Angel/actress/flake Farrah: Fawcett exhibits all her facets

To date, there have been three facets to Farrah Fawcett. The first is the most famous: Farrah the Angel, one of Charlie's chosen three, the Farrah whose pert pinup poster quickened the pulse of a million boys. The second was Farrah the occasionally serious actress who surprised us with her performances in "The Burning Bed" and "The Apostle." The third, and saddest, has been Farrah the flake. She's the Farrah who celebrated turning 50 by rolling around in gold paint in her birthday suit for Playboy, and the infamous Farrah who in 1997 appeared on "The Late Show," but left her brain in the green room.

All three Farrahs are on display in the TV drama, "Silk Hope" (9 p.m. Sunday, CBS, TV-PG). As Frannie Vaughan, Fawcett plays a small-town good-time girl who has spent one too many decades in Margaritaville, only to return to the farm and find out her Momma died. Faced with the prospect that her sober sister, Natalie (Ashley Crow), and her dullsville fiancé want to sell the farm, Frannie sets out to save the only place she can call home.

So suddenly, the honky-tonk angel sprouts wings and gathers enough gumption to get a job in a Dickensian factory folding underwear. There she meets the hunky foreman, Ruben (Brad Johnson), who treats her like a lady. Yes, there are more clichés in this tired drama than in a pile full of country songs.

But that doesn't stop "Silk Hope" from it moments of true weirdness. We get to watch Frannie work in a factory in an off-the-shoulder dress and high heels. We see her sweat and pout and cool herself off with a Coke can. We even get to see her chase after three little piggies and make a few photogenic stabs at becoming a hog farmer. But we know these cute "Babes" will never be bacon.

Dressed in skimpy blouses and hot pants and sporting a frazzled perm, Frannie looks too much like one of Charlie's Angels with more than a few miles on her odometer. And while Farrah the serious actress strains desperately for poignancy in this vanity vehicle, it's hard not get distracted by all that hair and strange behavior.

As a critic, I don't like to deal in superlatives, but "Mr. Rock 'N' Roll: The Alan Freed Story" (9 p.m. Sunday, NBC, TV-PG) is quite possibly the dullest movie about rock music ever made. Alan Freed (Judd Nelson) was a white Cleveland disc jockey who startled the airwaves by playing rhythm-and-blues music, which up until then had been relegated to black audiences. Freed has been given credit for popularizing the music and even coining the term rock and roll. Freed remained one of the nation's most popular DJs until it was revealed that he was taking payoffs ("payola") in exchange for playing and promoting records.

While rock music is all about raw emotion and spontaneity, "Mr. Rock" unfolds in a one-darn-thing-after-another fashion. We never really learn if Freed really loved the music he played or saw it as just another gimmick. Alan Freed clearly loved Rock and Roll, but Judd Nelson's character seems more ambitious than passionate. There's a curiously flat quality to everything about this movie, with the exception of Leon's ("The Temptations") impersonation of the sensational Jackie Wilson. Madchen Amick seems genuinely bored as Jackie McCoy, the pretty dance instructor who Freed woos, weds and ignores in quick succession. Like the vanilla "Temptations" and the appalling "The '60s," this is just another soundtrack impersonating a movie.

Chazz Palminteri turns in an intense brooding performance as Sicilian judge Giovanni Falcone in the cable drama, "Excellent Cadavers" (8 p.m. Saturday, HBO, TV-MA, L, V). Falcone's real-life war on the mob resulted in the conviction of hundreds of mobsters before his own brutal assassination in 1992. F. Murray Abraham plays a mob informer who helps Falcone after realizing that the mob's "men of honor" have become nothing but psychotic killers. A relentlessly grim film with stilted dialogue that often seems like it's been dubbed from another language.

Saturday's other highlights

The Mets and Braves meet in game 4, National League Championship Series (8 p.m., NBC, TV-PG).

Tom Hanks stars in the 1995 drama, "Apollo 13" (8 p.m., ABC, TV-PG, L) directed by Ron Howard.

A school bully meets a mysterious stranger who turns him into a dog who must do a hundred good deeds to undo the canine curse in the new live-action series, "100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd" (9 p.m., Nickelodeon).

Paul McCartney, the B-52s, Chrissie Hynde and Sarah McLachlan are among the performers at "PETA's Millennium Concert" (10 p.m., VH1).

Sunday's other highlights

Scheduled on "60 Minutes" (7 p.m., CBS): the high cost of prescription drugs for uninsured seniors; a welfare-to-work program; a controversial parole hearing for a cop killer.

Scheduled on "Dateline" (7 p.m., NBC): a device to track cars involved in accidents.

Five new songs are featured in the animated sequel, "The Lion King II: Simba's Pride" on "The Wonderful World of Disney" (7 p.m., ABC, TV-G).

Roger Mudd interviews controversial historian Edmund Morris on "The Reagan Biography" (7 p.m., History Channel, TV-G).

The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox meet in Game 4, American League Championship series (7:30 p.m., Fox).

Casper Van Dien, Catherine Bell and Martin Sheen star in the sci-fi thriller, "The Time Shifters" (8 p.m., TBS, TV-14, V).

A beloved high-school custodian (Lou Diamond Phillips) learns that he must pass his high-school equivalency test to save his job in the original cable drama, "In a Class of His Own" (8 p.m., Showtime).

The Arizona Cardinals host the Washington Redskins on Sunday Night Football (8:15 p.m., ESPN).

The tale of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall begins the series "Great Romances of the 20th Century" (8 p.m., Romance Classics).

Scheduled on "Millennium" (10 p.m., CNN, part 2 of 10): the 12th century.

Weekend cult choice: More than feathers fly in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 shocker, "The Birds" (Midnight, Saturday, TNT, TV-14, V) starring Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren and Suzanne Pleshette.