A newsmagazine for Lettermaniacs, Michael Moore's "TV Nation" greets the apocalypse of our modern times with a deadpan shrug and a keen eye for the absurdities and hypocrisies we ignore at our peril.

      Moore is a pudgy Pan, a big kid armed with quiet impudence and a video camera aimed at the big shots, including his corporate bosses. (This should come as little surprise to fans of Moore's hit movie Roger & Me.)

      "I am General Electric (owner of NBC)," he chirps as he makes his introductions in Mexico, the land where U.S. companies hire people on the cheap in the wake of free trade and NAFTA. Moore's mock assignment: to see if "TV Nation" could be produced for less money south of the border.

      His style is to ambush his subjects with cool irony, whether it's a plant manager overseeing exploited labor, Russian soldiers guarding a remote missile base or a real-estate guy hawking homes amid the toxic-waste residue of Love Canal. Is it pointed? You bet. Balanced? Don't kid yourself. Funny? Very.

      "TV Nation" has a chipper tone that would be at odds with the stories' grim realities if Moore's hand were any less steady. You have to admire a show that lets a testy foreman gripe about how most newsmags would cut from his sleek and bustling factory straight to the slums where his workers live, and then goes ahead and does it.

      So what if it's a cheap shot, Moore figures. It works. And it works on "TV Nation" because the tone is one of dry, sarcastic wit, not the desperate tabloid sensation that defines so much news-division product in these O.J. days.

      One of tonight's segments would be at home on David Letterman's "Late Show", as correspondent Rusty Cundieff ("If you're anything like me, you're black") tests the prejudices of New York cab drivers by observing whom they'll stop for: burly black actor Yaphet Kotto or a Caucasian convict. In a wicked touch, Moore contrasts Kotto's dramatic credits with the other man's rap sheet.

      "Will cabbies pass by an Emmy-nominated black man to pick up a white murderer?" Cundieff ponders. What do you think? Kotto's left standing even when he drags out a blinking roadside sign declaring: "I need a cab."

      In the best and most surreal story, former Letterman cohort Merrill Markoe visits a state-of-the-art Midwest prison that has everything you could want-- except for prisoners. "There's nothing more wonderful than an inmate," the warden wistfully sighs, as guards play volleyball in an empty gym and college students are brought in for practice until someone (ultimately Puerto Rico) agrees to send them some criminals.

      It doesn't all work-- Moore's Russian trek to discover the nuke missile pointed at his Flint, Mich., hometown is as overlong as a Saturday Night Live sketch -- but good luck finding anything so diverting on your typical "Day One" or "America Tonight".

      Speaking of which, "TV Nation" even has it's own version of the ludicrous phone poll (9% margin of error), with results like: "65% of all Americans believe that frozen pizza will never be any good, and there's nothing science can do about it."

      At last! News to amuse. If "TV Nation" exposes anything it's the excesses and cliched devices of those ubiquitous newsmags that take themselves so seriously. If enough people get in on the joke, Moore could soon enter the very mainstream he so puckishly tweaks.

      What's a rebel to do?