The TV Zone

"EXPOSÉ: America's Investigative Reports" is one of those rare - shall we say unprecedented - efforts by TV to chronicle the work done by newspapers, or at least by newspapers' dwindling corps of investigative journalists. It's back tonight (Ch. 13, at 10) - though it really already bowed a couple days ago online, as part of a PBS experiment ("initiative's" too strong a word) to get the program "on the air" even before it's on the air. Ah, the new world of television.

Tonight's show features Carl Prine, a Clark-Kentish figure with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review who spent the years in the wake of 9/11 probing chemical plant vulnerability. Prine's a remarkable figure because he not only established how porous chemical plants were but helped initiate legislation to get the plants sealed, so to speak. He later joined the Pennsylvania National Guard and was shipped to Iraq.

Watch or avoid: Most definitely watch. The guy's amazing, and so is his mission, though you may end up wondering - as I did repeatedly - that if the plants are so vulnerable, then why haven't terrorists exploited the weaknesses yet? Also, apparently little has actually been done to prevent attacks on plants, trains, and the like, which forces these unanswered questions, too – is something else wrong, or is Prine’s mission a quixotic one?