondents from Karen Duffy to Steven Wright in the name of confrontational TV. Opening with a jump-cutting montage of loaded images, to the alternating synthesized plucked strings and heavy-metal guitar of tomandandy, and punctuated by nonsensical polls conducted by Widgery & Associates, TV Nation took Moore and his colleagues up (inside skyscrapers), down (into bomb shelters), and around the globe--even to the Ukraine--to confront the exploiters, polluters, and hypocrites threatening Moore's peaceable and generally liberal-minded view of the world.
