Don't bother with 'Y2K: The Movie' By DAVID HAYES and FINN BULLERS - Columnist Date: 11/12/99 22:15 Kansas City Star

http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/business.pat,business/37740144.b12,.html

There are many reasons to dislike NBC's sweeps-week offering, "Y2K: The Movie," which airs on Nov. 21. The potential that it will cause Y2K-inspired panic in the streets is not one of them.

This movie is just plain bad.

Star TV writer Aaron Barnhart must have sensed it, otherwise he wouldn't have dished it off to us to preview. We did a screening at the palatial Bullers estate Thursday night.

With apologies to Roger Ebert, this one gets two Bugs down

"This is like a bad episode of `Murder, She Wrote,' " said Finn's wife, before finding a convenient I've-got-to-take-a-call-from-my-mom distraction to occupy the rest of her evening. We weren't so lucky.

The movie is a cheesy souffle of fact and fantasy. Name a Y2K disaster cliche and it's here.

The movie's most notable star is Ken Olin, best known for playing whiny husband and dad Michael Steadman in ABC TV's long-defunct "thirtysomething."

Olin this time plays a whiny husband and dad -- and, oh yeah, whiny Y2K genius.

Don't get us wrong. We (Dave especially) like action movies. As long as something "gets blown up real good," we're happy couch campers. But "Y2K" is a bigger waste of videotape than recording old Jerry Springer reruns.

A quick plot synopsis:

Early on, a radio broadcast says cars have been reclassified as "horseless carriages." (Fact: This really happened in Maine this fall.) Later, broadcasters prepare to air live footage of a prison riot when computer-controlled doors swing wide. (Fallacy: An urban legend in the making.)

An F-18 falls out of the sky at 12:01:40 somewhere in the South Seas. Is it Y2K-related? No one is saying. ATM glitches limit angry customers to $20 a pop. Parts of Paris go black. Is the power outage going to cascade? Times Square fizzles out, so do Philadelphia and Scranton. 911? Forget it.

A 72-year-old woman dies on the operating table, becoming the first confirmed Y2K death. A nuclear meltdown in Sweden kills all plant workers. Could the fictitious Emerald Canyon nuke plant in Seattle be next?

In the process, "Y2K" leaves so many loose ends it looks as if it belongs in the Kansas football Jayhawks playbook this season.

"My slogan while making the movie was, `Paranoia is our most important product,' " executive producer David Israel, a 1973 graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, said. "I guess it worked."

That's precisely what has sparked a bit of a controversy around "Y2K."

-- Jean Wasp (jean@sonic.nt), November 17, 1999