"TV Nation" is a magazine show-- but it's the Mad magazine of shows. It takes us to Love Canal to hear a sincere sales pitch for homes atop America's most notorious toxic dump. Later, we meet profiteers proudly making a killing off the life-insurance policies of dying AIDS patients. And we see a bold test proving that New York cabbies would rather pick up a white murderer than any black man, even Yaphet Kotto (then, just for fun, we watch the correspondent trick one of these discriminating hacks into taking rappers RunDMC for a ride). All this is reported with the iron earnestness we've come to expect from television news -- yet it's funnier than television's funniest sitcom. For this stuff isn't made up. It's real.

      It comes to us courtesy of TV's unlikeliest anchor. Scruffy, sloppy, shuffling, yet sly, he wears a baseball cap the way Alfred E. Neuman wears a grin; devilishly. He's Michael Moore, the guy in "Roger & Me" who hounded General Motors boss Roger Smith to get answers about a plant closing. Moore got neither Smith nor answers, but along the way he did chronicle the weird-but-true underbelly of everyday America. Moore is the Roseanne of reality TV: blunt, funny and honest enough to report the truth-- namely that life can be screwy. On "TV Nation", he finds dogs on Prozac. He challenges CEOs to come out and do something useful (the head of IBM won't format a disk, but Ford's chief does change oil). And he visits the last country we liberated, Kuwait, to find that there's not much liberation there-but there is a neat amusement park called Arab World.

      Moore has an attitude and an agenda. That will draw fire from conservatives who won't like his leftward leaning (but I say: Since the right has Rush Limbaugh, doesn't the left deserve one spokesman who isn't a dullard?). And news purists will complain about his unbalanced reporting and showmanship (but heck, everybody else is blurring the line between news and entertainment-- at least Moore does it for a reason and does it well). Moore is a rebel-- so getting his own network show is making even him skittish. "Don't write the network and get us canceled, OK?" he pleads. Yet NBC is already acting scared, throwing his show away in the summer at the inappropriate and unsophisticated hour of 8pm. But after losing television's other great smartmouth, David Letterman, NBC should try harder to hold onto this one. For "TV Nation" is as compelling and provocative as it is entertaining and hilarious. Mark my words: "TV Nation" will be a TV classic.