More than a sequel

‘I have to show people things they haven’t seen before and don’t expect to see,” says Alex Tanner (Cynthia Nixon), the filmmaker heroine of “Tanner on Tanner,” a new four-part series from director Robert Altman and “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau.

Alex makes this observation after fleeing from a disastrous New York screening of an unfinished documentary about her dad, one-time Michigan congressman Jack Tanner (Michael Murphy), whose failed fictional bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination was chronicled 16 years ago in Altman and Trudeau’s little-seen but influential HBO series “Tanner ‘88.”

It’s good advice, and we see it illustrated throughout “Tanner on Tanner” — not necessarily by Alex, who has more ambition than wisdom, but by Altman and Trudeau, whose intelligence transforms this Sundance Channel miniseries into far more than a sequel to a cult classic.

The HBO original depicted Tanner’s realization that in the age of TV news and 30-second campaign ads, politicians must avoid discussing the unglamorous details of real politics, take a page from movie stars, strip-mine their lives for talk-show-friendly anecdotes, and create happy-faced, slogan-spewing copies of themselves.

Since 1988, the rise of cable news and the Internet put multiple exclamation points at the end of this notion. Altman and Trudeau could have just dusted it off for another go-round. But to their credit, they chose to go in a different, more challenging direction.

While “Tanner on Tanner” expresses predictably deep skepticism about the Bush administration’s first term (Altman and Trudeau are die-hard Democrats), the series mostly skirts politics. Instead, it fixates on the more abstract, philosophical notion that even when a person with a camera aims to capture truth, the act of photographing something tends to falsify it.

In a phone interview, the 80-year-old Altman said that although he and Trudeau tried for years to reunite Murphy, Nixon and their co-stars for a “Tanner” sequel, they never wanted to revisit the same themes in exactly the same way.

After all, the marriage of politics and entertainment was examined before “Tanner ‘88” and has been re-examined many times since, in everything from the satirical films “Bob Roberts” and “Wag the Dog” to NBC’s “The West Wing” and HBO’s 2003 drama “K Street,” which starred political consultants James Carville and Mary Matalin as themselves.

“This one isn’t really about politics,” said Altman. “Politics is so orchestrated and scripted now that there are no surprises. People already know that — they knew it back when we were doing the first one.

“We just used politics as a Judas goat to lead us into something else, which is a satire on filmmaking and filmmakers, and on the idea of pointing a camera at somebody without a good reason.”

Altman’s withering description applies to the pampered Manhattan liberal Alex, who in her least flattering moments seems to be directing a movie about her famous dad because she’s a director with a famous dad.

The rough cut Alex screens during tonight’s premiere episode is unfinished. But from what we can see, it looks like yet another of those hip but sentimental documentaries that usually air on HBO, Showtime, Cinemax and (yes) the Sundance Channel: first-person confessionals that play like elaborately produced home movies, with fast cutting, pop music and wise-yet-humble voiceover narration.

Jack Tanner’s candidacy was a political footnote, a quixotic crusade undone not just by media shallowness and Democratic Party ruthlessness, but by the congressman’s reluctance to adapt his brooding, self-righteous, verbose persona to suit the post-Ronald Reagan era of government-by-sound bite.

Yet Alex’s documentary seems to assign epic significance to her father’s campaign, without bothering to explain why anybody outside their circle should give two hoots.

Altman and Trudeau’s series doesn’t just scapegoat one fictional director, though. It indicts an entire media culture and the increasingly illiterate public that feeds it. And it suggests that we’ve all become so addicted to images that we have lost the ability to look beneath the surfaces of things.

“What (Altman) is doing this time out is really relevant, I think, and it’s especially interesting when you realize Bob has spent his life pointing cameras at people and trying to get at the truth,” said Murphy.

“He’s reminding everybody that as soon as you point the camera at something, it becomes fiction. He was talking about that just the other day, talking about reality shows on TV. He was saying, ‘What’s this stuff about reality TV? Don’t these people know that whenever you point a camera, the thing you’re pointing it at isn’t real anymore?’ ”

The premiere’s first act is a bustling party sequence set at Elaine’s in New York City, featuring a zoo’s worth of cameos by politicians, filmmakers and actors, from former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo to actor Steve Buscemi to director Martin Scorsese. Everybody in the joint is watching everybody else, and some of them are even filming the scene.

While Alex jaws about her movie and instructs an assistant on the proper way to ask for a celebrity’s contact information — one of her filmmaking students prowls around with a small camcorder, taping the scene for use in his own documentary. Surveying the fishbowl, Scorsese quips: “Everybody’s making pictures.”

No kidding. In “Tanner on Tanner,” every public moment — and many private moments — is at risk of being photographed. When an anxious, insecure Alex flees her own premiere — a scene of profound panic and loneliness, brilliantly acted by Nixon — her student secretly tails her, recording her distress. When Alex wanders into a shoe store and casually tells a clerk that she’s a filmmaker who ducked out of a premiere, the clerk says she’s a filmmaker, too.

To paraphrase a line from the 1960 voyeurism thriller “Peeping Tom,” all this filming isn’t healthy. Americans point cameras at everything, Altman suggests, but usually they’re staring at themselves.

In one of the year’s niftiest celebrity cameos, Sundance Film Festival founder Robert Redford — who starred in the great 1972 satire “The Candidate,” about a Tanner-esque idealist corrupted by the system – stands up after Alex’s disastrous screening and warns her against navel-gazing.

“You’re showing people stuff they already know,” he says. “Forget all that.”

The fact that Sundance — the film festival and the cable channel — built much of its cachet on the kinds of documentaries Altman dislikes is an irony that should not escape notice.